My wife and I have this thing where we always have a drink together around five o’clock and make a toast. Last night I spontaneously launched into a doozy, approximately so:
“Here’s to you! [clink] Thank you for being so brave and true, for following me out here to New Mexico, quitting your job, giving up your home, saying goodbye to all your friends, having both your parents die, and coming out here with me to be poor and live in the mud!”
No, she didn’t shoot me. Oh, how far we have come.
Possibly related to the above, for the last 36 hours, there’s been this wild kind of energy I don’t necessarily recognize but don’t want to stop. I could do with a lot more of whatever this is, in fact. Could it be I’m finally here? That would be nice. It’s really quite impossible to have any kind of a life when you’re always wondering about bugging out. Or freaking out. Or just plain fretting until you drive yourself wacko and never have any fun.
So let’s see:
It’s still winter, right? But we’ve never been cold, not even when it got down to zero. The reason? One helluva cool kindred spirit and wood guy who brings us resin-soaked killer piñon, and my outstanding skill at keeping the fire going 24/7 in this small but solid old adobe. I’ve been burning the stuff this year like a man possessed, keeping the house as warm as I can and opening the windows when necessary. Yes, opening the windows, or even the front door. The “driveway” may be an impassable morass of mud, but by God, I can open the front door and watch the juncoes hop around in the snow if I want–no, I can’t actually walk out there in my bare feet, but I can stand in the goddamn door and pretend.
Last night I aimed a flashlight out the kitchen window at 2:00 a.m. to see if it was snowing yet. It wasn’t, but I was surprised to see a medium-sized raccoon staring back at me from the tall platform feeder I’d made for the birds. He (?) was licking those sunflower seeds up with his tongue as fast as he could and chewing them up husks and all, as far as I could tell, having a high old time. He wasn’t scared and didn’t pay any attention to the light. I thought about banging on the window to chase him away, but thought better of it–it’s not everyone who can claim credit for building a successful raccoon feeder!
It’s all kind of working right now. This evening my wife said to me, “Aunt Mary is never going to die. Your mother is never going to die.” She was a little drunk, but on the money. I already knew the ancient ones had decided to live forever, of course, to deny my siblings and me any kind of inheritance, or at least to keep going long enough to use it all up. (My family is diabolical in that way.) Still, it was nice to have the support.
Finally, I have a friend who just painted his pickup truck black. Flat black, from hand-held cans of spray paint. As soon as he can, he’s going to paint winged skulls on the doors. This may not be the kind of thing that rocks your world, but now I’m wondering if I should replace the stolen taillight on my own truck, after all. Maybe a controlled burn would be more Taos…
You know, just enough to singe it a little.
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