Dawn, and the world outside the window is eerie: shrouded in fog, still and silent. Not so much as a branch moves; not a single wild bird on limb or ground or cold heavy air.
Here at Red Willow, we, and our whole small world with us, await the coming of the snow shrouded in pale quiet.
The sun is here, of course, a thin glow behind the white sky. But it’s a light bereft of warmth, walled up behind the opaque mist of ice crystals hanging heavy in the still air.
This is winter, too, in this place, wan and impossibly cold, a scalpel’s blade the leading edge of a heavier damp that seeps through seams and buries itself bone-deep.
On a day like this, the need for calling back the sun seems only obvious, prudent and possessed of an elemental logic.
There will be sun, of course, although perhaps not much of it today; perhaps not much tomorrow, either, when the snow is supposed to be at full force. The day after, though, the blanket will have lifted, the glow of the sunrise turning the village less into a city of gold than a rose made of earth, petals flowering organically into the shelter of walls and roofs shimmering pink in the early light.
Riches beyond measure.
The invading Spanish, you see, thought they had found it: the famed (and apocryphal) City of Gold. The setting sun sets the walls ablaze, turning the reddish mica-infused clay a brilliant shimmering gold.
When you’ve convinced yourself that simple theft is actually a gift from God, that torture and murder and enslavement are tools of the sacred designed to ensure your divinely ordained seizure and possession of that which was never yours to hold? Talk of riches and legends of tangible rewards spring up and swirl like dust, taking up residence in the colonizer’s mind with all the prophetic force of doctrine. They are necessary, you see, these legends of treasure, to justify the immorality of the acts used to attain them.
It was all nonsense, of course. There were no “Cities of Gold,” although a few Pueblos south, there is now a casino by that name. It’s perfect, somehow — a small redressing of the damage done by parting descendant colonizers from their cash, even as said colonizers spend it in search of their own version of hidden treasure.
Here, even the gaming is more understated, invoking instead the imagery of the mountain that sits behind the glowing walls of North House like some great sheltering spirit.
At this early hour — on a clear winter’s day, at least — sunlight would already be washing over the front walls of that great structure, turning the clay into shades of pale coral, casting shadows from the ladders to form angled matrices that shift and dance with the direction of the light. On this day, though, the clouds that swirl around the peaks have descended to envelop even the earth of the plaza in their embrace, slopes and trees and even rooflines vanishing behind its veil.
The question today is whether the fog will clear before the snow comes . . . or, instead, do as it did a few days ago, and simply turn into snow. If it follows the former pattern, the earthen walls may yet have time to shift from rose to gold before the storm’s arrival.
It is a cold earth now, one that will grow colder still before the thaw. After last year’s record drought, however, the frost line is remarkably shallow, the earth beneath it just as remarkably dry. However inconvenient the winter weather may be, it is absolutely necessary now.
For now, there is still a rime on the rooflines from the last snow, one that will be refreshed with what arrives today. The ground, having thawed a bit yesterday, will be cold and hard again, the moisture seeping gently into it at a snail’s pace. But today’s cascade of chill air and crystal will create its opposite: like the adobe walls of the village, an earth warm and alight.
In this place, it’s far more valuable than any city of gold.
~ Aji
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