Mountain cool


happy face
A stunt pilot painted a happy face in the sky, but probably not for us.

Much of this week was spent in the cool Sangre de Christo mountains of New Mexico.  It started raining shortly after we arrived at the Shewberts’ cabin Tuesday and rained most of the afternoon.  No sooner had we arrived than Phyllis got a call from her sister telling her that her husband was unresponsive.  Gary and Phyllis left almost immediately and drove to Angel Fire where Phyllis’s sister and brother-in-law have their cabin.  The rest of the time we were there they travelled back and forth between their cabin in Red River and the hospital in Santa Fe where the brother-in-law had been taken.  We left Friday and the last we heard their brother-in-law’s condition was deteriorating. 

Most of our time in Red River was spent reading but we did visit the fish hatchery which is not far from Red River.  I’d wanted to do that for a while and it was interesting enough.  They had some really large trout in the tanks, as you can imagine.  In the viewing area of the building that houses the fish when they are very small and which didn’t have any because it was the wrong time of the year we saw a black widow spider in a window.  There was also a male of the species, something we had never seen before.  It was much smaller and brownish and was trying to gain favor but the female was playing hard-to-get.  We tried to warn the male but it paid us no mind.

We’re dry enough now that a rain, even a good one, say an inch or so, wouldn’t be much help.  Better than nothing but not likely to make much difference.  No, what we need is a wet spell, a period of wet weather that puts moisture deep into the soil where plants can drink deeply and rebuild their energy.  We try to put trees on little green islands in the hopes they survive.  It’s a full-time job.