June 23rd

I have been in New Mexico 5 months and 21 days. My husband has been here almost one month. We are officially living in New Mexico now, along with our pets and all our belongings. Every day I think of a new person or company I need to notify of our change of address, or some other detail of moving across the country that I need to take care of. I know people do this all the time, but it is HARD, and I have new found sympathy for anyone going through it. I am so thankful for the many friends who helped pack boxes, brought us dinner, wrote notes of encouragement, and also the people we paid large sums of money to who loaded the moving truck and hauled away junk . It was worth every penny.

When I think of our house in Tennessee and our farm, I get a rising sense of panic and grief and I have to tamp it down deep inside me. It is similar to the waves of almost hysteria I would feel after my mother died, when the reality of not being able to pick up the phone to call her felt too much to bear. This is a similar type of anxiety, but much more manageable, and also I am here by choice, and not by tragedy. But when I do think of our home there for so long and that I probably won’t see it again, I do get overwhelmed. I do not yet have a sense of this new land as “home”, and sometimes it feels very much like I could just fly off the face of this earth.

However, we do feel very happy. We love the new landscape, our tiny apartment, the cast of characters that rotate through our days. It is truly an amazing thing to be 53 years old and to be able to feel really and honestly like a whole, content and light- hearted person. It is not that I have wanted this my whole life and I am finally getting it. More that at different times of our life we want different things, and I am so grateful for this time and who I am now.

The farm here at Ojo is going well. The squash is blossoming, and the flowers are filled with honey bees, their heads covered in golden pollen. I am not allowed to keep bee hives here, but I have discovered three wild hives on the property. The cabbages are starting to come in, and the field is overflowing with lettuces of all kinds. The days have been hot, but there is no humidity and the constant breeze is so cooling it would make any Southerner let out a big cry of “Halleluiah!” I am working all the time, up with the sun and staying out until the light dims. Growing a new farm is intoxicating , especially as I let go of the stress I carried when running my own farm as a business and now learn to just have fun with it.

On Sunday nights the headgates from the Mother Acequia to the farm’s irrigation pond are opened, and Monday morning when I walk down to the farm from our apartment the sound of water trickling through the ditch is a beautiful song to my ears. In the early morning there are usually ravens foraging in the cover crop, the size of small dogs and strutting around with their chests puffed up.

We still do not know where we will end up - closer to Taos? South and East near Santa Fe? Taos is crunchy and loose, which we like. We were grocery shopping at the food co-op and a Leon Russell song came over the loudspeaker, and I felt a flood of belonging. When I was starting college, my father and I made the cross-country road trip to Arizona to deliver me to school, and took we took a detour through Taos. In the central plaza was parked a big tour bus with Leon Russel blazed on its side, and we hung around it for awhile wondering which old adobe building he was going to saunter out of. So hearing him sing in the grocery store felt somehow like a full circle moment in a silly, sentimental kind of way.

But it is all too soon to commit. It still feels like we have decision fatigue, and we are very comfortable living on the Ojo Mineral Springs property, so at this point we are really just taking our time and feeling into the days as they unfold. We have learned that we have to trust.