All of a sudden, everything is different, if familiar.
And don’t give me any rhapsodies about solar homes or New Age nonsense, I’m talking old adobes in the first real storm of the season. What we have here is more medieval than anything else. Primeval, even. Like being trapped inside a cave and glad of it, at least for a while.
All day and now into the night, the wind has been howling from the west at 25-40 mph and sometimes higher. There never was a lot of snow, but the wind has blown some good-sized drifts across the road in places. This is mostly a wind and cold phenomenon, then. Inside the 18-inch thick solid adobe walls, however, you really don’t hear much of anything. One reason is that in these old buildings, almost all the windows are fixed, just panes of glass set into the wall, with nothing to leak or open. This one does have three small sliding windows for ventilation in the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom, all added later. The traditional method of ventilating old adobes was to leave the doors open, you see. (And where you do find windows that open in an old adobe, they certainly won’t have screens.)
I like these old adobe houses for the solidity, though. The floor beneath my feet is actually the ground: just adobe clay spread over roughly-leveled, hard-packed dirt. Where the floor in the kitchen of our old house in Maryland bounced like a plywood trampoline, this thing ain’t goin’ nowhere. I’m sitting on the ground itself, surrounded by rock-hard walls of mud that come right down to the same dirt they’re made of, or do they rise right out of it? Either way, it reinforces the feeling of being in a cave, a good place to be when it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast. It is confining, though. And now with the weather…
It’s cold enough to kill you. The body’s response to that is significant (I’m exhausted and just want to hibernate). You have to huddle inside. At least it’s plenty warm around the hot spots, the wood stove and the oil-filled electric heater underneath my computer desk. If you walk past the barely-cracked window in the kitchen, you can hear the wind whistling past the frosted metal frame, but only just a little. And this is where it gets much different from any other place I’ve lived.
In the morning, the big windows in the living room are covered with ice. On the inside, I mean. (Thick, too.) The wide old wooden window sills have raised edges to hold the water that collects when the ice melts. We lay old towels down to soak up the water, wring them out, and hang them by the stove to dry. These are just the things you do, but you have to do them. That, and keep the wood stove going 24/7. Do all this, and you’ll be toasty, in between trips to the woodpile and needing to go out into the world.
But I also know I have to be here by the fire. I have to sit behind the thick mud walls and wait for never-gets-here spring like any rodent. We may bust out a bit in January, go watch birdies in the southern mountains, but that’s a thousand years away: right now it’s time to go get snow inside my slippers!
(I don’t suit up to walk 50 feet away and find firewood in the night, but maybe now you understand why.)
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John,
So you’re back in your winter state of mind! Seems like only yesterday when the blooms were breaking out. The thought that hit me as I read your version of paradise (and believe me to us not there it does seem at least a bit like paradise) how wierd paradise must have been before the digital explosion. Just you, your bride, the wonder cat, and the wind and cold. Maybe a long distance call and/or a trek to the post office if you could even get there. So at least now someone sitting in cold and breezy Cleveland can reach out electronically and say “hey”! The pictures the last few days have been marvelous! Thanks and enjoy the smell of Piñon!
Summer lasts about 10 days here. I am seriously thinking about warmer climes. If only it wasn’t a case of being bored living anywhere else…