Musings

Home again, and Carl and I are doing _Projects!_. Staining the last bit of baseboard where it curves around the kiva fireplace in the bedroom. Cutting cement board to form a backsplash behind the cook top. We have all this left over glass tile from building my Roman tub so we’re going to use it behind the cook top so it’s time to play with mastix and grout. There is still some wood that doesn’t have urethane on it. I’ve barely touched the outside of the house. I just got the aspens in the ground (which reminds me, they need water), and I’m trying to get some quotes lined up for drip irrigation. Once those lines are in from the cisterns and the grey water system I can really start planting. Nobody panic, it will all be low water use, native plants.

I made the trip up to Farmington for a well review with my pumper. The good news all the compressors, and pistons and wells are working beautifully now that the winter is over. There were just a few minor fires to stamp out. The best part of this trip was that I got to spend two nights and basically a day at the ranch in Regina. I drove to Regina on Wednesday, and Sage and I prepared a lovely vegetarian pot pie with a chesse sauce filling. (A warning, you’re going to hear a lot about food and cooking here. I love to cook.) There was chopped chicken liver pate and lavosh bread. The wind was howling around Sage’s little one room cabin. It’s up almost on stilts and when you look out through the large windows it feels like you are on the deck of a ship sailing toward the beryl green meadow dotted with yellow and purple wild flowers, and the darker green shadows of the pine trees climbing the shoulders of the mountain.

Thursday morning I got up early and drove the hour and half to Farmington where I was the business woman Melinda. Then back in the car and a return to the ranch for left over pot pie, and an afternoon spent reading submissions for writer’s group, and completing the first interstial section for BUSTED FLUSH. There was the buzz of an engine over the roof of the cabin, and the owner of the ranch came in for a landing on the grass airstrip down in the meadow. His bright red and white Cherokee looked like an exotic insect exploring the wild flowers from my vantage up on the crest of the hill.

Sage prepared a lovely hollendaise/hazelnut sauce that we put over braised chicken breasts. I was in charge of vegetables, and how to jazz up a bowl of pasta, and cooking the chicken. During this flurry of cooking there was a lull when I walked down to the large lake. (In wetter climates this would be a pond. In NM we call it a lake. ).

Water is a precious commodity here, and we had a good winter with lots of snow. The owner of the ranch has water rights, the right to capture the snow melt off the mountain and fill this cascading line of ponds that run down the valley. I’ve been going to the ranch for several years, and last summer the pond was a muddy hollow with some green slimed water in the very center. The mud was pocked with the footprints of racoons digging in the mud for dying crappie, and the ravens hopping about, and stabbing into the mud with their razor-like beaks and emerging with a skewered fish. There was a wooden dock, the wood gone silver with age, that thrust mournfully out over the cracked mud.

Well, this year the lake is full. The water is lapping a foot below the dock. When I arrived a sunset the water looked glazed with gold, and the mountain and the trees were reflected with crystal perfection in the water. It was a moment in NINE PRINCES IN AMBER where Roger described the Avalon that was floating in the sky made of moonlight. I could look from the reflected mountain to the real mountain and have a moment of confusion. A pair of ducks came sweeping in overhead, and came in for a landing with that wonderful upright position, wings beating desperately as if they’re afraid to hit the water, and then a ballarina’s landing without scarcely a splash on the surface. I watched silver v’s fan out behind them as the mallard and his lady sailed gracefully away toward the willows on the far bank.

It was back to cooking then, and a reflection that I had a better understanding of what my dressage coaches are talking about when they say a downward transition on a dressage horse should feel like a duck landing on water.

Dinner was a long and lingering affair. I got Fred and Sage to start talking about their years in Taos, and in the midst of my laughter I realized there was a television series in this. I’m totally jazzed and Sage got totally jazzed and I’m going to pitch it to my manager and see if it’s worth developing. It’s the Northern Exposure for the 21’st century, but with a lot more cultural fragmentation. It would be so fun, and now that NM has become Tamalewood (I’m not kidding, that’s what they call us in California) we could shoot this sucker here. That evening the pilot light on the furnace blew out, and we hadn’t lit a fire in the stove because it had been a pleasant day. Shivering, I hopped out of bed, and put on a sweatshirt. It was like sleeping in a tent at Chaco Canyon and watching the frost form on the roof of the tent.

I drove home Friday, and now we’re doing Projects. I wish I could return to the ranch.

Melinda

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 12:25 pm and is filed under hollywood, life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.