(ada mae and i walking by an arizona "lake" (aka mud puddle).

16.december.2006

it’s saturday evening and it’s fixin’ to snow. the sky is heavy with anticipation: white and low.

it’s just me and dogs tonight. meg is in vermont and kari and loren are on their way home from florida. the pups are all cuddled into one oddly shaped fur continent – happy and sleepy after a long walk and dinner. i have holiday cards scattered around me, rubber cement and red paper warming up this living room. i cleaned my little home-centered-cancer heart out today and i am basking in the fruits of it – no fisher hair on the couches, i mopped the muddy paw prints off the kitchen floor, i even gave little ada mae a bath - she is all fresh and dewy, curled up between the old boy dogs.

tonight is the first night that i’ve been alone in awhile. and being alone in this concrete block house feels like home. that’s nice. real nice. i feel proud of this cozy content feeling that is surrounding me. we moved out here to arizona at the end of july and it’s already 6 days ‘til winter. i can’t believe that i’ve survived this long on this thin dry air. i haven’t stopped feeling breathless when i look up at the mountains though….they truly are holy. even if everything crumbled around us out here (which it hasn't) – i would be grateful for the chance to live at the feet of the san francisco peaks.

yesterday i spent my day down in phoenix – a desert city. 5 million people aren’t supposed to live in the middle of sand and cacti. (what are they drinking?) as we drove down into the thick of it at 6 in the morning, we could see the dirty weight of the smog over the valley – it’s been a high pollution week – the elderly and the young aren’t supposed to spend too much time outside. driving through the exhaust on the freeways, all my muscles turned into knotted ropes of nervous – there is no southern hospitality on these highways. we got to see a fiery sunrise on the way down though - it looked like the rocks were on fire.

on my way home, after dropping meg of at the airport, i saw 12 shooting stars. the stars out here are so bright, so deep, it’s distracting. i kept seeing skid marks veering off the road and i couldn’t help but think they probably wrecked because of the stars. i felt like i would - if i even tired to glance at the dark night sky full of it’s milky way. so i just followed the yellow line home from the 1,000 foot valley floor to the 7,000 foot mountain highlands.

and now the dogs and i are in hibernation mode. tomorrow we will play in the snow (if it comes) and i will cook soup and bake bread.

lots of love and warm blankets.

rose

More Canyon photos. In my defense the sun was shining in my face.

On Friday, Rose, Gen, Gen's co-worker Joy, Jasmine, and I went to the Grand Canyon. Mostly, we all imagined what it would have been like to stumble upon the canyon back in the day; before the National Geographic IMAX theatre and the Grand Canyon "village." We also talked a lot about mortality, vertigo, and how you could just jump off into the depths...

Loving my evenings with the dogs....

On most evenings when I get home from work I am greated by a mass of tail wagging furry joy. Fisher and Darwin have been a wonderful welcoming committee since we arrived in Flagstaff. They are our buddies. They love us and they are happy when we get home. And this makes a big difference when you are brand-spankin' new in a place. On nights when Meg has class, I would take the boys on a run on the trails behind our neighborhood, climbing over and under fences and racing each other through fields of sunflowers (I know this sounds
ridiculous, but there really were fields of sundflowers until it got cold...). On nights when Meg didn't have class, all four of us would go on walks on the trails. A good way to end a day spent in an office or writing papers.

And now we have the puppy and her sweet wrinkled eyes. Our walk schedule has shifted a bit. I get up early so I have time to take her on a walk before I go to work and if no one else is at home, I come home for lunch to take Addy on another walk. Tonight when I got home, all three of the dogs were ready to go, so I tried the 3 dog walk.... It was comical. We were a mass of tangled leashes trying to make our way down the street. Coordinating pit stops was impossible. When we passed another dog who wanted to be friends, I thought someone might get strangled, but we all made it to the woods in our respective pieces. I let the older dogs off their leashes so they could run and wear themselves out a bit. The sun was going down and the horizon was bright red through the Ponderosa Pines. Amazing. We all ran home in the dark and arrived happy and panting. Now all 3 pooches are asleep at my feet. This is a good life.

AdaMae/Atlas



















Last week we drove up to the ski mtn to watch the sunset...











rose bundled up with the sunset....














more puppy shots....

















fisher was a butterfly for halloween.
very dignified.

these pictures are somewhat backwards....
meg and i at the top of the mountain/hill we climbed.













fisher, very worn out, after the climb to the top.


















woods outside of Flagstaff on our way to hike up a mountain....
















where is the lizard?

















rose regulating the wild west.












view on our hike up the mountain...

















rose and fisher walking up the mountain (hill).

