Advent Calendar Day 18 - November 29
Today’s bookish delight: excerpts from Breathing Stone: Living Small in a Southwest Village, by Betsy James.
Remember, today, Breathing Stone and all our titles are 25% off with code TAMALE25. Thank you for supporting small businesses this weekend.
November
On Los Altos road, a dead butterfly with steely-iridescent, blue-purple wings. Very small.
Windless woods, deep, and still cold with night. Cottonwood leaves fall one by one: they sound like an animal walking.
***
The wind blows clouds of silver light across the moon. Yesterday the mulberry was full of leaves; tonight it’s a witch-broom bundle against the sky.
How, with so slight a life, do I do the best I can? What needs me?
***
I left the car at the mailboxes where the Tecolote road joins the Placitas highway. To my surprise, the Tecolote road had been paved. It was odd to walk it on black tarmac, though it did mean less dust in the eyes.
Where the road crosses Las Huertas Creek I dodged down into the creek bed. I’m still intrigued by the hummock right east of there. I went as close as I dared, hugging the fence, but there’s so much new building right there—a hundred yards away two men were working in front of a new double-wide. I did poke my head through the fence, but I slid, hung up on the wire, and got a legful of cactus. Instant karma.
***
Three-strand fences say, “This is a boundary.” Four-strands say, “Keep out.” This was a four-strand.
I looked more closely at the site above the fork in the road. Some of the smashed china there is eggshell-fine and must have been somebody’s treasured teacups. I walked up the pipeline road to the hill crest, above the canyon that drops toward Tecolote.
The wind was sturdy. I sat on a limestone ledge and looked over the valley at the Sandias’ mountain shoulder, at Cabezón far off and hazy in the west. The valley was full of moving air. Suddenly: Cra-a-a! Eight ravens, shiny black against the blue sky, sailed out over the canyon and circled to check me out.
As I came off the crest and dodged down among the little foothills I spotted a crumb of red pottery, not as big as a dime and black and white on one side. Flaked basalt and basalt cores were scattered about, and more pottery.
I said aloud, “So where’s the house?”
I was standing in it. The tumbled outline of two rooms, a little Placitas field house built into the side of a hill and overlooking a valley. I can think of four or five. I’m sure they were built on hillsides in order to save the valley land for corn.
En route to the car I shamelessly stole a flagstone that road construction had torn out of the bank. I tried to walk along carelessly, as though I hauled rock for exercise.
Outside, coyotes howl.
I flashed the porch light on and off
and did not care
about chickens. I was tired.
Hundreds and thousands and millions
and billions of everything.
Hundreds and thousands and millions
and billions of felt-tip pens,
ballpoint pens, plastic markers,
all of them thrown away.
***
My favorite chicken—Kwili, of the fl oppy wattles and friendly disposition—has vanished. I heard coyotes in the arroyo last night, no hen fuss, but this morning there are only three chickens in the hutch.
Alas! Black wreaths!
***
Kwili is back. Where was she?
Rainy wind, a host of flying leaves, spatter at the glass. All night the little feet of rain on the roof.
One last cold, unhappy male mantis. Prodded, he still stirred.
Betsy James “bested Thoreau” with this collection of observations, poems, and illustrations from four years spent living in Placitas in the 1990s. Read more in BREATHING STONE: Living Small in a Southwest Village.
Remember, our entire bookstore is 25% off this weekend as our way of saying thank-you to you, our readers and champions.
About the Author
Betsy James is the author-illustrator of seventeen books. Her latest novel, Roadsouls, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. A watercolorist, she is represented by Nedra Matteucci Galleries, Santa Fe. She leads writers’ workshops in the University of New Mexico Honors College and lives in Albuquerque’s North Valley. Learn more at her website.