The brown cow hasn’t been around for a couple of days. I’m a little worried.
My wife says the cow’s laying low because I wrote down the phone number for Animal Control. She’s a nice cow, a young one, I think, and she’s been in the neighborhood off and on for a couple of weeks. I keep thinking someone is going to look out the window and say, “¡Dios mio! Mira, there’s one of Ernesto’s cows!” or something like that, but it never happens. Or if it did, they never called him. Let me tell you, though, the sight of a huge hairy animal 18 inches the other side of your living room window is kind of a shock. Plus, she leaves really deep footprints in the mud and every now and then, a cowflop. You can see everywhere she’s stepped for the last 14 days, and if you’re not careful, you’ll step in it, too.
Cows wander off and die out here, get chased by dogs or coyotes and fall into an arroyo, or even end up shot. Anything can happen. I’ve found a few old carcasses out on the mesa. The bones are usually scattered, but often there’s still the hide, stiff and wrinkled, with hip bones or vertebrae attached. The heads are always gone. The way I see this one devouring the clumps of dried whatever-grass, I wonder if she’s getting enough to eat and hope she doesn’t join the boneyard. I’ll call Animal Control if I see her again, in case someone’s reported a missing bovine. I did consider lassoing the critter and then calling, like that’s my civic duty, but fortunately I’m out of rope.
Ravens ready for lift-off
Meanwhile, like la vaca, we’re having trouble staying home. We simply need a bigger place where both of us can live and work. My wife rents a studio next door, but it’s too small for two pianos and on too steep a rough-and-tumble hillside to get her baby grand down there, anyway.
Living in this 105-year-old adobe with 18-inch thick walls and mud floors has been a rare adventure, though — an experienced Taoseña of my acquaintance walked in the front door for the first time and said by way of recognition, “OLD Taos,” and that’s just it. The house is probably the funkiest AND the most comfortable place I’ve ever lived, solid and quiet as a tomb. We’re out here on the edge of open country, with nothing between our awful muddy road and the nearby peaks but air and pine trees, yet main highway and the Ranchos post office are just five minutes away. A great spot, but it’s finally become something of a straitjacket, what with limited space, the ever-loving mud, and our having, well, “expanded.”
Yes, expanded. We’re taking up more space, bumping up against surrounding psychic landscapes. What was once enveloping and comforting is now often in the way, and of course the clock is ticking. Even if you’re living fully in the present moment, you move your butt when it gets sore. After nine long years of tumbling from place to place since we moved out to New Mexico, it’s time to get this finally, definitively, straightened out and DONE. No more voluntary victim crap, either. We get to have and do what we want.
Confluence of the Missouri and the Platte
It never ends, though, does it?
No plateaus, no sliding into home to win the game. Just motion, breathing, in and out, outside of time.
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