I have been thinking about New Mexico every day since my friend Tony, a resident, visited for the Reunion. He brought me two books as gifts and one of those books, The Walk by William deBuys, has helped me remember my time there — two visits, maybe 3 weeks altogether out of 68 years. My wife spent an additional 2 weeks near Santa Fe painting.
We have no plans to move now as we once did, but then moving has ceased to be the point. New Mexico is something else for me other than residency. Instead, it is a shape, perhaps even a condition, but not an oversimplified sign. There is nothing of semiotics about it. It is neither a metaphor for freedom or for geographic change.
This idea of New Mexico finds an example in Georgia O’Keefe’s home at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, a U shaped adobe on a ridge which she rebuilt and where she lived and worked from the 1930’s until a few years before her death in 1986. 
Ghost Ranch is open to the land, spare in its furnishings, allowing of reflection and of work. It is a place where Spanish was spoken often and one built by Spanish hands, and thus a reminder of how knowing another language offers an entirely new universe of meaning, one that I never took up, a regret I carry.
New Mexico has become a way of thinking about the time I have left, a prism that receives light, slows it down, sends it out at a greater speed. New Mexico bends light into colors. It has become another way of ‘seeing’ a way of living with what moves on the other side of windows instead of what lies within screens. It is shelves filled with bones, nests, stones, shells, feathers, flowers, seeds, the ‘found objects’ discovered on walks, the ones you find because you have been paying attention. Maybe that is what I am after, a winnowing of distractions, a discipline — here is how one might pay attention to what is real, here is how one might find the treasure that stays treasure. 
Pennsylvania is entering its lush cooling days of breezes and ample rain and big clouds moving above this wet land of trees and streams, especially of trees, trees everywhere, never stopping, filling up every perspective. I love these days and those trees and these green places, and New Mexico is its opposite, a dry landscape of rocks, mesquite, creosote bushes, of trees clustered only near water, and of a sun that fills every perspective. Still, it feels like a home I might have had and now, also, a state of being I might venture to inhabit even though it is 1800 miles distant.
