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Originally posted by piqué:

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I lived there in a 500-year-old house for a summer in the mid-70s. Recently, the owner of that house agreed to sell it to me.

hm. looking for a caretaker? sounds like a great place to write a novel.

From the moment I first set foot there, I've coveted it. For like 35 years. I quite accidentally ran into the owner when I ran out for last-minute brussel sprouts last Thanksgiving. Amid our happy reunion talk, I just had to ask about the house and he mentioned that he had been having thoughts of selling it now that his wife is dead and sons grown and dispersed over the planet. I told him then and there that I wanted it and he agreed that I should have it and that he'd love that because he could then enjoy it a week or two out of the year, trading the privilege I've enjoyed myself through his generous hospitality.

They'd commissioned me to paint that landscape that summer in '76, including the house, which had just then been restored by a 98-year-old stone mason. That painting is my favorite of any I ever did, mostly because it hangs beside an Andrew Wyeth, but also because it was done entirely in-the-field, sitting among the cactus and the red ants. Wyeth's is the same landscape in winter, done when he was in college, during a visit to the house for winter skiing with them decades earlier. Mine was the landscape in summer, done while I was also in college. The matched pair hangs in a fine Swiss chalet where the family spends most of their time.

It *is* the place I want to retire to ultimately, both to write and to paint. Most people would abhor the isolation but I'm such a homebody and I have become such a hermit by habit I think I'd be quite at home in that environment.

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It *is* the place I want to retire to ultimately, both to write and to paint. Most people would abhor the isolation but I'm such a homebody and I have become such a hermit by habit I think I'd be quite at home in that environment.

rick, i swear, sometimes i think we were separated at birth.

Elena, I shared some of your story with my mother, she was very interested to hear about it.

She went to Cuba in Jan 2002 (just weeks before the Guantánamo detention camp was opened apparently!) She said when she went, laws from the Clinton administration were still in place, and she went in a government approved educational capacity. (So she flew directly to Cuba from the US). She took a group of students (university) and part of their trip was to visit facilities for health and other needs for women and children. (my mother's specialty is public policy and esp with regards to policies that effect women.)

Anyway, she said she was mainly in Havana, but also went to Santiago De Cuba (sp?).

I am embarassed that I didn't remember those details (she forgave me for forgetting!) But I do remember her photos, I wish I could share them here. Unfortunately, this was pre-digital camera for her, and they are all actually printed out photos.

Elena,
Thank you for the stories and the pictures. Wonderful

Chickgrand,
Pictures?

Here's the plan-- I go with Elena to Cuba to gather pictures and interesting anecdotes, and of course to play with La Chiquita. Then I head off to Rick's retreat where pique and I will write our best-selling novels--mine about Cuba.

Elena, thanks for the pics. Like many, I hadn't realized (or remembered) that your parents were Cuban. Reading your post was fascinating.

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Originally posted by CHAS:
Chickgrand,
Pictures?

I *do* have a *lot* of pictures. Unfortunately, they're all Kodachrome slides. (I only ever use Kodachrome if I'm serious about documenting such a place.) While I have a couple of scanners and one of them has slide capability, I'm not satisfied with the results, compared to the kind of results I got with a purpose-made slide scanning device I used to use in my office for doing publishing-quality images for various publications. The only two photos of myself I've ever liked are in that set--one where I'm photographed in a huge field of wildflowers with wonderful mountains in the background, and another where I ignored my vertigo to be photographed sitting on the ruins of the wall of an old mountaintop castle with my legs hanging over a 90-degree vertical 1-mile drop. The one in that set of Kodachrome I like most, though, is the portrait of the 98-year-old stone mason, Pierro Salinas. I'd always intended to do a portrait of him working and it only occurred to me last night that I really ought to have put him working in that painting I did in '76 when I painted the landscape that featured the house, as he was then finishing his work while I painted.

I do have great slides of the house. If I get them scanned in decent quality, I'll post them sometime. Otherwise, pics will wait till I get out there next with one of my half-dozen digital cameras.

The house is a rambling affair of odd large rooms with several incongruous additions over its long history (not nearly as fine as the house Elena showed in Cuba, though similar.) Sits about 20 feet from a sheer cliff that looks straight down into the river a couple of hundred feet below, the last house on a narrow meandering lane. It has a wide, covered stone terrace that wraps all the way around. The walls are adobe-covered stone, about two feet thick, with tall, narrow windows. The ceilings are all viga-beamed with rough-hewn logs. Every room has one of those egg-shaped NM-style fireplaces in at least one corner, as that's the primary source of winter heat. (Summer needs no AC as the adobe construction is adequate.) One wing of the house has been left in ruins, with only the exterior walls intact. I like it that way and have no intention of restoring that wing as it adds to its charm and displays just how really old the place is. I like those unrestored spaces with their perfect empty windows and doorways and cactus growing where floors used to be. Ultimately, I'll probably lay some stone for flooring and use them like an inner courtyard. (Maybe convert one to an observatory.)

hm. i think you need to start an artist's colony there.

