Good luck little Chuck!

I gave away my baby rooster today, to a nice woman who I think will appreciate the bond between a gal and her roo. One of Charlie's sons (looks just like his dad) has gone on to rule his own roost and take care of his own harem of laying hens. Good luck little Chuck!

And, it turns out the other chick I hatched from an egg is also a rooster...Chuck's brother, a Barred Rock,  Black Star Cross. Kind of funny looking, but he's coming into some pretty tail feathers now and some have a hint of green. Interesting boy. Not crowing yet. A late bloomer? I think I will call him Gideon, from a dream I had some weeks ago of a baby with the same name. Didn't understand the relevance of the name in the dream, but it seems fitting for my lonely little orphaned rooster who is just nineteen weeks old.

I have been so caught up in the Occupy revolution, I have not been writing or doing much of anything really.

Took the kids to the city for their autism screenings. Turns out my son is fine, perfectly normal...well, his role  model, his older sister, has taught him a thing or two, which might be questionable, but otherwise, it's all good.

My little girl, however, is another story. That's how the doctor told us. Another story. Diagnosed PDD-NOS, which in autism lingo means not full blown autistic, but on the spectrum. Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Non Specified. She has many autistic traits, but she also speaks and can communicate, even if it is a little off. So there we have it. They'd like my daughter to undergo therapy once a week. Speech, occupational, behavioral...learn how to be social, in a normal way. What does that mean? I'm not even social in a normal way. Although, I have to admit it has been an issue for me in my own life. Maybe my daughter can learn how to talk to people and stand to be in the same room with more than say five individuals. If not, hey, I will understand.

Still got New Mexico on the mind. In a bad, bad way. Or good. I search through Craigslist daily, trying to find a place we could rent with all of our critters. But I also have been trying to find homes for some of them. Anyone want a nice, male, neutered indoor cat? It turns out my son may be allergic to all of the animals anyway. His next blood test will tell us.

The oil drilling in our neighborhood continues. There are now three within a mile of our house. Fracking? Yep. Heard it from several people now. But "there's nothing to worry about,"and "it's not that bad," and "maybe the town will use the revenue to fix the roads," or "a little fracking is not as bad as a lot of fracking." Right?

Wait...what?

"Oil fracking is not as bad as gas fracking." and "give it some time and they will go away."

How long? Long enough to grow a tumor out of the side of my head? Or maybe when our water smells like fuel? Or maybe when the ground starts to shake and our house actually falls into one of the old abandoned coal mine shafts 300 feet underneath of us? How long? Maybe when they put a drill in the empty lot next to us? There's one in the next town over...sits smack in the middle of four houses. I'd say those lucky families are less than 300 feet away from that nightmare. Evaporation pits. Sure, they are using chemicals. "Not that bad"...how do we know if they won't tell us what chemicals?

Abandon ship! Abandon ship!

I think it's time to move on now to a community that doesn't favor profit over human health.

Not in my back yard, damn it!

And since NM still calls to my spirit, I think it's time to listen and find another place. They have autism therapists down in Santa Fe. I checked. Even a DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) doctor. And the home school laws in NM are a bit more lax than in Colorado. Plus, you can collect and harvest rainwater. It's not against the law. Imagine that! And, as everyone knows, the Land of Enchantment is home to the most interesting people one could ever hope to meet. As one of my old lovers once told me...I'd fit right in. And as my family and friends always ask...who'd want to live in New Mexico? Exactly! Too many people here know me now.

I'm going to die in New Mexico, I promise. It'd be nice if I could do a little living in the land Georgia O'Keeffe came to love. The land recorded by Ansel Adams and written about by Tony Hillerman. It is an artist's paradise...a land where the muse runs free with wild and crazy abandon, dancing with the wind under skies ablaze with glorious, smoldering  sunsets. 

It is home. Even if I don't live there yet. I will get back to the land where my spirit sings in harmony with the energy vibrations of the mesas and mountains and the beautiful sage. I'm coming New Mexico, I'm coming!

Taos Time

Got Taos on the mind, like some old lover that won't let me forget, singing some desert serenade, urging me to fall in love again.

On May 13 of 2002, I sat in my pretty, little, black Neon, smoking a cigarette, staring out into the weirdness that is Taos, and wrote this short poem. My 2000 Neon was my writing studio, my personal space, my little Frogger, hopping across roads to deliver pizzas (until R drove it over a hill and put a hole in the floorboard...it still ran, but it was tainted by a man's harsh handling, scarred by a unconsciousness that didn't understand that by loaning my little car, I was entrusting him with a piece of me.)

                                                 

Taos

Wildlife in the yard—

A black and white magpie,

Three red-breasted sparrows,

And a big wolf dog

Wandering by.

Wildness in mountain time 

Where nothing is quite right.

Peculiar smallness-

A place where free spirits still walk

Half-dressed down the street.

Magpies walk,

Wolf dogs talk

And music from the heart

Resonates with the sunshine

In time to the wind chimes

That hum with the breeze.

-K.A.Bennett 2002

Taos was my muse, as it seems to be with so many people, and although I lived a lonely life there, my creativity blossomed in words and in paint, in photographs and in ideas, and maybe that was the gift the Mountain gave to me. As I read of Taos now, and see photographs of latilla fences and old adobes, I think of how much I miss her, that old town that I drove around delivering pizzas into the night, dodging dogs chasing me and biting at the tires of my car, trying to decipher houses without addresses and streets without signs (they have those now!). What an adventure the Taos days were, and had R been the person then that he has become today, perhaps we could have stayed and the Mountain would not have laughed us out of her shadow.

Maybe it isn't too late. Or maybe it is. Is there an adobe in my future yet? 

I miss the sage like I could never imagine. Lately it consumes me...my longing for the open sky and the scraggly sagebrush that is my soul mate. The closed minds that surround me in this right wing town beg me to recall a different time, and a different mind, a younger me, someone free, not bound and constrained by the conformity all around, and by the system I live in. I want to be free again. I hear the desert calling again. It is almost time to go back home again. The sage is singing and the wind whispers my name.