~:: Santa Fe: Pt 4 ::~

At home with Dick and Jane

First, one more downtown shot.

Remember the giant fetish turtle?  Well, this is evidently a giant fetish blue whale, shot while M was driving the camera.  Notice how, by his magic, he was able to reduce the behemoth back down to normal fetish size?  Nice, huh?

We start the tour with a shot of the back deck.  No, you cannot land a 727 on it.  Maybe a Piper Cub.  Note the landscape beyond the fence?  Not green.  Mostly sand.

Here we are, hunting lizards.  Note how odd the light is here.  You’d need an MCP action to get this kind of image anywhere else.  Kinda pink and a little dusty and mat.

And finding them in the oddest places.

No home in New Mexico is complete without a watch lizard.  You know that phrase, “Like a fly on the wall?”  Yeah, well, it has to be adjusted for cultural bias.  Who knows what lizards see and hear?  And who they tell about it.

Front door.  Pretend you don’t see the RoundUp or the Christmas lights.  Or the snakes and mice running into the house because said door is left open.

There are very large skies here, which is why you don’t need a weather guy.  You can see the rain coming – miles away.  You could probably plan your entire week just by looking out the window.

Home in the gloaming.

Inside the old homestead, uncle and karate nephew prepare to square off.

Holy Belts, Batman!  They’re going at it.  Large room, this.  Big enough to feed three small families or an entire middle European county (ending in -stein).  Every chair, recliner, couch, day bed, trampoline Gin has fits into this room.

Love these New Mexico ceilings.  Hey – I just had a thought.  However old I am when I finally kick the bucket, I want people to be saying, “Wow, she died young.”  Apropos of nothing, really.  Except I was thinking about how silly these captions are.

See what I mean?  Big freaking room.

Back to the action: as the karate guys battle, mother and child look on with concern—who will end up tipped into the fireplace?  Who will be thrown backward into a recliner?

Actually, nothing happens to either of them, as hard as Max tries. Here is the back of the house, and a hint of the coming sunset – which will have me running outside with my shoes un-velcroed in another five minutes.

More house.  How I love these colors, and the way you can see through to the other spaces.

Deck again.  It fascinates me.

M, at his leisure.  The back yard.  Also sand.  Cats must love this place.

Beeeea-utiful evening.  NO MOSQUITOS.

My room.  At least, it was for a week.

Note the brick floors.  Only the giant room has carpet.  This is a great house for skating and trike riding and remote controlled vehicles.

The kitchen glows at the end of this hall.

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And the great and grand Sully awaits his dinner.

This house, as is traditional, is built around a courtyard.  It’s great – an outside/inside room.  The kids can play out here, safe from the outside world (not safe from skinned knees) and can be seen from every room in the house.  Parties can happen out here.  And light gets stained pink.

My quilt.  This is so ironic, that I’d make her this quilt for her graduation, and then a million years later, it ends up in her very desert real home.

Don’t you just dream of living in a place that out-shelves your books?  Ah, the possibilities!

And back to that sunset –

I saw a hint of it through the window and then ran out here to see if I could find it.  In the rental, you could see the sunset directly from the double glass doors in the middle of the house.  Here, it’s harder to find.  And there’s a screen on the one window that faces it.

This is what evening light does to these houses – it lights them into a sort of golden-mango mellowness, and paints blue shadows all over them.  These are the southwestern colors, the orange and blue.  So seeing this, we headed outside for a long walk under the setting sun.

We saw these.  And see that hole?

We also saw this.

The house, so nestled into the landscape, you can’t even be sure it’s there.

We got out onto the road, just in time to see the sun disappear into that bank of blue gray.

Sunsets seem to happen quickly here.  But it’s not true.  They are long and languid.  They seem quick because they change dramatically from moment to moment.

This one killed me.  Soon enough – very soon – we home girls will be left behind on walks like this.  He has another girl now, you know.  This best friend of ours will have his own life.  So it will be Chaz and me walking into the sunset, and who will take that picture?  Maybe G.

This is the flip side of the sky.  She’s walking toward the sunset.  Looking at the sky behind her, you’d have no clue there was a party going on in heaven.

So this –

turned into this, which

turned into this.  You see the deep lilac that is coming in to kiss that orange?

to this – all of this happening in the same sky over a period of maybe twenty five minutes.

And just when it seems to have paled out, the night-tide rising over the land –

this happens.  This blazing rim, this last thrown-up glory.

Not the end of the story.  Only nearly.  Again, I hope you won’t mind getting more.  I think there are two more parts to it.  I promise, we’ll have fun –