It's Saturday morning and Loren (roommate) and I and the dogs are pooching in the living room listening to npr. I was looking back at what we've put up on the blog so far and realizing that we don't have any pictures of our house up...so here are some from our living room and kitchen. We're hoping to paint sometime soon and brighten up the white walls a bit, maybe when Meg, the painter of the house, is on winter break from school....

The big news in our lives is that we have a new puppy! Last weekend we visited the shelther and fell in love with a little pup who was found on
the rez with her sister. She is the funniest looking dog I've ever seen. Supposedly she is a
great dane/shar-pei mix. She has the ears and long legs of a great dane and a couple of shar-pei wrinkles thrown in for good measure, but most folks seem to think she looks like a hyena/dingo/egyptian dog. She is a sweet heart though, a regular cuddle bucket. Fisher and Darwin aren't quite sure how they feel about her yet though, especially Fisher, who at 97 lbs, still considers himself the baby of the household. We got them all kong bones today though to try to disapate the canine jealousy.... We'll try to get pictures of little Atlas/Ada Mae = "Addy" up in the next couple of days.

My work has been keeping me pretty busy the past few weeks. We put on a conference for our child care providers in Navajo and Apache Counties and have been doing outreach presentations all over northern Arizona. Last week I rented a mini-van and checked out a bunch of books-on-tape from the library and procceeded to drive about 1,400 miles throughout the week. It's a lot of driving, but pretty amazing to get out and about and explore small towns around Flagstaff. Once you get out of the mountains, down to 4,000 feet, it's mostly flat scrub-land, not quite desert, but full of sage brush and bone-dry creek beds. I've seen quite
a few cayotes, a bunch of deer, and a handfull of flattened snakes on the road. It's stark. It's empty. It's big sky. It's beautiful and a lonely sort of way. It almost gives me vertigo, or almost an opposite of clastrophobia, compared to the closeness of the big San Francisco peaks around Flagstaff.

these photos are from a hike i (rose) took on labor day. it was only about 3 miles to the top, but it took me 2 hours and i felt like i was going to fall off the mountain. i was (and am) still getting used to the altitude and it was a 2,800 ft climb. cold and windy on the top.














lots of pretty flowers














this is a random picture of fisher (on the left) and darwin out in our front yard with all the house plants.













the view from almost at the top, when the scrub switched to aspens.

Liberally, this our backyard. If you walk three block east from our house you happen upon part of the urban trail system in Flagstaff.
There are trails all over the city. We had a great walk on Saturday afternoon. Can you think of three reasons not to visit?

It is sad when trees die, but they are so beautiful in their past age.

In no particular order- these are pictures from the highway, Sedona, below where the fires were, a river we visited, and the sunset from ole interstate 40 just yesterday. It is beautiful here. Right now Rose is making a collage, Kari fell asleep on the couch, and I feel so content.

When you have no friends you must be creative. We decide to play cards with hats and dark glasses. I wish a great story came out of this but it didn't. Rose won. She is very good at Rummy.

DOGS! Darwin is the Cattledog and brains of the operation. Fisher is part lab/St. Bernard. I love Fisher. He is big, hairy, and hungry. In the picture above, Fisher eventually pushed Darwin off the entire backseat- he was left to curl up on the floor behind Rose's seat.

This is me and the boys hanging out front of our house.

There were these two crows that guarded the entry way to a path where one could explore the petrified wood. You could reach down and grab a handful of shattered pieces of wood, and small crystal like pieces. I wanted to stuff them into my pocket to fufill a childhood pursuit- I used to take a hammer out into my gravel driveway and split open the gravel looking for crystals. This was a hopeless endeavor, and ultimately I settled for a rock tumbler, which banished me to the basement (as one can imagine the sound of rocks banging around for hours). I put it all back.

Above is a bridge that was discovered here in the 1800's. At this spot there was a silence, a stillness that I have never experienced in my entire life. It felt soundproof. Then a family in an R.V. and a motorcycle pulled up. But for a moment...

Ahh...the beloved Budge parked at the Arizona welcome center. Who better to mark the first pictures of Arizona then the GMC? Below is our detour through the National Petrified Forest. An amazing park, and possibly the closest any of us will come to an experience akin to visiting another planet. I am pretty sure we saw a brontosaurus.