Midday, and it’s already just shy of sixty degrees.
It was warm this morning, too: Walking out onto the deck with the sun not yet very high in the sky, it felt like early May, not the opening days of February. The buds on the aspens, which began forming catkins before the old year was out, now show a profusion of the fuzzy white tips. It’s not merely possible to believe that spring is here early; despite the rapidly-disappearing snow on the ground, it’s impossible to believe that this is still winter.
I never actually took a yardstick out to measure the amount of snow we got last week, but it was apparently more than we thought, because there’s still plenty of ground cover yet today, albeit with rich brown earth showing through everywhere. The wholly bare places are where Wings plowed, or where dogs and elk have trod well-worn paths, but the spaces between still show anything from a dusting to some four inches in the more shadowed areas. On the north side of the hay barn where the accumulations on the roof fell onto the ground, a place always in shadow, the long extended pile of fallen snow remains a foot high or more.
Despite the dangerously warm temperatures, these are good developments. Presumably it’s a product, too, of the deep cold at night, one reinforced by the north and northeasterly winds that seem to have become a part of the dark hours now [and, indeed, have just begun to rise again in the last half-hour or so, a drastic departure from the southwesterly winds of spring here]. The earth was, fortunately, not so dry as to be unable to absorb the moisture, and it appears that we will not be plagued by as much mud as we anticipated.
Instead, the soil is a rich dark brown, healthy-looking and holding out hope for planting in late spring.
It’s been, historically, one of the great gifts of this place: good earth, soil a mix of dirt and rich clay, perfect for nurturing plant life.
And for nurturing human life, too.
This is the oldest continuously-inhabited place on this land mass. That alone would be impressive enough, but it’s not just that it’s been continuous; it’s that such habitation has existed for the whole of that time in homes as permanent structures. The old village of the Pueblo is built of multi-story homes, the continent’s first “skyscrapers,” that have been lived in in their current form for more than a thousand years and counting.
Wings’s own roots belong to what’s known as North House, the iconic five-story structure around which most popular-culture images of the Pueblo tend to be built. It’s an architectural marvel, still inhabited today. Some families and elders continue to live daily in the old way, in these traditional family homes [which feature no electricity and no running water, with only fireplaces, woodstoves, or propane heaters in winter]. Most, of course, live outside the old walls in more modern homes, with the more usual amenities, but they, too, use their old village homes for specific occasions and events.
In the image above that forms the focus of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, Wings has captured one small central portion of North House, from a perspective that shows the full height of its many stories. It’s an image that he shot in digital format, which, given the remnant snow along the rooflines, means that it could have been shot no earlier than the end of 2006, and no later than very early 2008. Given other circumstances, though, I think it’s safe to place it probably around late March of 2007, after the Pueblo’s re-opening from its winter ceremonial closure, but before the trees had begun to bud out; after the pave of the snow had begun to slow and small warming trends melted it more rapidly, but before winter was anywhere near done with the land.
And for a land of such harsh extremes as this, an alpine desert at an elevation of eight thousand feet where highs can reach the century mark and lows, actual temperatures [not wind chills] have been known to plunge to forty degrees below zero? These homes of adobe, made of the local clay with extraordinary insulating properties, are built of a sheltering earth indeed.
If you’ve ever visited the Pueblo, particularly in summer, you’ll know that however hot the day outside beneath the sun’s relentless glare, the moment you step over the threshold into one of the old homes’ shadowed interior, the temperature instantly drops a good twenty degrees. Unless yo’ve visited in winter, you’ll be less familiar with its ability to conduct heat in winter, but we know its energy efficiency intimately. It’s why we built our home of adobe, and it is, without question, the warmest place in which I’ve ever lived.
As I write, the lenticular clouds behind the peaks extend themselves a little more; the drought-deepening contrails diffuse themselves across the sky, shielding much of the blue from sight; and the snow melts that little bit more beneath the steady gaze of Father Sun. And the earth under that white blanket, increasingly threadbare, shows itself, rich and abundant.
In this place, ours is a sheltering earth, one that nurtures and sustain, houses and protects. But it needs our protection in return.
In a world on fire now, seemingly in every conceivable context, this is one small thing we can do to repair, to reclaim, to renew, to heal.
~ Aji
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