They found her broken body on Easter morning, 1949. Like other Sundays, they were hunting rabbits on the mesa after church. The village of Mesquite is 12 miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The cemetery was remote but familiar to the three boys who spotted her body partially buried in a shallow arroyo. A…

Rose Henley Hayden Fulton 1881-1968 William Shirley Fulton 1880-1964 Dragoon, Arizona Upstairs in the back is the room devoted to the Folgers who established all this in 1937. He was crazy about archaeology. She was crazy about Quarter Horses. Pictures show pastures of foals frolicking between the Texas Canyon boulders. Founding sires stand square and…

 Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day  And with thy bloody and invisible hand  Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond  Which keeps me pale. Light thickens, and the crow  Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.  Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,  Whiles nights black agents to their preys do rouse.  Thou marvel’st at my words, but hold thee still.  Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill. Act III Scene II

En route to Tucson, visiting the Luna County Historical Society’s Deming Luna Mimbres Museum in the old Armory building again. Down the long hall past the not-great paintings are the gems and minerals. I was staring at the “Apache Tears,” like my brother collected in the Jemez in the 1950s, when I heard a loud…

They wake me in the morning, keening. Crying and counting themselves. Telling about the territories and where mean humans live. Calls about when and where to cross the highways and probably boasts about their conquests. “They can live almost anywhere; they can eat almost anything. Poison them, shoot them, trap them – coyotes come back.…

I love the cottonwood tree. Everything about it, including the nuisances of cotton and pollen (not the same thing,) the soft wood that’s not great for stoves and fireplaces, the tendency to “self prune” and drop heavy branches onto cars, roofs, and fences. I still love it because “they aren’t making trees like that anymore.”…

Is it really camping if you haven’t forgotten something important or yelled obscenities at a tent pole? The big loop around southeast New Mexico took three days. The first night was at Valley of Fires and the second, Dog Canyon, or Oliver Lee. On my final night I stayed in Truth or Consequences for a…

The church was locked up tight. We drove around the vast parking lot, acutely aware of what’s under the tires – probably a plaza and multi-story pueblo.  We came to see the interior of Socorro’s San Miguel Mission. Our associate Chan Graham was involved in a renovation in the 1970s and considered it one of…