Category: homesick

Don’t know what you got….

I was sent off on a work excursion today and I’ll be inhabiting a hotel room in the greater Sacramento area for the week. Blogging might be a little sparse over the next few days, just FYI.

I’m not all that familiar with this area, but went out earlier this evening to find a grocery store to buy a few things to help me get through.

While wandering around the neighborhood, I rounded a corner and what to my wandering eyes should appear?

A Sonic!

We don’t have Sonic Drive Ins in the Bay Area. I’ve done without regular Sonic visits since I moved to California. They are only slowly moving in. I have to say, for so many long years there’s been a big gaping void in my soul where regular cherry limes should be.

Oh sweet mystery of life…I found you again!

Cheesy tots for dinner, on expense report! Boo yah!




I’ve Got A Secret

In one of those weird things that sticks with you over the years…

I remember that some dear friends of our family always subscribed to New Mexico Magazine. We’d go visit their beautiful adobe home in the Valley, and when the adult conversation would bore me, I’d pick up that magazine and flip through the pages.

New Mexico Magazine gave me a view on my home state that was much different than what I knew. I’d stare and stare at those amazing full color photographs of Native American jewelry, or locations around the state, or blue sky and clouds.

It was like my New Mexico, only better. I used to devour that magazine cover to cover.

When I became an adult, I started subscribing to New Mexico Magazine for myself. After my move to California, the magazine helped me get through pangs of homesickness. I’d dog ear pages of photos and articles that made me happy.

New Mexico Magazine has been a fixture in my life as long as I can remember. Today, I know something that the kid sitting on the floor in a beautiful adobe home in the Valley didn’t know.

I’ve been keeping a secret. I didn’t want to say too much in case it didn’t work out.

Now the secret can be told. I have permission to share my Very Big News:

I wrote three articles that have been accepted for publication in New Mexico Magazine.

Let me just pause here before I pass out.

Ok, I’m back.

The first article is slated for the June issue. Due out soon!

The other two are planned for the September/October timeframe. Since the magazine is undergoing some changes to the editorial staff, it’s a bit up in the air. I hope to know more soon.

All gratitude to Associate Editor Ashley Biggers (@ambiggers on Twitter) for opening the conversation and working with me through this process. She has a talent for developing writers, and I’m grateful for her patience.

I’m already working on a couple more ideas for upcoming articles. There is so much to know and explore about New Mexico that I’m excited to share.

This is a pretty big honor for a little girl from New Mexico.

Join me now in an epic rendition of the Happy Dance!






To properly celebrate, I wore my Fat Babies to work today. New Mexico in da hoouuuse!


Image from Yippee Farms


The Taste of Home

I could write about the obvious today, the topic every news source is chattering about, but I’ve made a conscious decision not to. I’m going to go with the blog topic I’d already decided for today.

_______________________


When you ask people “what is your comfort food” you’ll find that the answers are surprisingly simple. What give us comfort is usually food we recall from childhood. Mom’s biscuits, maybe. Mashed potatoes like gramma made. A rhubarb pie.

These aren’t high falootin’ foods. There is peace in starchy simplicity.

Over the weekend, I cooked up some of my own brand of comfort food by making a pot of pinto beans. This isn’t so unusual, really. I like to keep a pot of beans in the house for tasty quick eats. For me, beans are a staple food. But it’s more than that.

When I pour the bag of beans onto the counter and start sorting through them, I’m repeating an ancient process. It’s a part of me. It’s a part of my family. It’s burned into the DNA of New Mexico. It’s so right, so peace filled, and so intuitive to me, it doesn’t require much thinking.

I go to the happy place while I separate handfuls of beans, spread them out on the counter, look ’em over, throw the rocks and chunks of mud off to one side, sweep them into the pot, and repeat.

When done, I fill the pot with water and let beans soak. It’s the soaking that makes them magic. That pot sits on my counter smiling, humming to itself while the beans slowly begin to engorge with water and emerge as something quite perfect.

Then after plenty of soak time, I dump that water, rinse the waterlogged beans, fill the pot with water again (about an inch above the bean line) add a nice bit of fatty salted pork then put them on the stove to cook.

Burble, burble, the house fills with a wonderful aroma. That cooking pot is a sensory experience. I can hear the beans slowly simmering. I can smell the fatback cooking down. I peer in every now and again to see how we’re doing, give a sample bean a taste and feel the steam on my face.

And when they are done cooking, I feel satisfied. I made something good. Something tasty. Nutritious. Satisfying.

I made something like home.

Just by eating a simple bowl of warm steaming beans, I’m myself again.





Image by Karen Fayeth using the Camera+ app on an iPhone4


And Then I Get Out Of The Wayback Machine

I got a little down this past weekend. It might have been coming off one of the busiest weeks in recent memory. Twelve hour work days can bring a girl down.

