The last day of meteorological summer.
It’s hard to know how to feel. In some ways, it’s as though we had no summer; drought began bringing autumnal changes to the land back in June. That, of course, doesn’t even acknowledge the myriad quotidian ways in which summer never arrived at all: maples persistently red; red willows refusing to leaf at all; and, of course, the lack of anything remotely approaching a real monsoon season. And yet the heat was, at times, nearly unbearable. It’s not often we reach the century mark here, but this season managed it on more than one occasion.
Add into all of this the forced alterations to daily life and seasonal markers courtesy of a colonial pandemic still willfully, deliberately uncontrolled, and the knowledge that tomorrow is September first seems anticlimactic, to put it mildly. Statewide, there has been no Indian Market; there will be no state fair and no balloon fiesta, no Zozobra in Santa Fe and none of the other cultural touchstones of fall. Here, there will, for the first time in living memory, be no Feast of San Geronimo, as the Pueblo takes the pandemic risk far more seriously than the colonial world outside its walls. It does not mean that there will be no marking of it on the individual level, but for the moment, cultural norms are perforce held in abeyance for the specific purpose of protecting that culture, and more fundamentally, its people.
These are days that require strength of us all.
And yet, with all that has been so terrible all these months, there is cause for gratitude. Just today, the dawn haze lifted, carrying the last remnants of wildfire smoke out with it; for the first time in weeks (months?) there is no gray veil between us and the mountains. El Salto’s craggy face stands out if sharp relief, individual trees and rocky outcroppings are clear on the slopes of Pueblo Peaks. The shimmer of particulate matter floating in the sunlight has vanished, at least for this day, and the air holds that knife-edge clarity that comes with autumn.
Whatever else is past or yet to come, we have the solace of looking forward to fall: for both of us, our favorite season, the most comfortable temperatures and weather of the whole year, and the most beautiful, too. The skies are a deeper indigo, the sun a richer gold; even the gray and weathered wood of the latilla fences looks gilded now. And they remind us that there is beauty in age and experience, beauty, too, in standing strong beneath a relentless blue. The light is shifting now, shortening even as it sharpens its angle, and it turns our whole small world here to jewels set into precious metal.
There is a reason why colonial invaders thought this was the legendary City of Gold.
In a darkening world, literally and figuratively, it helps to remember that we are like the latillas: weathered by experience, perhaps a little grayer now, or a lot — but we are still precious, and we are strong, hard as diamonds with spirits glowing like gold in the sun.
More than the blue will be relentless soon. We will still be standing, beneath and within and through to the other side.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
