Remembering Spring

And now a blazing and muscular Summer has fallen over La Mancha. The locals say it’s going to be a bad one. When I open the door to the Hermitage it feels like I’m stepping into an oven. The sun throbs and shimmers and drains the colors of the landscape, leaving everything looking like an old polaroid photo. People avert their eyes from the sun, hide beneath broad brimmed hats, and scurry from one spot of shade to the next.

Fancy Dan

I met Dan last year when I arrived in La Mancha, and I immediately noticed how gorgeous he is. He’s one of the beautiful people. He just is. But his nickname comes from the way he dresses. Every day, so it seems to me, is a costume party for Fancy Dan.

Solitude

I have found solitude to be beautiful and terrible, uplifting and overwhelming, nurturing and destroying, a source of joy and of pain. There is a heaviness to solitude when it comes rolling at you low and hard and constant. When it is every night. When your life has called you to it and you must obey. When you long for human contact but there is none to be found.

Saboteur

There is a pole near the International Bocce Court at the end of Gallagher Lane. Atop this pole is a bright lamp that is never turned off. All night long it blazes away, slashing beams of light through the trees and opening great wounds in the darkness of the Valley.

The Tao of La Mancha

Few people know there is a secret entrance into La Mancha from beyond the Western Wild Lands. The old road behind the Lost Boys drops sharply downhill and then turns, ending at a chained gate. Beyond the gate is some sort of beatnik community, as best I can tell. Roxi lives out there somewhere. And I’m guessing so do the people who play the drums at night.

Roxi

Roxi works on the landscaping in La Mancha. I met her months ago and we talk sometimes when I come across her and her dog Elijah working in the flower beds. But I never really saw Roxi until the big freeze.

But they never got my mind

Across the Valley the tree canopy rises and pulls your eyes upward to the Modern Wizard’s Tower atop the opposing hill, a sleek and shiny thing of metal, glass, and stone. At night muted blue flickerings in the windows bear witness to the omnipresence of the media gods.