Author: kyce

Home days. A weekend of sweet home days at last. One of the downsides of living in a place where it is always impossibly beautiful out is that the soul of the introverted homebody grows desperate for a rainy day to take shelter in. Let’s just say one or two raindrops fell this weekend, and I am happy.

These pictures are from Friday when we wisely rode the wave of the week into the aspens, and though I’ve felt the longing for more “fall” all weekend, I’m remembering her other faces. There is a backlog of homey things to do: sweeping down cobwebs, harvesting from the garden, making soup, canning applesauce, reading all morning in the orange chair by the window while the clouds move across the window, teacup in hand. My daughters have played for hours on end as if the only thing they need in this world is one another and time and space to themselves.

Towards evening on Saturday we went out the door for a walk up the ridge. Once, my husband and I walked there every single evening. We walked it before kids, while pregnant, with one baby, then two. Lately, we’ve slowed way down. Our family walks these days tend to turn towards the river, at the other end of our street, or up into the mountains for “real” hikes, but the river has been dry since August, and sometimes the mountains are another country we are too tired to journey to. And so we went up the ridge. “Why don’t we do this more often?” the man of the place asked. “It’s the kind of thing we do when we aren’t doing anything else,” I said. “We shouldn’t do anything else more often,” he said. From the ridge we saw our house, our city, the mountainside swathed in golden hues. It is the best place I know to really see what it is we call home.

In other news from the homefront, I am grateful to have a poem in the fall issue of Taproot. What an honor, and what a pleasure to have my lines accompanied by a gorgeous image by Kristen Johns. I kept marveling at how perfect an illustration they found for my poem until I learned it was custom made. Pretty classy, Taproot! Thank you for sharing the warmth of our candlemaking joy.

And yet another sign of the season’s changing: the blogger returns to her post.Hello again, Dear Readers.

My husband and I went backpacking together over the weekend, and climbed Baldy while we were at it. Last time we took our packs into the wilderness, we arrived home to discover a baby was on the way, and began an entirely new journey into the wilds of family life. So much was given up, so much was gained. Seven years of mothering and I am a wholly different person–face and body softened, spirit strong, heart humble and grateful.

What isn’t climbing a mountain analagous to, I wonder? Marriage and mothering, to be sure. Also, coming to know ourselves, the changing shape of our beliefs, our identity, our work in the world. So much slowing way down for the steepest ascents. Resting & letting go, sure, but always the steady task of putting one foot in front of the other. And somehow, the path we walk–and the way we walk it–becomes who we are.

“A second grade child is like a butterfly who has just emerged from the hard imprisoning chrysalis and sits upon the leaf waiting expectantly for those glorious new wings to dry and strengthen. He is truly poised for flight.” I came across these words here, and they describe my eldest daughter perfectly. They also describe me these days. I’m not just climbing mountains lately, I’m seeing some long held dreams begin to materialize. This summer I started a low residency MFA program in poetry at The Institute of American Indian Arts, and later this month I begin teaching parent/child classes at Santa Fe Waldorf School.

It is an exciting season of renewal and discovery. And as ever, my main work seems to be growing still enough to feel the earth spin.

Be you high or low, be well!

May was one long rainstorm here, proving that 200 times the normal rainfall isn’t zero after all, but brimfull cisterns and water rushing down rivers and streams and acequias. For weeks folks kept asking each other “Are we still in New Mexico?” but a friend returning from New England said we could stop worrying: this was indeed still the desert. Well Amen to that.

I am delighted to once again be carrying buckets of dishwater out to the garden, thought it is nice to see springtime snowpack on the mountains instead of fires. We make our way each evening to the river and the willows, but never have a mosquito interrupt dinner under the apple tree. A happy medium, indeed.

A friend moved to the mountains where she has this acequia running past her house. It feels vaguely sinful, all that green right out the door, but I couldn’t help but recite Wendell Berry on the log crossing:

The god I have always expected
to appear at the wood’s edge, beckoning,
I have always expected to be
a great relisher of this world, it’s good
grown immortal in his mind.

