Sidetracked Charley

Talk these days at the store or coffee house is about fall colors and snow. Tourism in the area depends on both. Hard to say about the snow because we are not out of the drought yet. Better but not gone by a long shot. And that has also effected the colors. One always hopes we got enough rain at the right time. And that could be true in some locations. But I drove through Taos Canyon yesterday and the leaves are already falling off after never having gotten to a glorious gold and orange. Several days of hard freeze browned out the red of the Virginia Creeper vines. And the freezes also put toast to my tomato vines even under two layers of plastic and with drop lights. Even some of the tomatoes froze. Need to pick those that didn't off the vines for fried green tomatoes or as experiments in ripening after picking. Gardening was not a great success this year. Very late spring frosts and then very early sequence of hard fall frosts. It really is an experiment at this altitude ...

My ultimate fear has always been walking on to the stage in the middle of the second act with the lines memorized for an entirely different play. Most of this life I have been a relative innocent who wakes up with panic about having forgotten to return a library book on time and sure they are coming to get me. I also believe anytime I get stopped by a police officer and he runs me through wants and warrants he will find something. And my arrest for either incident will wind up as the headline for the day in bigger font and above a mass shooting by an annihilator with an AK 47. Totally irrational fears. I have always believed nobody else has such irrational fears. Yesterday I watched a someone almost crumble over having to make a telephone call because she was terrified she did not know what to say. I patiently coached her in what to ask and what to say and all the time felt I was giving her the wrong advice. I ended up making the call because I would rather jump off the cliff t...

If time flies then it is supersonic these days. It is day 264 per my daily post on the 365 Day Challenge on my studio page. And it is Saturday! I usually post my reflections of the past week on Monday or Tuesday. But Saturday? Really? I do not know why I should be so surprised because all day yesterday I thought it was Saturday. And Thursday I was sure it was Friday. I usually succumb to these time warps only in the midst of winter but it is the 21st of September. Tomorrow we are scheduled for our first freezing temps at night. I am focused on my still green tomatoes. But I have been too busy to do much about them beyond a second drop light in the poly tunnel. Busy is good especially when it has money attached to it. I have been doing lots of paid odd jobs for friends. Money is good at this time of the year because there is firewood to be purchased for the winter, and the chimneys to be swept. Do you think of Mary Poppins when you hear chimneys? And snow tires to be bought and...

Historically for me I have done a weekly blog here generally on Sunday. Purpose was for me to record the week I had just passed through. I will not guess the purpose for my readers. Maybe just to catch up. It has be a small but elite group. Certainly does not have the following of Creative Journey, but it is more in the spirit of a weekly online journal which is where I began on the internet so many years ago. No I am not going to end the blog. But Sunday is definitely not working out as I am busy throwing together my freelance articles. Boy, that makes it sound casual. Certainly has not gotten to that yet. But the purpose of blogging on line was initially to not lose my ability to write. I had begun to do this as an exercise to practice what it was I did not want to lose. I started it not long after my head injury December 24th, 2001. We were all stunned by 9/11 and I had decided life was entirely too short and quit my job as a municipal court clerk to go back to teaching skiin...

Shadow People Sometimes our losses are real and concrete like losing a beloved pet or dear friend to cancer. And sometimes our losses are more on the nature of just learning the true nature of someone or something. We all tell ourselves fairy tales about people, places and organizations. We want to believe like Anne Frank that all people are essentially good at heart. Denial is a goddess given survival tool after all. I realized a long time ago it isn't healthy to carry baggage around and yet I seem at times to be surrounded by people that do. And yet I want to believe they do not. I feel so betrayed when they pull from the past some sin they believe I have committed and must now pay for. I hate it when they bring out a long laundry list I in part cannot even remember and give me no time to explain or counter. And yet if I were to sit down and bring up my list which I have forgiven them for they would shout me down as if I was making all that up. It is so much easier to ...

A mixed bed I have this little bed under my studio windows that has always been rather unsuccessful. This year I added the shelf so I could put some potted plants to see if they did better. And then I added a hodge podge of other stuff. Sort of the nuclear option just to see what worked if anything. The purple succulent I planted there a few years ago seems to have taken hold. As did the hollyhock I planted behind it because I had given up on it growing. First year for the hollyhock but it seems to think it is going to bloom. The peppers in the tins above were late entrants. And the geraniums suffered severely from a late frost. Thinking of weathering them over winter in the polytunnel to give them an early start next spring. One or two may be moved into the studio. Just to the left in this photo is Borage. It is an herb good for kidneys and bladder and which I have tried here for several years. If it weathers over the winter I will be ecstatic. The Bee Balm seems to be making...