Oh, never mind the tent city on RickZ's lawn, I am SO at the artist's colony if I get admitted.

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Originally posted by piqué:
hm. i think you need to start an artist's colony there.

I think it'd be a good thing to do. There's lots of little enclaves of artists throughout NM and I particularly like that aspect of the place. I like stopping for an ice cream cone at some backwoods parlor to poke around on the old piano and finding the guy gnawing on a sherbet beside me is a broadway producer with nothing more on his mind than wandering the wilderness same as I am. Once, while climbing up a mountain there during a vacation "to get away from *everything*" by hiking several days into the wilderness, I passed a fellow writer from my own newspaper. We stopped at about 14,000 feet to chat. Later that same week when my car broke down in the middle of nowhere with a dead water pump, I walked through a sandstorm to the only light I could see in the dusty night, hoping to use a phone or at least get a jug of water. When I knocked, it was Georgia O'Keefe who answered and gave me water enough to get a few hundred miles home. As one who made his first dollar selling oil paintings, I felt humbled and honored to even set foot in her home. (Still, when I got a little further up the road and saw that I could have stopped at Greer Garson's house instead, I realized my luck wasn't *that* good. If I hadn't been young and stupid, I'd have stopped and begged for *more* water.) And the writer in me appreciated being able to set foot in D. H. Lawrence's room still preserved with his things at the La Fonda Hotel.

Lots of interesting people have homes there, even those who are now ghosts.

Someone should tell me to quit procrastinating by reading and posting here and get my ass in gear to start my taxes.

rick, you are a celebrity magnet. only you could be lost in a dust storm and wander into georgia o'keefe!

now, about this artist's colony, wtf members get priority on the applications, yes?

and there will be a grand piano or two around for us to play?

Keeping those old cars going is probably cheaper than what it costs to work on new ones - or buy them! Old cars were easy to work on. I could probably even learn it. No computers, no diode thingy jiggies - just mechanical stuffs.

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Originally posted by ChickGrand:
Someone should tell me to quit procrastinating by reading and posting here and get my ass in gear to start my taxes.

Get your ass in gear and start your taxes! We'll be here for you when you get back. Go!

I think WTF members would get priority. We're already friends, no? I think it'd be fun to get together to paint and play. It's going to be a while before I move myself out there (I don't intend to move that way till my parents are dead and I'm not hurrying that, but when it's fact, I'll have no reason to remain here). But as soon as they're gone, the Chickering will make one last move, along with me. I'm already dreading the bill on that move as the road is all hair-pin and one lane with sheer cliffs dropping on one side. It takes several hours to travel the last 30-mile stretch. The scariest it ever got was one night when I did that stretch at 2 a.m. in driving rain and met an old 40s-era bobtail truck coming the other way carrying fruit from the communal orchard out to market. I was in the largest Cadillac ever built and was happy my passengers were fast asleep as I crowded the cliff edge while the truck crowded the rock wall so we could inch past. The alternative was one of us reversing about 15 miles. I didn't get out and look, but I'd bet my righthand tires were barely on the road.

It really *is* a wonderful place. What I love most is going out in the cool of a desert night and lying in the warmth of the sand to watch the moon rise blood red over the mesa, while listening to the Pecos rippling below, accompanied by the ever-present sound of Basque Spanish voices singing with guitar in their homes off in the distance. No traffic. No machines. Nothing louder than those singing voices. Everything nearly as silent as the wings of the bats flying so close you can feel their body warmth while they pick off the mosquitos that would otherwise dine on you, close but never touching, seeming almost respectful.

The valley there is perfect for good hiking. Lots of natural caves in the mesa to explore, along with ancient man-made grottos. Pinion pine and juniper on the tops of the mesa, adding their scent to the wildflowers.

Reminds me a great deal of the sorts of places Dali painted from his youth in Spain around Cadaques.

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Originally posted by Daniel:

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Originally posted by ChickGrand:
Someone should tell me to quit procrastinating by reading and posting here and get my ass in gear to start my taxes.

Get your ass in gear and start your taxes! We'll be here for you when you get back. Go!

I find myself thinking, "This is only the FOURTEETH. You COULD do them tomorrow night."