bird on a wire

Outside Cafe Fina, near Eldorado, this morning.  It's a swallow, brown and gold against the perfect blue of the (morning) New Mexican sky, before the afternoon clouds and, this evening, the power-outage bestowing storms rolled in.

farmers' market, early august

Up early for the Farmers' Market - it's hit its early-part-of-late-summer stride, and it was hard to be realistic about how much we can actually eat - or even freeze - in the next week.  Above, however, my Migrant Mother pose - as ever, one's always very much aware how much this market is often a family affair (I bought my peaches from a young woman who I should think was about 7; the grandmother who used to make the most extraordinarily good tamales seems to have switched, alas, to frito pies.  I know from talking to her granddaughter earlier in the summer that she just seemed to have had enough of grinding the corn to make the tamales ...

It was also a market full of flowers;

some of them hanging in strings;

some alongside other produce.

And, whilst I'm sure this is a recognized breed, who could resist the name of these tomatoes?

caught purple-handed

The mystifying thing about these two purple hand prints (I won't even start to speculate about the small blue ball of sky) is not that they have suddenly appeared.  One sound explanation for that might lie in the fact that this tempting white wall is just opposite a pre-school.  The real and surprising triumph lies in the fact that the purple perfectly matches the shade of the Russian Sage.

watching for lizards

I won't pretend - we still have some cat dysfunctionality problems: Walter Gomez still harbors murderous intentions towards LucyFur.  But we work a kind of shift system (since everyone gets on with Moth).  This morning, WG and Moth had some quality time looking through the back door's screen at a lizard that - I swear - taunts these indoor kitties.  That's him on the right, Moth on the left.  Hard to believe that they were adopted as kittens at the same time, four years ago.  Walter is, shall we say, big boned.

evening commute

I like this train so much that I never mind being held up by the lights.  It's the Rail Runner (a pun, for those of you who don't get it instantly, on the Road Runner, New Mexico's slightly absurd, scurrying state bird), which runs between Santa Fe and Belen, 35 miles south of Albuquerque, and was a terrific Bill Richardson project when he was Governor.  Truth be told, I've only taken it a few times (driving to Albuquerque is faster, and it runs at commuter times), but it's the prettiest of routes, and allows one to see old parts of pueblos that you don't see from the road.  Today, as you can see in the wing mirror, there was a spectacular stormy sky trying to catch up with the transportation.

shedding skin

Yesterday, Alice found a shed snakeskin under a tree near the front door - I brought it in; all paper-white, translucent; fragile.  I've been wondering all day how to photograph it to bring out this fragility.  In the end, I put it on a white board, and, yes, used flash.  The top image brings out its almost not-there-ness surprisingly well.

But also, without flash, and then using Photoshop to make the white board as white as possible, a strange thing happened: it was as though I'd restored some snakiness to the skin, and one can see something like the snake's probable colors coming out. 

All the same, I'm not there yet ... I may try again with natural light tomorrow.  It's an extraordinary and beautiful thing (and I wish I'd seen it happening - how long does it take a snake to get rid of its old skin?).

do I dare to eat ...?

It's not that I'm a Prufrocky person, but there's a good reason why Eliot's lines always assert themselves when I'm faced with a particularly luscious example of a peach, like this one (which was delicious, you'll be glad to hear).  Sometime in the early 1980s, when I was teaching on the Open University summer school in English - held at York University - I was standing in the lunch line in the cafeteria when one of my more pretentious male colleagues struck something of a pose in front of the fruit on offer.

PMC: " 'Do I dare to eat a peach?'"

West Yorkshire woman, behind serving counter: "oooh yes, dear, I think you can.  They're quite ripe, you know."

It was a good moment.