Notable Books, According to Me

Awoke this morning feeling good about life, about living in a place where the air is sweet and fresh, where you need a jacket to sit outside in July to drink your coffee, where the main sounds are the crows cacking and the tickle of squirrels climbing up the barky pine trees. Yes, this house is small, but it has a beautiful ceiling. It rained yesterday. The roof leaked a little over in the corner by the television. It's the first real rain we've had since we bought the place. I found a flashlight to check for other possible leaks, ran the spotlight up and down the ceiling beams. I found a lot of cobwebs, but no other wet places.

I've seen ceilings before that this one is patterned after -- on old adobe porches primarily. Long beams spaced about three feet apart, with planks adjoining in a perpendicular fashion. The boards on the ceiling here are knotty pine and smooth, with rougher beams that are actually supportive and not just decorative. These beams extend through the exterior wall and out to the edge of the porch overhang. On the porch the beams are painted, but inside they have been left natural to darken with age. Now, that the paneled walls inside have all been painted a light off-white, the beauty of the ceiling really strikes out. And now that I have inspected them with a flashlight, the ceiling has also been de-cobwebbed.

The atmosphere here is really conducive to reading and I have been getting a lot of that done. Don't know why I seem to have no time for reading when I'm at home in Texas. I downloaded some books to my Kindle before we left Texas. Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragnoso is the first one I read. It's about a woman's relationship with a pedophile, and is particularly timely with the Jaycee Dugard story so much in the news right now. It was one of those books that hangs with you, disturbs you and makes you try to rationalize. Also downloaded was Remember Ben Clayton by my friend Stephen Harrigan. Stephen is another writer who hales from Corpus Christi, which is our only real connection. He's a wonderful writer and this novel is his best to date. I'm finding it fresh and factual, particularly since it's dealing with a time period I researched considerably for Right From Wrong, and his characters are lively and real. I'm not completely finished with it, and plan to say more about it later.

One thing I have found with all this reading is how easy to handle and convenient the Kindle is. It doesn't tire my hands out the way a real book does, and mine has a little light attached to the cover, so I can read in the dark, which I have been doing for a while every night before I go to sleep. The one thing that is not handy about the Kindle, though, is that it is easy to lose your place, and you never know what page you're on at any given time. There's a bookmark, but it isn't always easy to get back to the mark if you happen to accidentally hit the paging button a few times. The other thing you miss out on with a Kindle, is photographs that might be inside the actual book.

This is the main reason I bought from Barnes & Noble online, with a birthday gift certificate, a book called River of Traps by William DeBuys & Alex Harris. It's about these two men's years living in the New Mexico mountains in the shadow of the Truchas Peaks, and an old Hispanic man who befriended them. Harris is the photographer and there are some lovely full-page black-and-whites inside, and the descriptions and history of the area are beautifully told by DeBuys. The old man, Jacobo, is wise and witty and so familiar to me of similar men I had friendships with during my years of living and working in San Antonio.

Finally, there's a bookmobile that comes to our village once a month from up at Cimarron, which is about halfway between here and Raton. In June, I got a card and checked out two books, one of which turned out to be a lovely, informative treatment of The Mountains of New Mexico by Robert Julyan. The author has visited each of the mountains he discusses, gives so much information about the geography and how the land was formed, that even though I had originally intended to only peruse it for mountains in our area, I ended up reading the entire book cover to cover, and took it with us when we visited the Capulin Volcano when the boys were here. I'm one of those people who needs to know where I am in the world, in a much more detailed way than just by giving an address or distance from some larger town. I still feel a lot of mystery around me here, and won't quit reading until I think I understand this place, its people, its present and its past.

Meanwhile, it's time to take a shower and get this day started. It's nearly noon and I've done nothing but read, drink my coffee, and listen to the birds in the trees.

Onward ....

House Guests, a Volcano, and a Serious Discussion

I cannot keep track of the counter numbers on this blog. I don't even know if anybody reads the damned thing. I've thought several times about giving it up, but then I think of something I want to put down here and so it goes.

The pecan pie turned out OK. It didn't taste like my usual pecan pie, but it was devoured so I guess that's a good sign. The boys came and stayed with us for five days, and it really wasn't long enough. They are the easiest house guests in the world, so enthusiastic about everything, and appreciative. They make me really proud.

We took them over to the Capulin Volcano National Monument east of Raton. We hiked down into the crater and back up, which I thought was a hard slog, but I only thought that in the beginning. The rim walk was the real killer. I seriously believed for a while that I would not make it around the rim. It was brutal, and at 8600 plus feet, a real breath taker, and I mean that literally. I my lungs hurt, my heart pounded. The uphill climb was the worst. When we got to the top, finally, I thought I would really enjoy looking down on the lava flows. We'd watched a little movie before embarking on this trek, and it had explained about the pressure waves and lots of other geographic phenomenon characteristic of a volcano like Capulin. Instead, I was so thrilled to be done with the worst of the climb, I just sat on one of the benches they had up there and tried to get my breath, to fight down the vertigo that kept trying to take over, and to quell the nausea. We took some pictures on the way down but I haven't downloaded them from the camera yet.

On Sunday, we took them to the airport in Albuquerque and had a real heart-to-heart on the ride back about selling the place in Texas and making this our permanent home. There are some things that have to happen here for me to be in favor of such a big move, and we began on some of those things this week. We bought some furniture for one thing, and the carpenter we discovered is coming back to do some more work to the place, and to help me paint the bedroom. My SO is going back to Texas tomorrow morning to check on things at the house, and to do some personal errands and make some business calls. He'll be gone a week. When he gets back, the bedroom will be done and all that will really remain is remodeling the kitchen. But that will have to wait until the house in Texas is sold.

It is going to take some real getting used to, living in such a small house again. This house is just barely bigger than the first "starter" home my ex and I bought way back in the early 1980s. I'll have to get rid of half of my "stuff," more than half. But it's just stuff, and I said way way back that I was not going to let "stuff" run my life the way it has done for at least the past 25 or so years. It's not worth it. We'll have a big sale after the house sells, fingers crossed. We have a figure we want to get out of all this which will allow us to become, once and for all, debt free. Both of us are ready for that.

Meanwhile, the cat has taken a real downturn in the last couple of days. Today has been an especially bad day. I tried to go to sleep with the SO at 10:00, but here I am back up with the kitty. I held him for about an hour, and he responded to that. I tried explaining to him that he would feel so much better if he would eat something and drink some water. And that I would take him to the vet in the morning. He turned to press on me the way he has done his entire life, showing me that he loves me, too. And then he got down from my lap and ate some of his can and got a big drink, wandered off to the litter box, and now he is back in the chair he commandeered practically from the first day we moved in here. It's a big old semi-circular 1970s style low back easy chair with rust colored upholstery. I'll be glad to get my good living room stuff here eventually.

Guess it's time to turn in, or try to again. I'll post some more things I've been up to tomorrow.

Onward ....