Widows

I know the wooden widows.

With their silvered backs to the mountain

they wait.

These posts mark the site of a ranch that has vanished. The stones that lined the foundation of the house still exist, but the walls have fallen away, and the barbed wire of the corrals is warped and rusted. These posts line the road that leads to the highway. On my early morning drive to work, I used to silently greet the posts, especially the one above, which I called "the Widow." I envied her unmoving solitude, her stoic stance against the hard Northern wind.

When I worked at a nursing home about 30 miles from here, one of the elderly residents told me that a rancher had hired him years ago to graze cattle out in Blanca Flats, but there wasn't enough vegetation for the livestock to eat. Ironically, the disappearance of edible vegetation and the thinness of the soil may be caused partly by the lack of grazing -- the symbiosis between livestock and the land has been broken. The land grows increasingly dry, the brush more sparse. The old irrigation ditches are parched seams, and the sheep trails have faded to gray threads. Space and silence are our bumper crops now.