A March Walk in the Hidden World

Nearly Wordless Wednesday

The Walk with Me Edition

This month, as early spring creeps across our mountains, take a walk with me into the hidden world just north of our meadow.


North of our house is the meadow, and north of the meadow is the woods.

Looking across them from the house, you might think that the land goes on rising towards the high meadow and the mountains.

But if you enter the woods, you enter a hidden world...

The sky is that deep New Mexico blue as you

descend from the vacant lot by the road,

down into the Sedillo Creek drainage.

Here, the scrub Oak is brown, and the brush

is bare beneath the taller trees.

We seem to go back in time to winter

here in the canyon.

Down the side of the canyon,

we walk. The dogs on a short leash

as we wend our way across the rock.

The rising sun beckons us,

shining on the pines and juniper.

The air is soft, as the winds cross above

the canyon, which shelters us from the blow.

Here in the creek bed, Ponderosa Pines

rise high, nourished by the hidden water

that flows below the surface.

The ground rises on both sides, and

Pennsylvanian limestone tumbles toward us,

as float, down the steep flanks of the canyon.

Here in the hidden world,
snow lingers on the hillsides,
and makes frozen pools among
the tumble of rock.

Uphill, we walk now, toward the meadow

and the rising sun.

A tangle of scrub,

a field of broken rock,

between us and the open space.

And as we crest the canyon top, the open meadow and home is before us.

Hot coffee and breakfast await us, as the sun gains height in the morning sky.