I’M HAVING trouble believing the sprawls of prickly pear booby-trapping this muddy New Mexico hillside have survived the thirty years since I last saw them. Each prickly pear beside the trail to the crest evokes a soft inward pause, quiet as the quiet of your hands dipping down toward something they want to hold, though you wouldn’t actually touch these, ever, because their two- or three-inch spines, pointing every which way, project a mad happiness at the prospect of wounding. Apart from these glorious spines, admittedly a big apart, they’re drab. Lowly, too, their cockeyed stems supporting pads of withered army green rising barely above the dry bunch grasses: their growth habit resembles the crawl of prison escapees elbowing along under searchlights. They’ve lasted, though. They’ve sat tight. On this hillside mauled by wind, they’ve eked out a living, a thing my carpenter husband and I failed at. He used to call this the ass end of nowhere, sometimes lovingly, sometimes not. In the paperbacks on his nightstand, Earth had long ago been abandoned. He used lottery tickets for bookmarks. He adored me. He drank. Darkly resigned post-apocalyptic musing was hilarious to us. If he were here I would tell him what’s just occurred to me, that Opuntia polyacantha might well end up with ravens and rats and cockroaches in a scrappy posthuman cohort of genius survivors, and he’d say In good company, then.
He’d say Prickly pear does tend to hang in there.
He’d say So there’ll be flowers in 2043, and we’d both laugh.
The December cold smells of petrichor, wet stone, whispers of woodsmoke from the house on the other side of the hill, whose corner fireplace I used to squat on my heels in front of, blowing the sparks brighter, feeding them crumpled pages of story drafts. I’m feeling the 6000 feet above sea level, the steepness of the switchbacks, the uncoiling of reckless grief. My son and his wife—rockclimbers from Salt Lake City, well used to feats of exertion in thin air—are far enough ahead not to hear, but my wife, just a little way behind, is probably worrying about how harsh and raggedy my breathing is. It almost feels like it could rain again, or even sleet. This kind of piercing, get-under-your-clothes chill was absent from my memory of our years here. The sky is a slow-motion pour of cumulonimbus, and below that the rumpled, worn-out badlands, miles of hillsides ruched by erosion, separated by creases and dry rills stitched with fawn bunchgrass, the long, unfolded landscape of bony ridges and softer flanks, a small, set-apart, unspectacular planet done in shades of old pink chalk, old seashell, old ochre, horizontal ribbons of rust or taupe showing intermittently, those strata always at the same height, the summits crowned, here and there, with anvils or hoodoos or spires, too random and modest ever to have made it onto a postcard.
My husband again: Nothing to write home about.
Find the house: when we’d talked about it over coffee in our Santa Fe Airbnb, the half-hour drive north had seemed like a little adventure, the kind an amusingly quarrelsome family in a movie would go on, and would learn funny lessons in empathy from. I ought to have known exactly how to get to the house I had loved so well, but I didn’t. What should have been windswept and vacant was built up, the reckless curves of dirt roads had been domesticated, houses and trailers had been set down in fields where half-wild horses had grazed a minute ago. At last, this hill: I cried out—just a cry, not words—and my son in the front passenger seat turned around alarmed and held my gaze with eyes very like his father’s, held it (and, always, this is when I tip into the old cosmos of himand-me) before turning back, his profile—startlingly, a grown man’s—telling his wife, at the last instant the instruction had a chance of working, Pull over, love, as she, with her quick reflexes, had willingly done, though if she’d had the chance to reflect she might have wondered whether the last several days’ rain had left the shoulder treacherously muddy and the SUV might end up stuck.
Can we get there from here? my daughter-in-law asked, as we piled out.
—even as I was apologizing my mistake was worsening, not only because to put everyone to all of this trouble just to look down on the roof of the house seemed selfish but because I had been wrong to think I could handle seeing the house from distance. After the baby I had needed a job with health insurance, and the job was in California, and this house, a hundredyear-old adobe displaying, when my husband and I fell for it, the irreconcilable properties of great and archaic austerity of design and several generations’ slap-dash and jerry-rigged improvements, so that in the years we spent under its roof we seemed to be coaxing the house to drift backward in time and
