Summer Evening

I once heard someone say that “cellar door,” regardless of meaning, was the most beautiful sounding phrase in the English language—and indeed it is. But I’m proposing another: “summer evening.” In this case, the connotations help.

After supper on these warm evenings in Santa Fe, my dog Pip usually insists on a walk. As the heat abates—we are suffering from climate change, like everyone else—I enjoy snapping on his leash and starting out.

This is an old neighborhood, founded by East Coast painters arriving here in the 1920’s—”the five nuts in five mud huts,”they were called—and due to historic neighborhood restrictions, all the houses are made out of adobe bricks in two antique styles, pueblo or territorial. Most are one story and relatively small although newcomers often add a wing and sometimes a second floor. They are set close to the road—in those days, the barely two-lane road was not considered a menace—but now all are enclosed by adobe walls.

The older walls are usually only about four feet high and so as I pass with Pip, I get a look into open and lighted windows and doors. Because air-conditioning was never considered necessary here, we live an outdoor life of porches, patios and small gardens. With the pandemic taking a new hold on New Mexico, due to ill-advised early opening of businesses and the refusal of some to wear masks, neighbors are more often at home these warm evenings than they would have been during so-called “normal” times when so many gallivanted to restaurants or other forms of entertainment.

Now and then I see the glare of a lighted TV screen but more often it’s the simple domestic scene of a woman putting away supper dishes or a man hovering in front of a bookcase. Sometimes three or four people are eating dinner at a table set in a garden. Cars are parked, noise is at a minimum since the road is deserted. I pass other dog walkers now and then, and we smile behind our masks. The warm air is a balm.

Some neighbors have made a special effort for passersby. First, I see small rocks, set at the roadside, painted with hopeful slogans: “WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.” Recently, Pip and I passed a forty-foot tall pine tree in someone’s yard that had tiny blue fairy lights spread all the way to its topmost branches. I can’t imagine how anyone was able to climb that high, but there the lights are, shining away in the dark foliage as night falls.

As we all struggle with fear, depression, even despair, the way neighbors recognize unknown passersby seems to me to honor all of us and our shared future, no matter what it may turn out to be.

In New Mexico 20 Favorites of 2020 Santa Fe New Mexico