Santa Fe was enduringly—endearingly—itself. This is my favorite season there, between the time of blowing tumbleweeds that catch on chain-link fences like bony fish in a net and the time of yellow-hearted roses, Peace, that were always full-opened for my birthday at the true beginning of summer, in June. It seemed a lesser lilac year, but there were still cascades of them around town, evokative of springs gone by, of rope swings over the river with water still in it, recent snow melt, not yet run dry. The time of playhouses and track, the running broad-jump, of Gormley’s Grocery on Canyon Road where we stopped after school, bicycling home. And one year, making a movie in a distant canyon with a small adobe church, caught with my classmates in the unexpected rain, the sky bruised dark as plums against the mountains as we waited it out inside—one of those turning points that marked me.
After, the moments when I took stock were in winter, at the darkest period of the year, but then spring changed me utterly, thawed me, left me longing for what was too far ahead. And Santa Fe conspired with its lilacs and its budding trees to coax me on. Birthplace, and place of annual rebirth.
image: Christie B. Cochrell, Green Gate, Santa Fe
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