Music to my ears.

Once we are tucked into bed up in the sleeping loft, the yurt roof is only about three feet above our heads. Since around midnight last night, I have been listening to the lovely soft sound of rain falling on that roof just above me. For a short while this morning it even turned to snow...fortunately not the foot of snow that fell in Flagstaff, Arizona last night. Ah, the unexpected pleasures of living at a high altitude.

It's quite chilly too, barely topping 40 so far today and after dragging all of the fragile plants and seedlings back out on the deck this morning when I got up, I drug them all back in about the time it started snowing. That's alright, I expect I will be dragging things in and out a few more times before real spring finally gets here. In the meantime, I feel this joyous peace over the better than half inch of rain that has fallen so far, with more expected through Thursday. That might not sound like much to most people, but in the high desert it means I can stop scanning the horizon for smoke for at least a few days.

Earlier this year I learned about a winter hardy rosemary called Madalene Hill. Rosemary is one of my most favorite cooking herbs and it seems every year I am hauling a huge pot in and out during the winter, or watching my rosemary slowly losing its needles and dying from being in the house. I ordered it through Mountain Valley Growers along with some sage plants I've been looking for and they finally arrived today. I have to say I was impressed with the health of the plants and the care they had been shipped with. Too many times plants I've ordered arrive barely alive and with the harshness of this environment, they often don't survive. By the time the weather warms up again, these little guys should be ready to be potted and moved out onto the deck. This company offers an interesting mix of hard to find herbs and plants and I'll definitely order from them again.

The helicopter was supposed to be picking Mike up at 5:30 this morning to take him out to the rig in the Gulf that he will be working on for the next week or so. I haven't heard anything from him yet so I hope everything went smoothly and that he is getting settled in. He may not have phone access, but we should be able to exchange emails.

Look at this!

And they say we can expect more through Thursday, even a little snow at the higher elevations. Yay! So far it hasn't amounted to much as far as overall rainfall, but it sure smells wonderful and the winds have settled down. Mike left pretty early this morning and called me from the Albuquerque airport where he was waiting for his plane to New Orleans. From there he goes to a heliport and on out to a rig in the Gulf. It's been a long process to get there so congratulations, Mike!

Coming in...

...for a landing.

Black Headed Grosbeak

The only thing blooming in the deck garden, so far.

Valeroso is back at his stick game.

I guess Besol has forgiven him.

She really is still alive.

She's just very, very relaxed.

Good horses.

On Sunday we took another opportunity to work with Llego and Griton before Mike has to leave on Tuesday. Since Llego had challenged Mike a bit the last time we worked, we wanted to make sure we had definitely gotten through the little issue they had before Mike took off again. As we expected, this good horse remembered what he had learned and cooperated with complete focus. We even began to teach him about lateral yields of the hindquarters and he caught on to what we were asking for immediately.


We kept it short as a reward and Mike ended the session with asking Llego to practice standing quietly next to the mounting block while he climbed up and down, made noise with it, and put his weight across Llego's back. As you can see, the level of trust we have slowly built with this formerly wild horse certainly removed any concern he had about it! The fundamentals of what we teach our horses aren't any different than what most people teach; what changes from person to person is more like the differences in regional dialects when you learn a language. Llego worked first with my nephew, Boyd, who taught him a Texas drawl, then with me during the fall and spring, and now he has had to learn the subtle differences in how Mike speaks to him. This trip home was an excellent beginning in developing a lasting dialogue between the two of them that we will be able to continue to develop on Mike's next trip home.

Every horse has been getting mounting block practice and when Mike took this photo, I reminded him of when Griton would be across the arena if you even thought about mounting him. Now all he thinks about is when he's going to get his next cookie. It was a several year process to get Griton to this place of calm relaxation, starting with showing him he could accept the saddle without fear. From there he learned it was safe to have me slip onto him bareback. This year, we are putting the two together and later this spring will be his first time to calmly carry me and a saddle at the same time.


In case you're wondering about what is going on with Besol, he has gone back to horsey kindergarten in hopes that starting him over from the beginning will help him to let go of his old fears. That was the process we used with Griton and it certainly worked with that big Cookie Monster!

Whether your children have skin, fur, feathers, scales or leaves, walk on feet, paws, hooves, swim with fins or have roots growing in the earth; may your time with those you love be filled with joy and grace, not just for today but everyday.

There is a new post at Wild Hearts, Willing Spirits.

And on Wednesday he is heading out to sea...

Getting in some Mike snuggles while they still can.

Mike has been home for the last week working his way through a tedious set of instructional modules and taking online tests for certification in something I have no hope of understanding. Then yesterday he got his 'ship out' orders and he will be leaving on Tuesday for his first Gulf offshore well project. It will be good to start having those nice paychecks rolling in again but still, we will miss him and worry about him being out there on deep water. It will all be worth it when we can get settled into a more or less reliable routine instead of the long stretches we went without him being able to come home over the last two years. I'm always a little shocked and puzzled when women tell me how much they look forward to their husbands being gone on hunting trips and so on...Mike and I actually like each other and the separations are definitely not the part of our relationship that we enjoy!

I want to be Ellie in my next life!