It could have been the emails flying around about the upcoming memorial for my friend. It hurts my heart.

Perhaps it was simply about the dark gray skies and soaking rain that laid down like a cold, wet blanket over the Bay Area.

Yeah. It was all of that. But there’s one more.

Back in February, when I was visiting my Fair New Mexico, my best good friend told me some really good news.

“Friend, there’s a Lake Valley coming up! Joe Delk got the permits!”

Well, this made me grin so hard, the sides of my mouth met around the back of my head.

Ah Lake Valley. Now there’s a memory.

The town of Lake Valley, once a booming silver mine, is now a ghost town. Out there in the middle of gosh darn nowhere (a little to the left of I-25, a little to the right of Silver City), there are a few buildings still standing.

One of them is an old schoolhouse. For a lot of years, cowboys, ranchers, locals and college kids got together at that Lake Valley schoolhouse for a good old-fashioned country dance.

When I say a lot of years, I mean my best friend’s grandma remembers coming out to Lake Valley to dance, and she and I do too.

People came from miles around to tailgate, share beer and stories, and dance on the uneven wood boards of that rickety old schoolhouse.

The last Lake Valley dance happened back in the late eighties. The BLM has taken over the land and buildings and it’s been mighty hard to get in there ever since.

But to hear that Joe Delk, leader of local band The Delks, had somehow persuaded the BLM to go along? Well hell, I bought my ticket PDQ. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!

March 19th was when it was set to go down.

About a week before I started packing my bags, I got the news. Sadly, it was not to be. Evidently the BLM wanted a whole lot of restrictions that just wouldn’t work. So Joe cancelled the dance.

When I heard the news, I felt low.

And so…on this past rainy Saturday, I looked out my window and I texted my best friend. “This would have been Lake Valley weekend.”

“Yeah,” she replied. Then she sighed.

And I sighed.

But it was not to be.

I guess Lake Valley gets to live on only in our memories.

Maybe I should write a story about it one day. It’s a intriguing bit of New Mexico history that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Ah well. Monday rolled around and the rain came down and work was waiting and I stepped out of the wayback machine and back into my life.

But somewhere in my dreams, I scoot across the uneven floors, careful not to trip on a nail, while the band plays “Put Your Little Foot”…..and we dance.



That’s the schoolhouse. Now imagine it at night. Very dark out there…



Photo from Jimmy Emerson‘s Flickr photostream.


Walking On The Moon

Last weekend, toward the end of my visit to New Mexico, my best friend and I decided we needed to go somewhere without much in the way of civilization.

A break from the every day is good for the soul.

This year my friend had drawn out a tag to hunt Oryx, and about a month ago, she and her husband went out to the empty land around Upham, New Mexico as Oryx are plentiful there.

While she didn’t manage to get an Oryx this year, while hiking around, she witnessed a vista so amazing that she wanted to share it with me.

So we loaded up and went bouncing down dirt roads, me riding in the passenger seat. My job was to open and close gates so that we could make our way past ranches without much in the way of fences to contain their hungry cattle.

Since the truck we rode in sounds a lot like a feed truck, they’d come a galloping along to greet us. It was kind of hard to let down all of our bovine friends as we only had a fried chicken picnic to eat, and that’s not really cow food.

The land we saw as we bumped along was empty, otherworldly and beautiful.

My New Mexico readers will also know a bit about Upham as that is where the New Mexico Spaceport is being built with taxpayers money.

By taking publicly accessible roads, we were able to get pretty gosh darn close to the construction site.

Here’s what it looks like (click photo for larger size):



The Spaceport website has quite a few construction photos as well. I was struck by the fantastically long tarmac, pure concrete rumored to be almost two miles long and three feet deep. How the heck they got that much water out there to create that much cement is absolutely beyond me.

The actual location of the Spaceport is quite a ways off the highway, almost an hour in the truck, and it’s a good thing my friend was familiar with the area. I would have been quite lost.

After ooh’ing and aah’ing along with cussing and discussing the merits (or lack of) of the spaceport, we headed up a long and somewhat winding trail to get to a certain spot my friend had in mind.

That’s when the ooh’ing and aah’ing really began.

This photo does no justice to the almost 180 degree sweeping view from Anthony to Truth or Consequences. It was absolutely breathtaking.

Other than the guy who lives in the small ranch at the top of the rise, and some Oryx hunters, I don’t imagine a lot of people have gotten the chance to see this amazing view.

It made me proud to be a New Mexican. This is who I am. This is where I come from.



(click for larger size)




All photographs by Karen Fayeth and subject to the creative commons license as seen in the far right column of this page.