I stayed in bed until almost 7:30 because the wind just sounded cold but it wasn't all that comfortable. I'm not sure when Kilo wakes up, but she is always waiting. The first move I make she is in my face asking if I'm ready to leave yet. There are days when I'm not, but that just brings out her heartless side - "we need to hurry up and go". And it's not like the place we go to is always inviting. There aren't ever any other people there but this morning it's 25 degrees and the wind is 30-40 mph. The really strange part is, no matter how rotten the weather, at some point I'm always glad I went.
The pasture I walk in the most often contains the last remnant of the original U.S. 380. We've always lived within a couple of blocks from the area and when I was a kid, the access to it wasn't fenced like it is now. To a 10 year old on a bicycle trip it was a piece of highway, maybe 1/4 mile long, that just ended at a fence for no apparent reason. I even remember watching it deteriorate through subsequent decades and regarding it as similar to erosion on a cliff face. And although the city maintenance has modified that area in the past five years, blading it up and taking out the remaining asphalt, there are still interesting indications of what it was. So far I have found two New Mexico license plates. The first was 1939 and in bad shape, but the second one is from 1930 and in almost perfect form (no paint). My first thoughts were of who it might have belonged to, why were they in this place, and what was the penalty back then for driving without a license plate. I find artifacts such as these interesting because of an overlay of personally relevant time-lines. A Century is actually not that long, my step-father and his family came here in either 1907 or 1911 (New Mexico was a Territory) in a covered wagon before there were any roads; and a half-Century (a little less than my age) is not that long, 18 was just a short time ago; but the changes that have occurred are astonishing. I never feel "frozen in time", but I sometimes feel frozen in a space, watching time stretch in both directions.