So having gotten out of Denver, for whatever reason, this stuff didn’t look so delusional, temporarily…

Whereas, out the window, hot but not all THAT hot compared to some but still pretty hot for 8000′ up a mountain,

with air in the nineties which comes furnace-like up the meadow necessitating downwind window closures as in Nevada summer… lying about through somnambulant afternoons reading exhibition catalogs wishing for rain and

rainlessly venturing into obscure portions of the immediate environs later.

 

We go up the creek in the mornings and into the weird wild reaches of the “yellow zone” at the base of the knoll in the warm ends of days…

Meanwhile Linda decides it might be time to try some drawing…

The stomach fills, the moon fills…

We walk back from dinner at Bill and Muriel’s on the full moon night to more of the same…

Went to Walsenburg to clean up the ‘Bib so I could begin sorting paintings into decades, decades into years, eventually to decide who will stay and who will go west.

Some seventy-eight canvases [out of 240] made it out of the racks that Friday and were sorted into 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and teens, with a preponderance of eighties…

before a slow [and proud of it!] lunch in La Veta…the distinction between slow as in freshly prepared [which it is] and slow as in interminable service [ditto] being a concept as yet unclear to them.

Back across the valley

and the County to Libre-on-Mountainside;

…living in the country and getting…weird.  -er.

All the time.

Far-off fires make air reminiscent of 1950s L.A….

bringing insects of unknown provenance to the eaves…

and others more familiar to the creek crossing;

Thursday brought us two Gordon Setters, a total of eight for dinner [one of whom only drank water] with homemade ice cream, a homemade tart from homemade cherries, salmon, Sicilian Pueblo Chile sausages, potato salad, grilled vegetables, one bottle of champagne, five bottles of cava and five hours later we figured we’d all had a pretty good time.

[Porch light flame-cut from recycled propane tank by Dave Roberts of Red Wing, Colorado]

Come morning we still had the two Gordon Setters, a painter and a hungover architect, but they soon departed for a mountain of their own, leaving us free to stumble up the creek yet again…

…at least as soon as Leon showed up to collect the instructional signs I’d made for Hippy Days;

Gardner Hippy Days is an annual [Tenth Annual, this year!] homegrown music, food and craft event much beloved  hereabouts…kind of an extremely lowrent two-day Burning Man on the Community Center parking lot instead of on a playa with much cheaper tickets [it’s free, though the concessions aren’t] which we, ever eschewing all such festivities large and small, ever fail to attend.

We stay up there, in the far background…

M