We have gotten to have a couple of good work sessions with the horses and as always, I have been impressed at how quickly Mike grasps the fundamentals of horse training and how deep his connection to his horse is. Most adults new to working on those levels struggle with it and for Mike it comes intuitively. Llego even tested him a bit and they worked through it. I'm always glad to finally see the 'challenge' in a young horse, it lets me know just what we might be up against in the future. With Llego it was so benign that it made me appreciate him all the more.

Duffy in the spotlight. Don't you love that face?

The winds are still blowing and the fire danger is still on red alert here. There is a new chance for rain towards the early to middle part of next week though, and we can certainly hope for a bit of relief from 9% humidity and skin scouring winds. At least we don't live down in the valley where it is even more relentless.

'What are you looking at?' Do you think they get tired of me constantly pointing a camera at them?

And for me, my back pain is creeping back up because I thought I could make two weeks between acupuncture appointments. I was maintaining because I had an appointment scheduled for Monday, then got a call saying my acupuncturist would be gone for two weeks because her daughter-in-law had a baby! Jody, I'm thrilled for you and so very glad mom and grandbaby are well and healthy and I can't wait to hear about them...just hurry back please!

Memories.
Self-portrait with Griton from yesterday evening...sorry I cut your ears off Big Guy, but my arm is only so long.

I'm a pretty easy person to find on the internet, just type in 'Carmon Deyo' and over 2,000 entries will come up. Several old friends have found me that way since 2001, when I started the Black Horse Design webpage. One was a co-worker from San Francisco, now back in her home area of Pennsylvania and someone I'm very glad to have back in my life. One was a boarder at the stables we had in Austin, still in Texas and now the mother of three. And a dear friend and fellow graphic designer I knew in Austin, who is now teaching design at a small university in South Carolina.

There are people I have tried to find without success...the most important being Joanne Schwope, who was my best friend through junior high when we lived in Boerne, Texas. We wrote to each other for quite a while after my family left Texas, and eventually lost touch somewhere during one of the five additional moves we made before I got out of high school. I would imagine Joanne has married and changed her last name and there lies the problem. When you move as much as we did while I was growing up, it wasn't easy to let your guard down and make real friends. There were two places in my childhood where I believed we would stay, Arkansas and Texas, and those were the two places I let myself have friends.

A few days ago, someone found me and got in touch that I never would have expected to remember me, much less seek me out. This is a woman who knew me as a child in Arkansas where we lived from the time I was five until I was ten. When we moved to Arkansas, my father promised we would never move again, that we would stay there forever, and we all believed him. We let ourselves fall in love with that place, which wasn't hard for a kid to do. There was a mountain covered with dogwood, maple and oak trees that looked like they were on fire in the fall. My mother named it Autumn Hill Ranch. There was an artesian spring that tumbled through an orchard that was sixty or more years old, and then ran down over huge slabs of limestone that became our playground and where we fished for crawdads with chunks of dog food tied on strings and weighted down with a nail. There was a hundred acre meadow that stretched down from the house and was filled with the horses I had previously only dreamed of.

When we weren't being put to work following around behind my father's flatbed truck, picking up rocks that had surfaced in the fields after the winter snows, or pulling up noxious weeds, our summers were spent on the backs of horses. We ate apples from old gnarled trees that had been part of a long abandoned homestead, and we made forts in trees perfect for climbing and where we had 'sword-a-fights' using wooden swords we had made from sticks with a cross piece attached as a hand guard. There was a secret place I had, down at the bottom of the meadow where I was lying under a large oak tree one afternoon. As I leaned against its trunk and looked up into its leaves, I saw two branches, each as large around as my waist, that were tied and growing in a square knot. I still wonder about that tree...who tied its branches into a knot as a trail marker when it was still a sapling with limbs soft and supple?

And I made a friend, the first one I had ever had, and surprisingly she has remembered me all these years. Hearing from her brought back a lot of memories for me and put me back into a place of introspection I haven't visited in a long time. There was a lot of dysfunction in my family, things that I have written about in the past and will put the links at the bottom of this entry should anyone want to read them. What I have realized in the last few days is how divided my life has been, into three phases actually. There was that early childhood when I still had some innocence left; then the high school years and up until my father died in 1979 when the best I could do was try to survive; and finally the years after 1979 when I worked to heal and eventually become the person I am now.

I had never realized how separate each of those parts of myself were until this chance re-introduction to someone who knew me in that first phase of my life. I have held so much of my earlier life at a distance, because it was painful, because I made bad decisions, because I am no longer that person. It has been hard for me to stop and look at the whole picture with someone who knew me as the innocent and who could see me now from this blog, but never knew the person in between. I'm not sure how I can stitch these three people back together, or even if I should. So many of those years after 1979 were spent in agonizing therapy where every detail of my history was gone over again and again until it lost at least some of its power over me. I think that what I want to do is to continue living here and now, in this place where I am mostly happy and at peace, and to leave the past where it is. I would like to know this lovely woman better, not because of who we were as children, but because of who we are now.

My Mother

My Father

Their Marriage

Survival

Just a few photos...

Look who was swimming in my watering can...

I've been really kind of phenomenally tired the last few days. Don't know why, maybe the fire danger anxiety catching up with me. Or the constant wind wearing me out. At any rate, I feel better this morning so hopefully will soon be back to my 'normal' driven energy level. In the meantime, a few photos to entertain you.

It must be love. Vannie would have taken that foot off at the hock.