Christmas 2013

 Over the desert and up in the range, to Muleshoe ranch we go. Right click for big...

Twelve miles of sometimes atrocious dirt and rock track, up to above 8000 feet, with the  astronomical telescope on the 10,000 foot ridge above glinting in reflected afternoon light from the west...

No art or essays or anything of import here, other than my old story of a place and those who by intent or accident belong there, that odd bunch who come to fit, who become part of an older community...

We have done Christmas at the Lassez for almost ten years now-- they born in France and here almost as long as me, hosting natives and newcomers and visitors with warmth and hospitality in a hundred year old ranch house with a bit of the style of the old Swiss Italians who were an uncelebrated but substantial percentage of the European- American settlers here after the Civil War, as well as my New England paternal ancestors. And how likely is that convergence?

John and Carolyn Wilson, retired from Ohio where John ran an Audubon sanctuary, (though she has local roots), listen to our hostess describe the latest Lassez Asian odyssey, a month in Nepal; many footsteps where Libby blazed trails in the seventies, when she guided treks to Everest Base Camp. And Catherine and Libby comparing notes, backed by the window with the best view in the county.

Jean Louis explains economics to John...

(Economics also informs Jean Louis' painting parodies, but we will deal with this later...)

Sarah Lassez, in from SoCal, and her dogs.

 Dolly Dawson,  Magdalena native and former Old- Timer's Queen :

I did not get good enough pics of: Dominique, in from Paris (Domi, sorry, maybe before you go);  Donna Dawson, Mag native, daughter of Dolly and old fire crew friend of Betsy Huntington; the bonfire; Rolf Magener, my peripatetic e- mag travel editor, whose namesake uncle escaped British internment with Heinrich Harrer, but who then went to Burma; his book is as good as Harrer's, but Myanmar has never been as popular as Tibet in the West.  Nor GUNS: my .410 ,which against odds I got back, and brought to show off-- wait, here's one from yesterday, so much smaller than my 12 that it makes that slim game gun look like a ponderous pigeon piece...

But finally, sated, headed home in the gloaming. And to all a good night!