To New Mexico with Love - Part III

Dust.
Red.
Fine.
Red.
Present.
Here. There. Everywhere.
In the air, in the trees, on the window sills, in the doorway, on the plates, in the sink, in the bed, on my sheets, in my shoes, between my toes, in my eyes, in my hair, in my clothes, in my books, between the pages, between all spaces.
Dust.
Easily blown but never away.
I always thought my grand-mother would go crazy here.
She spent a good portion of her life rubbing furniture down with Pledge to rid it of dust. And it worked. Dust-be-gone and shine-like-new.
Not here. Not New Mexico.
All those years she and my mother and every other grown woman in my family groomed the girls to be perfect housekeepers with Pledge as our pledge. I often wonder what else I could have learned in place of dusting had I been born and raised in New Mexico....nothing more liberating I am sure but possibly more practical like skinning green chilies.

October 1986. Halloween. Winter came with a vengeance.

As we bustled around campus in holiday attire, the winter sky thickened. Old Man Winter exhaled a giant blast of snow into the lungs of Father Sky, and as his lungs expanded, His great chest pressed down upon the earth. At 7,000 feet above sea level, it is hard to ignore the sky.

Dressed in combat boots and a white cape coat, I ran from the lower dorms to the cafeteria where the evening's festivities were going on. The wind whirled. The air was crystalline cold.

Inside The Smiths moaned. The radiant heat of dancing bodies was a welcome warmth to the cold plunge of the night. I joined the dance but kept my eyes trained to the windows. The wind and the deepening darkness were giving new meaning to All Hallow's Eve.

I do not recall the precise moment when the dark turned gray and the gray turned white but I do remember the seconds it took for the black night to disappear. Two breaths and the entire building was whirling inside a tornado of snow. We were Dorothy again flying through space, head over heels, tumbling and singing, "I am the son and the heir...."

Nothing but snow particles.
Teeny tiny pointelistic realism...
Spin and fall.
Twirl and dive.
Dense and vast.
The mother of all snows
on All Hallow's Eve...

We danced among every single spirit that walked upon this earth from the beginning of time...each snow crystal a particle of spirit, unique, unlike any other. We danced in defiance of death knowing yet not believing for a single second we too will pass as does the snow: a shimmering crystal, perfect radiance, and brutally fragile.

Whirl on...shine on...crazy, crazy diamond.