Twenty-nine years we’ve been married. TWENTY-NINE YEARS!
It all started back when I was cute. She saw me and fell like a tree: “I loved you immediately,” she wrote on the card she gave me this morning, and of course it made me cry. I gave her champagne, chocolates, and flowers. Locally made dark chocolate-covered espresso beans, I’ll have you know. And a card, which made her cry, too. We went out to Doc Martin’s Restaurant for breakfast — it only took me ten fucking years to take her out to breakfast at Doc Martin’s — and I cried over my buffalo patty with mushroom gravy and yam roll. I can’t believe she’s still here. I can’t believe we’re here in Taos, New Mexico. Twenty-nine years ago, I didn’t even know where it was.
When I bought the card and told the owner of the store it was for my anniversary, I added that we’d left a home in the country and financial security 10 years ago to move out to el Norte. He said, “And she’s still with you??” I told him she left for a few years but finally came back. (My heart was plucked out, naked and bleeding, sitting on a stump for ravens and coyotes to eat, and she put it back inside my chest…)
Appropriately for the occasion, it’s beautiful here today: sunny, clear, no wind, 46° F at 2:00 p.m. this afternoon, but next week we might get slammed:
Combining snow from all three storms will likely bring tremendous accumulations… measured in feet instead of inches… over the west facing slopes of the western and central mountains.
[Note: since downgraded! Can you say "cover your ass?"]
Never in my life have I heard official weather bureau language like that: “tremendous accumulations…” Of course, we’re in the northern mountains, not the central ones, so we shall see. Just this morning I decided we should take advantage of the sunny, clear conditions and go for a drive on Sunday afternoon. We don’t usually do that in the winter, because it’s either iffy or impossible, and now it looks like this could be the last chance for a while. By this time next week, it could be that nothing will be the same.
I do like drama, especially when it comes from Nature. Today’s Santa Fe New Mexican has an article about the largest single volcanic eruption in the history of the world, the La Garita event, which took place 27 millions years ago less than 150 miles northwest of here in what are now the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Geologists only recently figured out that the caldera is 30 miles across. (They’d never imagined it could be so big, and so for years had mistaken smaller craters within the larger one for the main event.) The unbelievable explosion is estimated to have ejected 1,000 cubic MILES of ash. Closer to home, the explosive eruption that created the Jemez caldera in the mountains south of here ejected “only” 71 cubic miles of ash, and the top of the mountain fell to earth in western Kansas!
It is not lost on me that this occured nearby, or that we live along an actual rift valley where the tectonic plates are still pulling apart. We’re surrounded by dead volcanoes. One of them is over 10,000 feet high! Not that I worry about eruptions or earthquakes, but living here, you’re battered by the truth of walking on a living, breathing planet undergoing constant change. You can see the scars right in front of you. There’s no geological or ecological ideal “steady state” where everything is nice and tidy. We’re just part of the scenery in a landscape that blows up all the time.
“Everything is coming out, everything is different,” she told me just this morning, referring to the changes in my own long-guarded, selfish little world.
I guess it’s safe to come out now, and apparently I have, at least a little.
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Happiest anniversary to the two of you. Show pix of where you drive today, plz.
I think I can handle that.
But it’s so varied: up and over a 10K ft. mountain, through a winding, pristine mountain valley over 8K ft. up, then slowly meandering down past spectacular views to one of the most interesting and least-known (by tourists) NM destinations on the edge of the plains. Walk around, have a treat, head back. Ninety minutes each way, almost no traffic at all.