What Child Played Here?
July 29, 2011
In the remote Pecos I found a big marble from the 30s: white-and-butterscotch glass, battered and frost-spalled, buried in dirt. It appeared to have been thrown off a mesa.
The inexplicable things one finds in the wilderness! I assume it had lain in the dirt for as many years as its age: seventy or eighty.
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Rain in the Desert
July 24, 2011
Slow, huge thunderheads.
Rain had washed everything, as though it had doused the desert with a gigantic fire hose. The daisies’ faces were plastered to the ground.
A pretty mano of pink granite. Where it lay was wilder than when it was made by an Archaic hunter-gatherer, probably a woman: only the rare hiker goes there now. The mano had been looking at the sky for two thousand years, at least. I admired it, then left it to its next eons of quiet and space and rain.
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