another friday night

so i'm at the checkout line in lowe's, and i've got two kinds of ice cream and milk and cereal, and maybe something else, so i put it all down on the conveyor while the woman in front of me finishes her transaction. a beautiful little girl is tugging at the woman's leg and begging for ice cream, clear as a bell, in english, though they appear to be mexican, all three of them; the father is off to the side, and he's nice, they're all nice to me. i'm waiting there patiently. the woman has won in the store's promotion, but giving her credit, when she has used food stamps, has caused some kind of problem, and they're unable to finish the transaction without ringing the whole thing up again. the little girl keeps tugging and saying "ice cream! ice cream!"

finally they back off and let me go through with my few groceries, but the irony of it is, i walk off without any of my own ice cream. i take the milk, and the cereal, and whatever else, but i don't see the ice cream, and i leave without it.

the little girl, sweet and beautiful as she was, was probably getting enough to eat, one way or the other. you'd find a lot of people, i think, who are in an uncomfortable position, in the grocery line, and can't even walk off with a five buck prize. i'm not sure how it turned out. in the end i went back, and they'd put my ice cream back in the freezer, and i found it, right there where i'd gotten it to begin with.

we had a little vacation to the mountains of new mexico; came back to an empty but relatively clean house; now we have our eyes on a little strip of land on this one mountain in new mexico, just under the high peak where clouds hover, they always have rain, and where it's often thirty, forty or fifty degrees cooler than lubbock. we breathed that high cool piney mountain air for a week, though the boys never even wanted to give up their screens, even for a minute. we went out in it, reveled in it, and finally started land-hunting in it.

so this three-point-four acres is on a hillside looking down on the highway just as it's about to shoot into a tunnel, but we never quite found it exactly because we were given wrong directions to where it actually was, and turned back too soon. supposedly you can see the tunnel from this land. supposedly there is enough room to build a house, though the lot is very wide and narrow and runs along a ridge; because we didn't see it, we're not sure how that would work. and one more thing, there's a cave nearby, i think it's across the road, and this ridge looks right at that cave, and the springs come right on out of the mountain right there on that ridge, and supposedly they blew up the front of the cave when they built the road underneath it. so i would guess, though i'm not sure, that the little ridge with the mountain springs coming out of it, and down into the creek by the road, is a very important place historically, for these cave people who so wisely used the cave to duck in out of the sun, and hide from the cool rain of the mountaintop eight miles up.

these days, of course, you come down off the mountain on eighty two, you go through the town of high rolls new mexico, where this property is, technically, and, as you come to the tunnel, i believe if you look to the left you'll see what's left of the cave. if you look to the right you'll see our hillside, ours, that is, if we buy it. if you look either way you're in mortal danger of smashing into the walls of the tunnel, it's better to do as they say, put your lights on, don't stop, shoot right through the tunnel and end up in alamogordo. we're talking sacramento mountains here, the southern end of the rockies. way different from lubbock, the air is high, and fresh, and cool, and the rivers have water in them. at least they did, when we were there.