Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind. 

Shadows Roll In

Up the green foothills

the South wind pushes the clouds

in a shadow tide. 

On a windy autumn afternoon, masses of clouds roll across the Valley, darkening the plains and flooding the roads with shadows. The shadow wave moves over the Blanca Massif; the clouds will hover over the peaks all night and leave a dusting of snow by morning. 

I watch the wave of darkness roll towards me as I jog down the road. I wait for the moment when the wave will overtake me the way I used to wait for the waves of the Pacific to fill my mouth and nostrils with salt and the taste of seaweed when I was a little girl. 

The months go by quickly. It's already November. The little pile of firewood that was left from last winter is already dwindling; we've started lighting up the wood stove at night. The clouds roll fast. The shadows come in. I walk and jog and stretch to keep my body as straight and supple as I can, but at times I already feel the pull of the earth below my feet. 

Autumn Weeds

Dry weed bracts glitter

distracting the downturned eye; 

October sunrise. 

Gravel

Sifting damp gravel

over a red wheelbarrow

I smell last week's rain. 

This pile of gravel is our latest Sisyphean project; we have to sift through it to remove the dirt. I like big, apparently insurmountable projects like this. I spent over an hour shoveling and sifting today, burying my fingers in the damp soil as I spread the stones across the sieve that Eric made. He constructed the sieve by nailing a piece of mesh to an antique window frame. We sift the dirt out into the wheelbarrow, then haul the soil over to a ridge we're creating to defend our struggling flowerbed against rabbits. The gravel will fill the trenches that will form the foundation of the strawbale addition to the house. The addition is intended to be a mudroom, but it will also provide extra insulation against the winter wind.

I can't believe winter is on the way already. The sooner we fill up the trenches and finish the addition, the warmer we'll be when the winter winds start in earnest.

Sublimation

The coyotes glide

below the dry chamiso --

my forgotten fears. 

Clouds without Rain

Four or five raindrops.

Thunderheads darken the mountain,

hover . . . and move on.

One Sunflower

Like a tiny hand

a single flower's shadow

spreads across the dust.