Where I’m writing from

There’s a small building I love on the ranch, perhaps one of the last places I threw all my energy into, before by necessity my energy morphed into something more focused and personal.

We’ve tried to give the structure a name, but it always ends up being “la casita,” a small, two-room frame house built after World War II. From the shell of what had been my grandmother’s ranch house, I brought it back to life as a screened porch that offers from a height of 30 inches off the floor a 360° panorama of the world beyond.

I saved the lines of the roof, its rafter-and-plank ceiling, and my grandmother’s hearth. I replaced only what I had to with new lumber, and much of what I did to the 500 square-foot building was with recycled wood, including the cedar fencing AEP gave me when it constructed a new substation fence on the ranch.

I say I built it for my mother who had always wanted a detached outdoor kitchen and dining area on the ranch, but in the end, I guess I built it for myself — a place to write with the outdoor world just in reach.

And perhaps I built it, too, for my granddaughters and the nieces and nephews who will enjoy this clean, simple vista of high banks of white clouds on picture-book blue skies, gnarled mesquites, birdsong, and wildlife.

May they all enrich their lives by tapping into the fuse of the natural energy of this teeming ranch land ecosystem, and may they give back with the real work it takes to keep up fences and keep the land clean and productive.

I no longer do the kind of physical work I used to do here, but I can organize it and bring a bit of order to the wildness of the brush.

Stepping into what had been Doña Maria Dionicia’s old house is like running my hand along the touchstone that defines the relationship we have had with this land that has provided shelter, respite, inspiration, and balm for broken hearts. The casita cradles cherished memories of my older sister and little brother, parents, grandmother, aunts and uncles and primos on the occasion of roundups and family gatherings that never brought strangers to the table.

I can’t remember a time this ranch wasn’t a part of my heart or a time I didn’t write about it. It shows up in bad poetry I wrote in the 60s and 70s, in short stories set on this edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and in more recent years in the Santa Maria Journal, a column I have written for three decades.

I like writing here year-round, morning and evening. On most summer days there’s a constant breeze that moves through the casita to take the edge off the heat. I like the short, silent pauses and then the susurrus of wind that has the power to evoke images and whip them into words.

Out in the brush I love the surprises that cross my path — a covey of quail flushed from the brush, the sighting of a pair of wild turkeys, a red fox hurrying across the cowpath to its assignation with what will be its dinner.

With no ambient light, the Milky Way is a creamy, breathtaking sash on the indigo of the night sky.

As I write this at the scarred wooden table where the tios once warmed themselves with coffee on bitterly cold days, I admit to myself that what I feel now about the ranch has been tempered by time and that it’s different from how I felt when I was younger and more years than my age hung in the balance of time yet lived.

I feel anchored, rooted here as I always have to its raw beauty and to the stories that tie us to the land, but sometimes, too, these days I sense a slight untethering and have the utterly clear realization that the land owned me, that I was just stardust on a long lucky pass.