Wildfires in New Mexico are Changing My Life

Sweet dreams of “Art on the Mesa” are feeling quite wobbly now. That mesa is in the northeast section of the state and right now is in very close proximity to a Huge Notorious blaze that is galloping across high desert and canyon and butte and mountain top. Across badly parched dry dry fields and water-starved forests, the hungry fire eats thousands of acres while the wind dances in all different directions setting hundreds of buildings on terminal last moments of hell personified.

Our farmhouse and barn have trusted men watching and digging and watering as best they can to redirect hellfire away from many places like ours …places with what we’re very recently homebases for families and farm animals, crops recently sown, with elaborate landwork done to receive any drops of moisture and somehow deliver it to seed beds.

We left with a couple of cars full of essentials and with very ambivalent feelings of fear and gratitude mixed. We left behind a fine house designed 57+ years ago to be ecologically sound and kind to the soil and air. What history that house has witnessed! What lifetimes of precious memories there, not to mention rare rugs and antique furniture and collections of so many years of travel and homely enterprise!

And up on the mesa, near beautiful and historical buildings, is the one which holds a large collection of my paintings and carvings. The summerhouse.!

Will it still be there when we return? All that dear stuff? We hope so. But, you know…we didn’t move ALL the stuff. W and I are at a place where “stuff” has begun to be moot! We are at a place where we are ready to lighten our loads of earthly goods, and give ourselves some quiet and simple time.

Watching by internet and phone calls, we are safe because of a secondary place that was available. So many evacuees are camped…have been camped for weeks…in school auditoriums or lunchrooms. We know we are extraordinarily lucky. If friends need a roof and shelter, they know they can come here.

Thinking of “The Home-less.”. Well an awful lot of people in this state are suddenly newly homeless.

Sobering to the soul. Numbing to the mind. Evoking seriously urgent prayers.

Susan G Holland (c) May 2022 New Mexico