Pinecones dropping from pine trees, and new-fallen yellow leaves scattered like lemon drops on dirt roads. The giant sunflower is still standing tall, but its leaves are rumpled. September and October are my favorite months in Santa Fe, with everything feeling crisper and more precious as sunlight slips away. The threat of a hard frost creeps closer as it gets a degree or two colder at night, even though it’s still in the 40s. On my morning walk, I look forward to the streaky pink-gray clouds that sometimes filter the pure sunlight. Leslie Marmon Silko writes evocatively of these “cloud beings” with minds of their own in her new nature-oriented memoir “The Turquoise Ledge.”
In downtown Santa Fe (yeah, there is such a thing—it’s the area around the Plaza), parking spaces can once again be had now that tourists are scarcer. Santacafe, the elegant eatery where art stars and realtors gather, still has a seasonal Crab Louie salad for lunch and still is serving on the patio. Out at the barn, fall always meant fall shots for the horses, and their coats would be thickening now. In Ryo’s last year, his coat didn’t thicken at all and the barn owner told me Ryo wouldn’t survive that winter. My former acupuncturist Beverly used to say that fall is about harvesting the bounty that life has brought us, and abandoning the plans that didn’t reach fruition. We’re lucky enough to have two long months of a lingering fall here in Santa Fe to come to terms with that concept of harvest/loss… and to continue putting effort into what we want most.
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The remnants of a tropical storm splattered Santa Fe with an all-day rain, and now autumn is here. Flowers are opening slowly in the morning after the nighttime bite of temps in the 40s. Autumn is Santa Fe’s most alluring season. I saw a brand-new, six-foot sunflower this morning on my walk, and the wild purple asters are looking spirited. The green is just beginning to blanch out of the aspen leaves with a faded outline encroaching from the outside of each leaf.
Had a great time yesterday at Los Poblanos (www.lospoblanos.com), a farm and inn in Los Ranchos, one of my favorite parts of Albuquerque with lots of horses and goats. Los Poblanos is a working organic farm, filled with lavender fields, goats, chickens, and roosters. An all-white peacock strutted by as we ate BLT sandwiches with an organic Arugula, fig, and goat-cheese salad. Back in Santa Fe, hundreds of people showed up at the Inn at Loretto to hear Sam Shepard read from his new book of short stories, “Day Out of Days,” and earlier books. Shepard’s ironic, spare prose is brilliant. He gets at fundamental truths with a droll insight. “Reality is an internal affair,” a father contends in one short story as he recalls a decade past, dismissing current events coverage of that time as “superficial and a lie.” I get that: what ultimately matters most is what goes on inside our own heads. Shepard’s brand of introspective Americana at last night’s talk included descriptions of a dead mountain lion strapped into a pickup truck and crows strutting in snow. There’ll be lots of sleek designer racecars skimming through town this weekend for the Santa Fe Concorso, and the chair lift starts running at Ski Santa Fe for aspen viewing. Autumn is late this year. Summer is hanging on in Santa Fe, and even though green chiles are being roasted outside Whole Foods, their fabulous smoldering aroma evaporates quickly in the searing sunlight. Nobody is loading firewood into woodstoves yet. Why would they when temps are climbing into the 80s? The morning air is more languidly cool than Rocky Mountain crisp. Cottonwoods and elms are just starting to turn from green to yellow, which seems behind schedule.
I’ve been walking every day. A few weeks ago I traversed the hills north of Santa Fe with travel writer Judie Fein, author of the book “Life is a Trip,” which is brimming with stories like how she apprenticed to a Mexican bruja. We emailed to set up the hike: she was in Norway at the time! As we clambered along, Judie told me a canoe story. She tells it better, but essentially it was about a man who was out at night in a canoe having a peaceful time, then this other canoe started banging into him. He got furious at the other person--who would be so rude and downright dangerous? He fumed all night. When dawn came, he saw the empty canoe floating by. The point being: he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He shouldn’t have taken it personally. That canoe wasn’t bumping him intentionally. Judie tells other great stories in her book, available at http://www.yourlifeisatrip.com/home/life-is-a-trip-the-book.html. Speaking of writers, Jimmy Santiago Baca just gave a powerful reading here (that man can emote!), emphasizing how Southwest border life compels all races to compromise to get along. He also read a poem making a political statement out of what he does naked at home, but I’ll leave more on that to his blog. On October 1-3, 110 authors gather here for the New Mexico Women Authors’ Book Festival (www.newmexicocreates.org). Saturday looks like the best day, with Phaedra Greenwood, Sallie Bingham, Sally Denton, Virginia Scharff, Judith Ryan Hendricks, and Jo-Ann Mapson all talking! Mapson’s new book “Solomon’s Oak,” about three broken souls who befriend each other on a central California ranch, is my favorite October book release so far, along with Nicholas Evans’s “The Brave,” in which the best-selling Brit (“The Horse Whisperer”) returns to the American West, this time writing about a man whose boyhood was in 1950s Hollywood, and who now lives in rural Montana. Hollywood and ranches, I’m a sucker for both. |
Above: My mustang Ryo in Tesuque, NM. Our barn owner in Malibu described him as Ghandi-esque because Ryo didn't fight for the best feed bin like the other horses. When Ryo died in Tesuque, I turned on my car radio to hear John Lennon singing "Imagine"... that was Ryo "living life in peace." PHOTOS BY WOLF SCHNEIDER
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