I had a good post day yesterday. It resonated with quite a few people. And that’s good. Except now I have to try and do it again the next day, and that’s damn near impossible, because resonating insights aren’t just lying around for the picking. The best I can do today is say that I solved the NY Times mini crossword in 44 seconds and that puzzle had 17 clues. My puzzle solving friends will understand and everyone else will just go, so?

Home again. Home again. It feels good. We pulled out of Red River, NM around 8 a.m. yesterday, and I put my head on my pillow at 12:45 this morning. Two cars, eight people. We stopped for breakfast in Taos, and from there it was gas station food all the way home. New Mexico in the daytime is pretty, Texas at night is no great shakes, it’s blackness and the blinking red lights of wind farms, until you hit the blessed Interstate 10 with its 75 and 80 mph speed limit.

We went for a ride yesterday. Headed east out of town toward Bobcat Pass and then down to the town of Eagle’s Nest. It was a lovely drive. One I’d never taken before because we always come in from the west from Quest. The scenery was lovely and I decided I’d love to see the place in summer when the river was running and everything was green.

Snow has fallen, starting its work of covering the imperfections of earth. Whenever I see a first snowfall, I always wonder if this is how an ice age started. The snow came. It stayed. It came again. It stayed. Before the days of instant communication, how would humans have known what to do? Would going south have been a thing? Of course, we’re a long way from that. The weather people are keeping us apprised, we know when the snow will end, and even where it’s snowing.

This morning I am sitting within fifty yards of the Rio Grande, just outside Alamosa, Colorado. In late February I will be camping alongside the same river in Lajitas, Texas. In both places the river will be about the same width. I could easily throw a rock across it. I suppose, running as it does through land that is mostly desert, it just never has a chance to get as big as some of its sister rivers. Plus it’s the US/Mexico border so there are lots of people using its waters.

I took my first bath and massage in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the first years of the 21st century. The idea of another person bathing and massaging me, was strange, but I persevered and found it comforting. Eventually, the massage became part of my health maintenance routine, and now my massage therapist is a vital weapon in my battle with age and despair. When my muscles knot, my head refuses to turn, or my back aches, she reaches inside and chases away the demons.

I’ve hiked to the edge of the South Rim in Big Bend National Park, and the top of Guadalupe Peak in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, but yesterday, I took an equally satisfying ride in a gondola to the top of Sandia Mountain in the Cibola National Forest just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. We went for the views and watch the sunset, and I got both cases. It was especially impressive being so close to the mountain as the gondola climbed. It was the easiest peak I've ever done.

I’m home. And it feels good. Slept in my own bed. Walked out onto the porch this morning and looked at the pasture. Looked at the sky. Now for the rest of the day. I washed everything before I left my daughter’s home, so all I need to do is put things away, attach decals to guitar cases, and remember the good times.

In the first four Christmases after my wife’s death in 2020, I dressed myself and the house for a party in which one of the guests was gone. Children still came, friends still visited, but the missing soul was still missing. So, this year, when my daughter invited the family to her new home in Virginia, I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to start anew, do something fresh and different. I made my plans and left town and the undecorated house.

In the early morning, on a fine summer day, just as the sun is rising there can be a moment when the beach is all mine except for the tide and the shore birds. It's a sight quite literally never to be seen again, and being there to see it, to be the one to see it, fills me with quiet pleasure. It’s been that way all my life. And that's how it feels this morning as I stare off into the first day of 2025.

The stars on a cold clear night sure seem big and bright, and closer, too. As if they were just over the treetops. And last night as I left a friend’s house in the chill of the evening, I could see Orion’s belt, clear as day, and it felt as though I could reach up and unbuckle it, and as I drove through the dark, I surprised the moon resting on a hilltop, taking a break before it continued its journey into the night of a December sky.

I’m back in the saddle so to speak. Yesterday, I finished the repairs to a fence I started several weeks ago. I got the old sections securely tied to the new poles, and now we’re right as rain.

Digging postholes. I’ve done it all my life to varying degrees of success. As a new homeowner in the 70s one of the first things I did was put up a fence, for privacy in my yard.

I dug out another old posthole yesterday. This one had the complication of being right beside a second old posthole. So, there were two blobs of concrete and rotted timber. Talk about hard.

Some mornings I wake up and my words are right there in bed beside me. Then on some mornings, I find them sitting comfortably on the couch or hanging around the coffee maker.

The first of the four roof tins is in place. It took me a while. First of all, I realized I needed additional lumber for the rafters. More feels better and secure. Then I had to overcome an earlier mistake which came about because I got ahead of myself.

I watched my little bird go to bed last night. It landed on the birdbath. Surveyed its surroundings. Then flitted up to its little notch at the top of the cedar porch pole and settled in for the night.

An only upside in failing to sleep through the night is being able to walk out onto my porch and look at the pasture behind my house in the light of a nearly full moon. It’s a bonus when the temperature is in the 40s and there’s no breeze.

It’s a cold crisp morning in the Hill Country. The air is clear, not a cloud in the sky. The presidential election didn’t go my way, but the sun has come up every morning since and gone down as well. I’m disappointed, but it isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last.