Grace

New Year’s afternoon in Santa Fe: most shops surprisingly open, the Cathedral doors just closed. We park by the public library and walk to the Plaza, though not under the portal of the Palace of the Governors where silver and turquoise is laid out for sale on woven Native blankets. We go into La Fonda, the old railway hotel, with its dark polished flagstone floors, the bar where newspapermen met and drank martinis or margaritas, the inner lightwell set off by painted glass windows that is the restaurant, and behind that the leather couches and enormous fireplace I remember from when I worked that winter for the court reporters, after college and before coming back to California, on icy days a smouldering piñon log giving out warmth. The newsstand’s still in the lobby where you can get books by Donald Hamilton, Oliver Lafarge, Tony Hillerman—the Santa Fe writers whose children I went to school with, or who I almost invited to my parents’ 40^th anniversary party; who I’d once thought to join.

There in the shop we find a perfect cup, tomato red, painted inside and out with very Santa Fe flowers—and on the red saucer (really a spoon rest), something like the hollyhocks that grow so tall and straight and proud along coyote fences, the peeling rough wood posts of my childhood. It has a yellow florette where the handle meets the rim, and is too lovely to resist: a cup I’ll treasure for these regenerative moments of grace before the sun is gone again into the winter dark.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Red Cup