Tag Archives: Santa Fe

A little green

Summer arrived rather suddenly here in the valley. After a rainy May that was a bit cooler than average, June has slapped us with 80° days and sunshine. Not that I am complaining, but it does throw a curve at the vegetable garden’s usual progression.

And all that rain burgeoned into so much verdancy–my eyes almost ache from all the green! We’ve needed the rain (the wettest May on record) to make up for the driest October on record (2024). Nature appears to be doing its best with balancing things out in the face of all we humans have been doing to unbalance it.

Quite a switch from the spring greenery in the mountains of New Mexico, greens that are far less chartreuse in hue, the kind of green you have to be looking for amid the deep jades of pines and the brownish-green cholla. Prickly pears are a bright shade of green but don’t evoke any sensation of lushness. The little-leaf oaks start out with a fresh hue but become very dark, nearly black, as the season progresses.

I was thinking about the hues of the high desert because of our visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. One of the galleries there is a display of the artist’s pastel chalks, brushes, and color chips she created for herself to get the palette she felt best represented the landscape she knew. Many shades of ochre, browns, dull oranges, sandy yellow, and that famous turquoise blue of the New Mexico skies–but also the green of cottonwoods in spring, the green of pinyon and ponderosa, the sage green so common among low-growing plants like sage and rabbitbrush.

Try defining the word green.

A little Joni Mitchell to accompany that request:

Plan B (reading)

While I was traveling the high-altitude desert regions, my home valley got its much-needed rain. And the rain continues. And continues. My plan was to get to work on my gardens as soon as I came back, to weed and plant out seedlings. Well, it’s a bit too wet for that. Also chilly and humid and sea-level, and therefore my physical adjustment has been a bit …bumpy. So, Plan B.

The Plan B default for me usually entails spending “down time” reading, writing, or housekeeping, though visiting the library and meeting friends for coffee fall under Plan B, too. Today, since I feel lousy and have a spate of brain fog, reading has been the choice. I still have a few books on the bedside pile that I haven’t gotten to–mostly poetry collections I bought at AWP at the end of March. But also there is Ocean Vuong‘s heartbreaking and beautiful novel-that-reads-like-memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that I finally got around to reading, and a back issue of Rattle Poetry a friend gave me–one that was largely devoted to haiku and related forms–that featured a fascinating interview with Richard Gilbert (thank you, Lesley S!). On the poetry-only book list, I read January Gill O’Neil’s Glitter Road, Julie Kane’s Naked Ladies, and Ross Gay’s first collection, Against Which. All quite useful to me in times when I feel bleak and physically frail–there’s humor, sorrow, and bravery in all of these writers’ poems. Though I’m too foggy-headed to write mini-reviews at the moment, I encourage my readers to check these poets out.

Perhaps my next post will be about the lovely time my friend and I had in northern New Mexico, visiting my daughter and Santa Fe, including my opportunity to see Bandelier National Monument again and ponder its environments and history. A trip like that takes some time for me to “digest.” But it was wondrous. And so is a day at home to recuperate in my favorite way: reading.