another story

Yesterday Nambe Pueblo was having dances, up at the falls. There was just time to go up before work. It's not possible to head into the Espanola Valley from Santa Fe without running into a story or two from the past. I lived on the edge of that valley for almost 4 years, and knew it like, yeah, the back of my hand. The front of my hand, more like (why don't people say that instead?). Roads stretching out their lifelines in every direction. But I forgot how thick the stories grow in Nambe. Or how the roads out there grow as well, gnarled and twisted like tree roots. Irrational and interweaving like dreamstories. One minute you're topping a hill, with an unbroken view of the Sangres in front of you, and the next you're following what seems to be an arroyo under somebody's house. If you take more than two turns you find yourself back at the same intersection where you started. I passed a stop sign that had to go on the left side of the road, because a giant cottonwood was taking up every inch of space on the right, and part of the road too. It's a dreamlike place for sure.

Diving off the pavement into a road/arroyo that I think leads through the pueblo's center, I pass a church I visited a couple times, long ago. Back when I still visited churches to see how people in that realm were doing community. But that's an old story now, buried under years of road. Further down is the house where, back when I was a new homeowner - trailer owner, that is - a yard sale one Saturday offered all the materials I needed to start remodeling. That's one of the few stories that felt like it ended the way it wanted to. Rounding a green curve, this road looks familiar now: Michael Nesmith's summer house is right around here somewhere. I spent a summer afternoon there, sampling champagne and caviar, listening to an impressive collection of artists, writers, activists, all there at his personal invitation, speak their visions of how to improve the world. I didn't speak with Mr. Nesmith (just as well, as citing my membership at 16 in the ranks of Second Wave Monkees fans would've been something for both of us to cringe about). But I sat next to him for a highly entertaining half hour, operating recording equipment as my date for the party interviewed him. He was as original, ironic, insightful, and funny in his own fix-the-world ideas as anybody there. But that's definitely another story.

The Pueblo of Nambe has my best wishes, but I don't feel up to supporting them with the $10.00 entry fee I encounter at the gate to the falls. Backtracking, I take another side road, and suddenly, I'm at the turn to Violet Roybal's house. How not to go and take a look? It's been years since I've even been by, although I came back to this turnoff more than once after declining that particular story's invitation. It was fall of 1997. I had landed in Tesuque a few months earlier, where my sister gave me a kind welcome and a place to recover from a few years of story I'm not even gonna mention here. Now I'm looking for a place of my own to settle. A handwritten paper on a public bulletin board has led me out to the Nambe loop, where there's a place for rent. A right turn onto a county road, a left turn into an arroyo and then a narrow, climbing driveway lined with lilac bushes and ancient-looking stonework. The eroding hillside around the place is fortified with old pallets, pieces of tin, and tree branches, all held in more or less place with baling wire. It looks like the hill's bones are showing. The house is invisible from below, perched on a hilltop and surrounded by cottonwood ramparts like a green fortress. It's old, I can't tell how old, classic northern New Mexico with hand-planed wood walls, pitched tin roof, and wraparound porch. It's poised at a lovely point just this side of dilapidated. There's a sort of barn out back, with an ancient truck that hasn't run for 20 years inside. The rental sits between these: an adobe casita, sheltered by cottonwood shade, furnished in classic 1950's Granny Style: spare, sparse, practical.

Violet Roybal herself strikes me at first view as the perfect combination of my two very different grandmothers. She has the small, compact build of my mother's mother, and looks ready (like my granny) for any work the day might offer and then some. She's wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her silver hair is not permed, but straight and shoulder length. In her eyes, I see the spark and energy and love for life that I admire most in my father's mother. She greets me kindly, shows me the place, answers all my questions. We turn from the casita, and her eyes light up a little brighter. "Want to see the horses?" she asks, in a voice that makes me feel like we are two six-year-olds, and the world is our own gorgeous secret to explore. Her enthusiasm, it almost feels like joy, is tangible, contagious. They're not even her horses; they're only staying here awhile. We climb a short rise behind the house, and a small meadow and a manmade pond appear, in the back corner of the place. The pond is also ringed by the grand old cottonwoods. It's just a little island of paradise.

Why don't I take the place? There are definite practical considerations. The road out will be a challenge, maybe an impassable one, for my two-wheel-drive truck, come winter. The 40-minute drive to work is hard to picture, since I drive for a living already. But probably the deciding factor comes when she tells me that the place is for sale, and there's no telling how long I would get to be a renter there. With the uprootings I've already come through in the last year, I can't stand the thought of getting attached to another place and then having to leave it. Especially a place like this one.

I don't remember how we ended our conversation that day: if I declined in that moment, or asked to think about it awhile. I do remember that I felt thoroughly welcomed in the short time I spent on her little hilltop. I tried to imagine what life would be, up there. Would we keep our own silent green spaces? Would we sit on the porch at sunset and drink tea and talk about life, breathing lilac perfume and watching the mountains change colors? Where was she going, after she sold her house? What kind of difference might a few months there have made? And in one of those irrational dream-spaces in the mind, I think of Violet Roybal as a grandmother I never had. An alter-dimension grandmother.

This morning I got up to breakfast with my housemates, and was offered another story for the here and now. Instead of my taking on the entire renovation of this dilapidated old casita here - a sort of condition of my moving in with them, and one that's become kind of overwhelming, lately - what if they gathered all their friends, pooled their knowledge and their energies, and organized a couple of workdays to get the place fixed up? We could cook for people, make it fun, make it worth their while. Build community, and build the barter network they're already helping to start here in the Valley. And my part? Probably to swing a hammer or a paintbrush, where I can. But much more significant than that: my part would be to ask for the help that I need. With the things I can't possibly do myself, but keep pretending that I can. And just as essential: my part is to ask for another story, when I need one, when the current one is getting too sad and heavy to keep carrying around. Alright, then, I'm catching on. I want another story. Not an entire replacement, because a lot of the parts of this life right now are really beautiful, and I want to see how they turn out. But I want another telling of the things that are possible, and the changes that aren't too late, and the connections that don't have to be uprooted, and the ways that I am not alone. That's the story I would like to begin, if it's not too late, in this time and place.