New Mexico

2022.12.04

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I once lived in a land with no seasons, only dryness or wetness with little dependability.  Keeping busy was sport, and I excelled.  It’s no wonder I burned too brightly.

 

Autumn in New Mexico is my favorite season.  Every year I join the choreography of the land as it collectively accepts a passing, relinquishes its last energy, sheds, and allows itself to rest in the waning light.  The transition brings both relief and sadness, a sharp pang of loss mixed with accomplishment.

 

It begins with yellow—first the chamisas, then the quaking aspens.  The bigtooth maples lay bare their individualism in a spectacular display of reds and pinks and then sigh into nakedness.  Slowly, then all at once, the rivers seep amber, revealing fingers of water reaching into the desert.  The cottonwoods linger, dignified giants with golden crowns.  The sandhill cranes are the last to arrive, though they’ve been journeying for some time. Their bugles sound out from thermals high above as they spiral toward Bosque del Apache.  I’ll meet them there in a few weeks when all my chores are done:  seeds sown, firewood stacked, tools organized and given a well-deserved recess.

 

When it feels like everything has bedded down, and the light too, I make the pilgrimage to the Bosque.  Just as the sun sets, thousands of honking cranes and snow geese sweep into the wetlands to take refuge from predators.  They flew some 1500 miles to rest peaceably here until spring.  In March, renewed, they’ll begin again.

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