Life in a bubble

Yesterday I went up to Dixon with my friends Rob and Gary. Dixon is a small town north of Santa Fe, just off the road up to Taos. It's quite pretty there, and like almost every small town in northern New Mexico, there are a number of artists there, and every year they have an open studio event the first weekend in November.

Rob and Gary know a lot of people up there, so we did a lot of visiting and socializing, and that was fun. We saw some arts and crafts. It was a beautiful day.

There was one artist, a landscape painter, who was wildly popular. We didn't go to his studio, because we ran out of time, but we saw about six of his paintings, three of which had been bought by people who were visiting at the house where R and G's good friend lives. The paintings were framed with gold frames from Mexico. Supposedly the guy produces at least one painting a day and orders the frames by the hundreds. The whole idea of art and who is an artist in New Mexico is testing my judgmental side in a big way. But these paintings were lovely.

Dixon seemed like a throwback to my early hippie days. It felt very much to me like what life was like when I was in my twenties in Tallahassee. I knew people over the years who lived that way, in Cornwall, CT, for instance. It's pleasant, but it's not for me. Even though Santa Fe is hardly a city like New York, it feels urban enough.

Anyway, we visited a family that has a self-supporting household, with a big geodesic dome that is a functioning greenhouse, full of amazing things growing, including a fig tree that produces fruit, melons, all kinds of greens and root vegetables. It was beautiful and lush inside there. They also have chickens and turkeys- one of them a beautiful male turkey who refused to pose for a photo.

 

Well, since Thanksgiving is right around the corner, I worried that this guy's days were numbered. But no, the husband said they've already killed this year's bird. This guy is NEXT year's meal. Oy.