Well, I am back now, but winter break was wonderful--really restful, which is precisely what I needed. I slept, cooked, ate, read, saw friends and family... all that good stuff. I gave mostly baked goods for Christmas, so I made lots of granola, sweet breads, etc. New Mexico is so beautiful in the winter, cold and sunny. Things become transparent, and the colors become at once subtle and deep.
A few days before Christmas, my mother and I had an all-day baking spree. This involved:
Giant Vegetables
(Courtesy of Gemini Farms)
A Cozy Hearth
And home-made eggnog--YUM
(eggs, milk, cream, and bourbon)
We were lucky enough to get snow a few days before Christmas, which stuck around for most of the break.
This made for some wonderful sunsets.
Christmas was a low-key affair. I went first to one Grandmother's house, and then to the other, and ate a lot and well. Graham had to work, which was foul, but I saved him posole and tamales.
My mother called me on New Years Eve as she was walking the dog at the golf course near our house. "I'm looking at the most amazing thing," she said. In the falling dusk, she stood at the edge of the small pond there, looking at the outline of nine (!) snow angels that had been left upon its frozen surface. Walking further, she saw, on the small ridge to the east, a bonfire come alight. And then--
"Holy shit! Holy shit!" Walking past the ridge, the full moon had suddenly come into view, enormous and yellow as our eggnog. My photo does not even begin to give it justice:
The week after New Year's, Graham and I went down to the curious little town of Truth or Consequences, NM. Strange though it may be, it is sited above a hot spring, and has lovely mineral baths. We stayed at a cute and funky refurbished motel with private tubs and a courtyard with palm trees. It was a really relaxing post-holiday thing to do.
They love bright colors in T or C
We stopped at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on the way back--millions and millions of ducks. But it is really beautiful there.
It is so beautiful in New Mexico all the time. Winter has its own quiet grace, a pensiveness--always a sense of promise. It is warm in the sun, standing against south-facing adobe walls. Light fades in the evening like old roses. You can tell already there that we are shifting now back towards spring.
I miss it always.
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