Category: homesick

An Ode to the Magical Wood Burning Stove

Yesterday afternoon when I arrived at the El Paso Airport, I was heartened to see sunny skies and no snow on the ground.

“Ah,” I thought to myself, “it’s back to normal.” After reading reports of New Mexico’s state of emergency last week, I didn’t know what to expect.

Feeling happy to be home, I gathered my things and walked off the plane. Just outside the door I discovered that gap between the jetway and the plane’s door when a cold gust of wind whipped through and made my eyes water.

Brr!

Once inside the airport, I checked the weather widget on my phone. It reported that at that very moment, it was thirty degrees in El Paso.

Thirty. A three followed by a zero. That’s all you get. Just 30 small degrees.

I’d just come from a connecting flight in San Diego where it was positively tropical.

Brr!

Today I’m at my best friend’s place somewhere in the rural land outside of Las Cruces. It was a frosty night and this morning I, like all of the animals they posses, am lingering close to their beautifully old fashioned source of heat, a wonderful, magical wood burning stove.



As I sit here, I am reminded of the many ways that life is easy peasy where I live now. I want heat, I work my thermostat and the heater kicks in.

Simple. No effort.

Today I have a great warmth in my heart (pun intended) for the curative powers of fire and the simply beauty of a wood burning stove.

As the fan behind the stove kicks in to send toasty air to all corners of the room, let me take you on a journey.

It takes a lot of work to make enough fire to heat a good sized home.

To start with, just building a fire takes the use of tools.

My goddaughters are expert fire builders. They start with this small hatchet, on the ground by the stove.



They use this to ease slivers off a log for kindling. That along with some bits of newspaper help get the flames started.

Then small logs are added. The logs, of course, come from here, the ubiquitous woodpile.



I remember well (and not especially fondly) the call for “Karen! Go get a load of wood for the fireplace.” Yeah, it’s *cold* out there. I didn’t wanna brave the cold and the spiders and the rasty roadrunner living in the woodpile to bring dirty splintery wood into the house.

But I did it because the payoff was hot chocolate in front of a fire (and the consequences too hefty to ignore).

A woodpile takes work. A lot of work.

Now here’s something you don’t see in the backyard of Bay Area homes…



(not to worry, it was not left that way, I laid the axe on a stump for photographic purposes)

Off to the side is a sledgehammer and a wedge for splitting logs.

And oh hey! A bucket of pecans!



Whoops, I digress.

Back to the wood splitting. My brother did the hard work of swinging the axe and sledge. My job was to take the newly split pieces of wood and pile them up in the corner.

This work was usually done in the heat of August or September. Bleah, who wants to think about fire in the summer?

But come December I was always glad we thought about fire in the summer.

And right now, I’m very, very grateful that my best friend, her husband and kids thought about fire during the summer.

Because me, two dogs and one chatty orange cat are relying on the heat.




Baby it’s cooooold outside! C’moooon Spring!



All photos by Karen Fayeth, taken with an iPhone and subject to a Creative Commons license. Details in the far right column of this blog.


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Unhinged

As you read this, I am somewhere overhead winging my way to the Great State of New Mexico. This is not so much a vacation as taking care of some personal business.

It’s a bit hard to leave seventy degree California for thirty degree New Mexico, you know? That said, as the weather works in my home state, by the end of my trip, it’s expected to be almost seventy in Las Cruces.

As a kid, I always did love that phenomenon of snow today, sixty eight and sunny tomorrow.

But right now, the day before my flight, all I can think about is…what am I going to eat?

I mean seriously, the green chile level in my blood stream is so low as to be critical.

This needs fixing the second I leap off the airplane.

I keep thinking of ALL the places and ALL the menu items I want to eat all in one big Cookie Monster-esque “ahm nom nom nom.”

If only I could unhinge my jaw the way my favorite blue monster does, then sweep in all the rellenos, enchiladas, carne adovada, and tacos al carbon I can get my arms around.

That would be great.

Of course, I’d qualify for extra baggage on my flight home.

Hoping to fit in reports from the road. Stay tuned!




With The Passage of Time

While toiling away at my desk job every day, I like to keep the day going by listening to the radio in the background.

Generally, I like to stream the oldies country station out of Albuquerque, channel 104.7. It is very comforting to hear familiar music mixed in with ads for local ABQ businesses. It’s also very perplexing for my coworkers, which is an added benefit.

This afternoon while crunching spreadsheets and lobbing emails over the wall, the circa 1969 song “Okie from Muskogee” came on the radio.

Now, as you know, I do love a Merle Haggard song.

For some reason today, instead of just mindlessly singing along, I listened in on the words.

It’s a pretty outdated song by many accounts, yet in some ways still feels relevant.

Take this, for example:

“We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy/
Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.”

Well, for one thing, long and shaggy hair is commonplace now. It’s actually mainstream.

For another, there’s not any hippies in SF these days. I don’t think the free-love folks from the sixties would even recognize the place anymore. Funny how scads of money tends to move the needle toward conservative, no matter where you are.

That said, that’s still my favorite line in the song. I sang it at the top of my lungs when I saw Merle in concert this summer. The absurdity of singing a line deriding San Francisco while being near San Francisco was just too delicious.

