An Enchanted Easter

My family will tell you I have a habit, and I wonder if they would say annoying habit, of always saying, “If you had told me last year that I would be (fill in the blank) this year, I wouldn’t have believed it”.  And so, a few days ago, I found myself saying “ If you had told me last Easter that next Easter, I would be singing “Resucito” in the 300 yr. old, San Felipe de Neri church in the center of Old Town Albuquerque, I wouldn’t have believed it. But, there we were, singing and exulting and hardly feeling that some 25 yrs. had passed since we had spent three wonderful years, living here and letting the magic of the Southwest sink into our bones.

 

I’m writing this at the end of an “enchanting” week, just as the NM license plate promised.  My husband and I, two out of three daughters, and a good-natured beau, spent a high-speed week taking in everything we had loved in NM in the past: the Indian pueblos, with a favorite being Acoma that sits atop a 357 ft. mesa, hiking to hot springs in the Jemez mountains, scrambling over lava tubes near Grants, NM and just being enthralled by the beauty of it all.

The bulk of our week, however, was spent in Taos, where every view is simply breathtaking. I can’t think of anywhere else that feels so completely like one of those 360-degree movie experiences where beauty is coming at you from every angle.  When you are in the bowl of Taos, mountains are always on the outer edges, the clouds and sky change minute by minute and it is just non-stop stunning. Clouds that gathered in masses over the mountains, rain that fell in sheets in the distance, blue, blue, NM skies filling in the center and on the breeze the smell of aromatic desert plants plus the spring singing of whatever birds topped the sage. Glorious! I used to nurture a fantasy that when I retired, I would spend half the year by the sea in New England and half the year in the mountains of New Mexico and this visit surely rekindled that dream.

It is paradise for a naturalist; so many places to hike, so many tracks to see, bless the soft lava sand and enough space through the sage that you can walk easily where the jackrabbit and coyote walk.  We took a 3 hr. trail ride up into the Sangre de Cristo mountains following elk trails and their huge teeth marks where on so many of the aspens, bear markings too, for the thin bark of the aspen is a perfect writing tablet.

 Prairie dogs abound in the lower valleys, alternately sitting bolt upright, then diving into their burrows when we approached.  I wish I could have been observant enough to see the “prairie dog kiss” where they greet each other touching noses in what looks like a kiss but is really a sniff, and if you aren’t wearing the signature cologne of their town then watch out, you will be summarily dismissed.

Magpies were omnipresent in the villages near people and ravens swooped over pueblos.  I am a big fan of Paul Goble and his beautifully illustrated children’s books, “The Girl who Loved Wild Horses” etc. and ravens are always diving about on the pages and here they were, illustrations come to life.   

We hiked a high mountain trail in hopes to see hoary marmots but the snow was, as we found out whenever we stepped in a less packed-down spot, up to our hips, so although we saw their holes tunneled up from the snow, their tracks and the bushes they had been nibbling, we never saw them.  But we have in the past and if ever there was a West Coast version of our East Coast groundhog, they are it

Clearly I could go on and on and bore my audience just as overzealous slide shows did in the past. Perhaps the bottom line of all of this is that you simply never know what’s coming down the pike, for good or ill but when it is good, exalt in it.  I always told my “ladies”, my Wild Women of Weds, to get fully excited when they saw something, don’t hold back, for you may never see such a thing again.   Whether it is a flock of ravens swooping over craggy mountains, or a suburban robin pulling up a worm, it is all worthy of our enthusiastic appreciation for being at the right place at the right time to see it.  And who knows what you might see tomorrow, wherever you are.

There always exits the possibility it will be something grand.

 “Resucito” everyone, He is Risen; life is a gift.  Open the present you have been given and daily look for glory; it honestly is around you everywhere.