Looking for Home

The Sangre de Cristos

 

I drove to the market yesterday for avocados. It was Thursday before the Memorial Day invasion. The tourist season comes on Harley Davidson motorcycles decked out in their leathers. Supposedly they are "celebrating" a war I marched to end. I usually just hide away in my Black Lake home and try to shut my ears as they roar down Hwy 434. The rest of the tourist season will be quieter but also not welcome.

This year I feel like a tourist. I have just returned from exile in neighboring Eagle Nest. I have been an evacuee for 12 days. I have been glad to be back in Black Lake on the land I love but it has not yet felt like home. I feel like a cat on a hot tin roof. Thicke, my cat, has settled in better than me. I stand in my studio and pace trying to figure what to do next. I come up with a plan to unpack this or rearrange that. Move a few things then abandon it. 

I had planned to go to Taos and stock up with groceries for the invasion, and go by Ace Hardware Nursery and get some starts for the garden, maybe some chalk paint to decorate the three stools and three chairs I have acquired over the winter. But I am afraid to go that far from home. But I needed avocados so I got in the Explorer and went into "town," Angel Fire. Once it had the Valley Market owned by a local but it was bought out by a Texas (tourist) company. It stocks things the tourists want. I think of it as a liquor store (four aisles of booze and coolers of beer that take up half of one wall) where I try to find things I eat. Avocados. They market good Mexico avocados. And I have figured out how to buy four and ripen them one at a time with the help of a banana and an apple. 

I got my avocados and got back in the Explorer, still partially packed for a quick retreat should we get evacuated again, and cruised down main street looking for home. The home I left two weeks ago. And there was an open sign on Pacheco's nursery. I could not believe it. Pachecos was open. I could look for flowers to bring home. But most important the Pacheco's were there. They live in the off season in Chacon. Chacon is in the heart of the fire. It is the name which pops out at me on the fire map. How could it still exist? How could the Pacheco's survive and get here to open their nursery like always. This year of all years.

I may have stopped for flowers, especially pansies with their beautiful colorful faces. But what I really needed was the Pacheco's. Especially Mrs. Pacheco. I always have such wonderful talks with her and this year she had stories of Chacon and its survival. My sister and I accidently stumbled into Chacon on a off road exploration through the forest now in the heart of this fire. I needed to know Chacon still existed, but more that the residents of Chacon still existed. And in almost an hour of animated conversation and shopping for garden shops I found out they did. The people have made it. The Pachecos made it. The land and the people have survived. We paused at a point in our conversation and stared at the spine of the Sange de Cristo mountains which bound us. 

I still had a home.

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