Might as well be summer!

I totally ignored Windstream today. They totally ignored me. All that “Your static IP will be up within two hours” stuff they told me day before yesterday? Nada. Ziltch. Zero. Nothing. Not up yet. Was promised two calls back (by 2 different people) and an email back by yet another. Nope, nope, empty hope, hand me a gun or give me a rope. Oh, not for ME, silly.

I’d have better luck, I think, wishing for Sean Connery to stop by with a spring bouquet for me and to say he’d seen my work somewhere and he loved it and he wanted to buy nearly all of it and, incidentally, why didn’t Leonardo and I come back to Scotland with him on his private jet for a relaxing fortnight in the country? Lovely, I would say, and we would be off. Then I wouldn’t even need the damned IP because I’d be set for 2 years or 3. And by then we would be established and doing a thriving trade in original paintings and drawings from our most-like-Scotland on-the-rim-of-the-canyon right here in Northern New Mexico.

Before I decided on art I was most lauded and encouraged, and was actually good at, creative writing. Creative writing is nothing more than.....Ok, that’s a big digression, so let’s get back on the train of thought here.

I worked at the new house today and it was great. I needed to get out of HERE! Mostly I don’t mind but have been ensconced inside this little mud hut longer than even my hibernation-prone self can bear.

It was a glorious day, I got out of all my long-johns and even into a t-shirt! With no turtleneck underneath! I planted 40 bulbs of daffodills that I did not get into the ground last fall—they were already beginning to sprout. I put them all along the inside of our front wall. I put 2 bearded black iris in the corner (to protect from the vicious winds up here—Sean Connery would be proud. I’m sure the winds are equally strong in Scotland so he’d know exactly about that.)--PS..I just checked. We are over twice as high as Scotland's highest point, we at 8100, Scotland at Ben Nevis at around 4,100. However! Our high winds go to 60+ sometimes gusts as strong as 90 mph. Scotland weighs in at 172 mph winds. I believe that could blow a man out to sea! So although we claim “Arctic/Alpine climate” Scotland certainly wins in wind. Like it’s a contest anyone wants to win!

I raked the entire front yard. It is a huge yard! Very few folks up here have yards, no one with a home 200 years old has a yard at all because it wasn’t done like that in the early days. They used all their land for farming, which is why the older homes are absolutely right against the road.

Our adobe is only about 60 years old. Isabro, just around the bend of the canyon from us, and roughly in our age range -–plus or minus a decade and a half--, remembers at his first confirmation (what? 8 to 12 years old?) a picture taken with our house, across the canyon, in the background, with only it’s first few adobe brick layers in place. That puts him quite older than I’d imagined, maybe in his early 70’s? He is a famed woodcarver in the area, and a member of the Morada, the Penitentes. He’s a very lovely man. He came to visit our gallery in the early days. (I say lthat as if we’ve been here for years!) But we are becoming more and more a real part of this place—if one can be for not having been here 400 years at least. And it continues to feel right. Quite, quite right.

Still. The Spanish think they own this place. But you know, there were Indians here waaaaaaaaay before that. Absolutely no one acknowledges that fact. You’d think the Spanish were the children of God and he just plopped them right down, right here, and without even the slightest hint of original sin. Honestly. I really think they believe that. Not a single one will buy into the fact that THEY ALL came up THROUGH MEXICO to settle here. Around these parts MEXICO is a dirtier word than some of those four-letter classics that we all know and use from time to time.

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