In town, where our green belts are slightly less orgiastic and school is letting out for the summer, I think of my friend and her family in the mountains often. What would Katie do? I wonder to myself, thinking of her contentment to quietly spend the days tending her home, watching her children play, welcoming visitors.The same things that content me, but are easy enough to toss into the rushing current of life. I keep the calendar as free as I can, and savor this high season in which life is less about doing, and more about relishing.

Rather than being carried away by the figurative runoff, I want our roots to be well-watered, our leafy crowns reaching to the sun. Moored to the unfolding days, to our unfolding lives that blossom in the quiet garden.

It should be one long song of praise, the pen moving in time to the lemon balm rising from the mulch, the tulip petals dropping, the eggs in the nest, the plipping rain that is this spring day.

The storm darkened sky, which is really a brightening. The third helping of milky sweet tea in my cup, not the one he gave me and I loved until it broke, but a good one full up, or was not long ago, anyways.

The girl who wants and wants has written to Santa every morning this week (which I admit is only two days), every morning with a new want and asking me, why can’t I have it all? I want love, and so write my own letters each morning asking for it–long run-ons like this one asking, asking. She comes after a while back into my arms, though her own are empty, and before long we take up our pens again.

Last night I sat under the rain dropped roof reading a book until late, only then remembering the roasting pan with it’s half eaten chicken, the husband asleep on the children’s floor, that I had meant to sit quietly relaxing the muscle of my mind, which I do by first softening my tongue, which always seems in need of softening, no matter how many times I remember.

There is thunder, and when the rain stops I call up to the clouds reminding them to soften and spill. They roll on. The claret cup cactus is still in bloom and this morning I saw the yucca’s glorious stalks erupting from their center, the bell blossoms opening. I ate the petals as I walked.

My father came over and listened to my notes from the speech I heard last week by the famous journalist who explained almost everything I have wondered about the world today (she did not comment on Santa). When I was done with my my notes, Papa said, this world is a symphony–magnificent, holy. All you need to do, he told me, the only thing you need to do, is play your own single, small, pure note.

We sat together and our eyes filled with tears, there on the flagstone patio, under the fruit trees dropping tiny frost shriveled apricots around us, next to the bucket of bindweed pulled over the weekend, next to the iris patch with so many dark purple crowns, each one as open as it could be, some still coming, some long since spent.

We last passed this way a dozen years ago, our younger selves half-grown and beautiful and lost. Last time through, we quarreled and debated marriage, and in the morning continued on our desert loving way. We had a ’69 VW van. The Man of the Place didn’t know how to play the guitar yet (what on earth did he do instead? I can’t remember). Some things are the same. We’re still traveling together, after all, nowadays in a water cooled van, and with two little girls running the show from the backseat. Returning to this canyon was like a taking a very long road to step in an old footprint and to see the wholeness of the circle that has been traveled.

And because the land is so big, it’s history so long, I couldn’t help but pause and see how our story is a short one beside the volumes of fallen leaves, the years the sun has passed over the black rock butte covered in etchings. Take the land, erupting with lava for some thousand years. Take the people who lived here, then and now, their migrations and exchanges. Take all the losses of history, every tragic tale of conquest, every new home built on the foundations of the old. Take the day the first atom bomb was detonated in this very valley. Take the herd of twenty elk we saw in the foothills at dusk, the stars spinning through the clear night as they always have.

Camp made, our children ran to meet the stream and play beneath the tawny gold of ponderosas and oak trees. I saw then that each generation must find their way through history, must be brought to meet the waters of this year’s snowmelt, to take their steps on that spiralling road and mark the page where their story begins. Flip the pages back, if you will. The story is old, and still unfolding.

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If you ever pass this way, or would like to from afar, do bring Miracles of Sainted Earth and Blood Desert as your guides.