The last week started off a little early [or bleary] with one of those three-bottles-of-bubbly-dinners with Patsy and Jon,

after which The Horses showed up…four on Sunday but by the next early morning

there were five there and no one we’d called had called back [cowboys, feedlot cowboys around here, tend to be of little help as they strive to maintain a strict code of Macho Taciturnity].

Labor Day was laboriously soporifically hot as the horses wandered Libre somewhat unseen

and Tuesday, hot again, necessitated a trip  to High Horse Veterinary Clinic for a third

round of puppy shots followed soon after lunch by a fruitless search

for what had eventually been determined to be Vincie’s outlaw equines…who never turned up and in the most optimistic scenario may have left for a drink by the time Leon, Muffin, L. and

I scouted lower the lower lands.  While down there Muffin convinced Leon

to secure the gate just in case [and we never saw them again, the horses, that is].

Wednesday we made a last trip to Walsenburg for food and such as well as to hear the sad tale of the Mysterious Submariner who, twenty years after moving into Snida’s house next door to our Habib Building and boarding up all the windows, had rarely been sighted or heard from

until we heard from Ed, over to trim our yard, that he’d rolled his car out on 69 last spring and, hearing the emergency vehicles’ sirens approaching, shot himself in the head, dead. Weird but sad, and now what will become of dear Snida’s old house?  Years ago we’d have tried to buy and restore it but now we’re old and the Habib contains things like this below [1963-4]

which only goes to show that in the intervening 55 years I seem to have gotten much fussier.

We returned home, did two loads of laundry and took a rudimentary walk in the Near Woods

but Thursday at least made it up the creek, stopping off at Dean’s on the way back to return the not-so-inexplicably depressing video “Commune”, a documentation of the rise and continuing entanglements emanating from Black Bear which at the very least reinforced why I have always done my best to avoid drama, simultaneous relationships and free-range child abandonment.

Much of the rest of the day went into preparations like taking down and fixing two of Linda’s summer drawings and laying them out in the Toolbox to provide a clean wall as part of the

rearrangement of her studio for a long-delayed* screening of M. Metz’ bootleg of Robert Frank’s “Cocksucker Blues”, an event which had in the interim blossomed into dinner for eight, many of whom were neither that interested in nor even curious about CSB, the combination of Robert Frank and the Stones at their puerile nastiest being a taste some do not easily acquire but some [myself mainly] enjoyed immensely……lots of dishes, glasses and popcorn in the aftermath and another all-too-warm too-late-starting day followed with leftover popcorn wherein I finished a second pass through Murakami’s “Killing Commendatore” and enjoyed what proved to be the best studio afternoon yet [better late than never] during which Muffin made a house-call to give the pups [still hopeless on leashes] their rabies shots.

Unfortunately that night was yet again plagued with stuffiness and allergies so Saturday, despite skipping our last Farmer’s Market [L made a foray to the transitional P.O. anyway], was much muddled and more typical of what has generally been a singularly unproductive summer. Additionally, despite its proximity to our departure, we attended a potluck that night at DKD not only to see if rumors of Dan’s damage to the forest were truly as horrendous as reported and but more importantly to send David Pritchard and his family off to their new life in Jackson, Mississippi, a place I’ll likely never go. Driving up their road, Transformed by Gravel, the brutally amputated trees were an eloquently distressing testimonial to the “European-Forest-Fire-Mitigation Philosophy” espoused by several households hereabouts but the party [Dan is an excellent bartender, he and Sheila are superb hosts, and the company was splendid] was way more than pleasant and a Wonderful Last Event for us…

Sunday, not particularly renewed after another stuffy night [see yellow bushes, Chamisa aka Rabbitbrush, above], we topped off the water, walked our mile of Dry Creek, fired up [though, owing to an empty tank, could not run] Trigger, positioned the Tacoma for gradual loading and

made yet another unsuccessful attempt at Accustoming Dogs to Leashes….last days a-comin’.

That afternoon nonetheless all had a lovely little walk in rain and sunshine

before evening’s clearing allowed for tamales on the porch at sunset…

Monday, a day cooler than most preceding if not presaging Fall at Last brought laundry,

the mile up the creek, the beginnings of the aforementioned Gradual Loading

and after wrapping up some six paintings finally tentatively deemed Finished and

a penultimate look around Suburbia it was into the woods.  The really serious packing and

loading came Tuesday, along with with a last four-dog romp up the creek after a detour

to Dean’s to give him seven eggs, a potato and farewell.

Then onwards

unto the exhausting finalization of the load [thanks to L.’s encouragement managed to fit the six + four paintings of various dimensions in along with all the rest] and leave

Various Explorations behind with time

for a last late wandering walk before the day wound down

wound down

into endlessly final details, dinner on the porch

and night, right?

Still all unknown is how a trip across the west with two dogs utterly terrified of leashes [and not too happy about riding in cars, either] will pan out…

 

*In 1979 I traveled to Berkeley to see Mr. Frank present the film but, similar in some ways to this viewing, my companions [who provided transportation] were insufficiently interested to arrive in time to hear him speak and by then the only seats were in the front row stage right so it wasn’t a very satisfying experience.  It turns out most of CSB is by now available on YouTube anyway with better sound quality than we experienced Thursday here…the editing’s really the most striking thing about it; brilliant.