october

I'm am at the point of posting monthly now. Amazing what working full-time away from home can do to your blogging. Writing about work isn't any fun, so it all comes down to weekends. And sometimes weekends are just washing dishes and baking bread. Though lately I've been cooking up tomato sauce too. And in preparation for surgery I'm having in two weeks, I've been baking up pasta and fixing up burritos for the freezer. Somehow it makes me feel less anxious if I know there will be food I made for D. to eat during my recovery.

The garden faded in a lovely way, and it became a home for the rabbits (safe from the coyotes). The aspens turned gold in a week, and now are beginning to lose their leaves. Fall in northern NM means seeing golden patches on the mountains appear and disappear, bushes of chamisa turn bright yellow, the smell of pinon burning, mornings hazy over the valley from woodstove smoke, deer tracks in the yard and truck beds either piled high in wood or showing the tops of antlers, a tell-tale sign of a recent hunt. 

In late September was the Taos Fall Arts Festival, this time including the idea of a friend of ours, incorporating street art & performance. Called The Paseo (for the street it lined) it was a long walk of different street art, from huge mechnical robots and displays to adobe walls lit up in papercut projections. We were lucky enough to get our tintype photo taken by one of the visiting artists. Though it took forever, since the plate had to be exposed and processed one at a time, we love that we held out. 

It also means sunny, warm days and crisp, freezing nights. The pleasantness of the weather here.

A few weekends ago we started out on a drive to see fall colors, with a walk in mind. We drove through little Truchas, where I found some awesome roadside graffiti. But we ended up heading south to Chimayo, to visit El Santuario.  A site of pilgrimage, famous for the healing dirt upon which it is built. It was a spiritual place of healing for the native populations before the Catholic populations began living here & built a chapel. Now the courtyard is covered in altars of rosaries, candles and homemade crosses. And as we visited the simple adobe chapel full of believers. People praying in spanish, and people weeping at the altar. A moving place, you can feel the belief, the hope, the sorrow, the relief and the ancient ways. We brought home a little wooden replica of the chapel, and in it we filled with some of the healing dirt. This is a part of what you do when you live in New Mexico.