Luck

We went to the Farmers’ Market Saturday morning ahead of the snow. Carrots, sweet potato, cabbage, apples, local gouda, fantastic cardamom buns, and a loaf of crusty caramelized onion bread. There isn’t much of a selection, but we are happy to support Heller Farms and the other local vendors who tough it out through the winter. There is a feeling of camaraderie among the folks who stay, the vendors and the shoppers. Once home, I did my few outdoor chores, carrying compost, kitty litter, and ashes from the pellet stove to the compost heap through the thin crust of snow left over from Thursday.

The snow began after lunch, as predicted. It’s been the tiny, light flakes most of the time, coming down so heavily at times that we could scarcely see across Gulf Road. As the world disappears our house feels snug and complete. We don’t need anything from the outside world, and it needs nothing from us. We have long, quiet conversations about the lives we’ve lived, the choices we’ve made, the lessons learned, and what the next few years might look like. Charlie and Hazel are our only company through the snowbound weekend, and they are all we need. The fire in the pellet stove has been on steadily, keeping the house cozy and cheerful.

We had expected Tamar and Ryder this weekend, but by Friday it was clear that it wasn’t going to be good driving weather, and Tamar and I are both recovering from colds, so we agreed that the visit would have to wait. It’s disappointing, of course. We had meals planned, and I was ready to get creamed at Scrabble, and was looking forward to taking Tamar in to Cooperstown Monday morning for Carol’s aqua aerobics class. But another time. And after being away last week, we’re happy to just stay still.

We were in New Mexico last week. We flew into Albuquerque, picked up our rental car, and drove straight to Garcia’s on West Central. The food was as good as we remembered from our last visit, coming across the country. We were back for breakfast the next morning before we headed up to Santa Fe to meet up with Liz and Sean and the boys. The drive north is much as I remembered. Albuquerque has sprawled north – probably in every direction. The freeway is wider leaving town. But the sky is the same, the mountains are the same, and once we’re past the outskirts of the city, the dessert is the same. I love the New Mexico landscape, its narrow color palette, its simplicity of form, its huge, long views. You can drive towards distant mountains for hours and they don’t seem any closer.

Santa Fe is much changed from when I last lived there in 1971, but then, so am I. There’s been a huge building boom, but for the most part they’ve held to the traditional architectural style taken from the old adobes, and they’ve kept to a narrow range of colors. You don’t see a blue house here. In the old center of town the streets are still narrow and windy, and traffic must be awful when the town fills with summer tourists.

It was delicious to see Liz and Sean and the boys. They have come to Santa Fe to consider it as a place to relocate. They’ve had their fill of the Bay Area, and Sean now has a job where he works entirely remotely, so they can think about options. The boys are much the same, taller, smarter, but still loud and sweet. They will still snuggle. The only downside to seeing them is that it makes me feel how much I miss them. I’d be happy if they decided to move to Santa Fe – a time zone closer, a place I love to visit, and a chance to get great Mexican food. It would be full of wonderful learning opportunities for the boys – a huge change in flora, fauna, history and culture. One of the attractions for Liz and Sean is that Santa Fe has a lively home schooling community, so the boys would have lots of opportunities for friendships and for team based projects. The more stringent home schooling requirements in New York State are one of the main reasons they’re not considering our area.

While Liz and Sean and the boys were off on a kid adventure, Jay and I drove up to St John’s. When I came there as a junior in 1968 the Santa Fe campus had only been open for four years. Now there are several new buildings, including a beautiful library, and the trees have grown up and filled in the bare landscape. Those trees are more than 50 years older now, which comes as a bit of a shock. Jay and I walked through the student center to the dining room, where I was expecting to see the same fabulous view to the southwest, but now it’s just trees and the students will not be able to stand on the long balcony after supper as we did and applaud the magnificent sunsets.

We had a cup of tea in the coffee shop and I was filled with memories of post-seminar conversations that lasted long into the evening. We were so earnest, so deep in our studies, so separated from the big, busy world. In many ways, we were ill prepared to enter that world, lacking marketable skills and having spent four years in an intellectual hot house. But if we were not prepared for the shock of the transition, we were, as it turned out, very well prepared to thrive in a world of rapid change, a world in which the ability to keep learning mattered a lot. We learned to read and write and reason, we learned to defend our opinions and be willing to change them, we learned to trust our minds and to know their limits, we learned to face mysteries without fear. It was, and remains, a great education. I’m so grateful to Mr. Schermer, the high school English teacher who told me about St. John’s, and to my parents, who paid the bills for my four years of freedom and put up with my snobbery about the virtue of studying ancient Greek. And I’m so very grateful to our incredible teachers and to the classmates who slogged through Kant and Pascal and Aristotle and Plato with me. We were so very lucky.

Whenever I come to the end of one of these little posts, I decide what to title it, what it seems to be about. The thread that winds through the snowy weekend, the trip to Santa Fe, the visit with Liz and family, and the memories of St. John’s is luck. In one of his Friday night lectures in Santa Fe, Dean Darkey said, “No one earns a living, no one deserves to be loved.” We are alive and loved through luck, or perhaps grace. I have had more than my share.