Then there’s this part that has always cracked me up:

“We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse/
And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all.”

So he’s singing about how being a square is a good thing. About having good clean fun. About waving the flag and being upright and just.

Oh and he’s also singing about drinking an illegal alcohol substance.

Marijuana? No. Moonshine? Just fine.

Am I the only one who finds that just a little…oh I don’t know…ironic?

Plus, I can guarangoddamntee you that Mr. Haggard has sampled of the green stuff. More than once. More than once today.

Merle has said he wrote “Okie from Muskogee” as a protest to the Vietnam protestors. He found them a little hard to take after he’d been released from San Quentin.

Oh wait. So the flag waving good clean fun guy was in prison?

Five different times, actually. Doesn’t that seem…uh…also ironic?

Which makes me remember that the whole song, while conservative and flag waving and a bit chiding in tone is really, actually, all done tongue in cheek.

It’s a bit of a ruse, and a well-done ruse. A Grammy winning poke at society.

And that’s where the title of this post comes into play. With the passage of time, The Hag starts to look a little less like a musical outlaw and a lot more like a musical genius.

Plus he helped me get through a really rough day. Thanks Hag.




Sometimes The Answer is Clear

Yesterday, when I saw that this week’s Theme Thursday was stairs, well, it didn’t take much for me to choose what to write about.

If yer talking New Mexico and yer talking stairs, then naturally…yer talking about Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe.

It is a stunningly beautiful and magical place.

For those unfamiliar, in the 1850’s the Loretto Chapel was being constructed, and when finished the Sisters of Loretto realized that, for whatever reason, no one planned a staircase to get from the floor of the church to the choir loft.

In addition, the chapel was made pretty small, so any staircase built would have to manage the impossibly small space.

The sisters were distraught at this situation and out of money for construction, so they prayed mightily about it. Legend has it that a man with carpentry skills arrived at the chapel and spent about six months creating an elaborate staircase that still stands today, the left without being paid.

The staircase is made from wood not native to the area, makes two full 360 degree turns with no center post for support, and uses only wood pegs, no nails or glue.

The chapel and the staircase have become busy tourist attractions and the chapel is also a very popular place to get married.

I’d hoped to be married there myself, but logistics were too difficult between California and New Mexico.

Enjoy a beautiful photo of the “miracle” staircase, one of my favorite destinations in the great State of New Mexico.



Loretto Chapel



Photo taken by user jfelderh and found at travel.webshots.com

Perhaps a Sunlamp Is Required

On this post-holiday rainy day, I reserve the right to be melancholy.

Holiday blues, weeping gray clouds, and general lethargy. Sure. It’s my prerogative.

I am loath to say the next seven words I’m about to say but…

I heard this great story on NPR.

You may not realize how pompous I think the people are who quote NPR. Now here I am committing the crime I rail against.

The story was of a musician named Shawn Camp who had a record set for release back in the year 1994.

Through a series of events, the record was shelved until recently. Camp met the new studio head at Reprise who gave Camp’s record a fresh listen and it was finally released in September of this year.

What’s got me going here, got me writing a whole blog post about this story, is one of Camp’s songs that they played on the air.

It was a beautifully written song about being at the funeral of his grandfather. For some reason, the words reminded me of the incredibly sad funeral I attended back in August.

Despite the passing of four months, I find I still grieve for my friend. I guess there’s still something left to grieve, because lately he’s been showing up in my dreams.

Listening to Shawn Camp’s song reminded me of a dream I had just last night.

It was me, and my friend, and we were dancing. Just a simple two-step, nothing fancy, but we danced and he was whole and healthy and grinning from ear to ear.

My best friend was there too, and before I was even done, she got the next dance with him. The three of us laughed like it was, well, 1994, and it was good.

Now, this dream was particularly odd because in real life, my friend wasn’t much of a dancer. Oh, he was long legged and tall, a perfect partner. But he had a farmer’s sensibilities and didn’t dance that much. He could, and did, but it wasn’t something he did a lot.

But there in my dream we danced. When I woke up, I remembered seeing my friend’s body laid out there in a casket inside the El Paso First Baptist Church.

The old Southern saying is “now, don’t he look natural?”

No, he didn’t look natural. In my dream smiling and laughing and giving me seventeen kinds of heck…that was natural.

I’ve always been pretty glad that at the end of the line for my dad, one afternoon when my mom had run into town for errands, my dad and I had a talk. It was uncomfortable and weird, but in that talk, a lot of things were said that needed to be said. I can happily say I have no unresolved issues there.

But with my dear friend, I have something unresolved. It niggles at the corners of my mind and sits on my chest when I have another dream in which he plays a cameo. I owed him an apology. I’d planned to deliver that apology when he came home from the surgery from which he never returned.

Perhaps in dreams I can find the way to lay my issues to rest, to lay down the burden I carry around, to feel at peace with the loss of my friend.

Or maybe we can just dance and forget about I’m sorries.

After my best friend is done (which may take awhile), I got the next waltz.

Cuz these Fat Babies were made for dancing

Photo by Karen Fayeth