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Sidenotes

By Peter Kidd, April 2011

For those of you who have experienced what I am told has been an old fashioned New Hampshire winter, filled with snow and cold on an ongoing basis, I shall explain that I get two springs. The first takes place in Texas the end of February and the month of March. Jonquils and tulips are up, soon the Bradford Pears will be in bloom in Amarillo. Though I shall confess I was held up in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, for two days at a Motel 6 with the Interstate closed down after an inch of snow. On one side was a Denny’s and the other side was a MacDonald’s. This was at the end of January, returning from a visit with an elder poet friend in Arizona. The temperature was –3 degrees, windy, and I was in the desert. I even had a chicken fried steak at Denny’s one night. Two nights and a day, computer plugged in and Wi-fi. I wrote some poems, played a lot of online poker, chatted some, and kept my heater cranked up while the winds blew loudly. Every now and then I’d look outside and see a local driver try and drive in a parking lot fish tailing, knowing why they shut the interstate down. I worked it out with the maid, no need to clean my room, just give me oodles of coffee packets with sugar and powdered cream.

I have enjoyed moving around this winter through Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, looking at the desert, the grasslands, the high plain, the mountains, and the woods, and trees growing in areas with water available. There are wide open skies and incredible sunsets. The wind is the driving force, as is the sun, in carving out these lands. Most of the time we are able to see from the highways, side-winding dry riverbeds that every now and then break thru with a wall of waters after a rainy period.

Coming from a state that is 85 percent forests, this is quite dramatically different. Rather than rhodis and mountain laurel I see cactus and prickly pears. An oak here means a live oak which grows maybe 30-35 feet tall, with a small leaf. It supplies partial shade, but there is little real shade here in the West,

So, back to my original statement. I get to see flower trees and shrubs here in March. Today it was mid-70s, but windy. The middle of next week seems projected to be mid 50s. By the time I leave here at the end of March, drive back to New Hampshire, I’ll see the similar pattern reoccur, but a month later. This country holds such a diversity of ecologies, cultures, ethnicities, dialects, and sensibilities. This leads to the richness of experience. Should also be, to some degree, humbling that things and events are perceived differently by different persons with different experiences.

I have only a few weeks left to stay up all night and sleep all day, to sit down to a keyboard each day, to work daily on a project – in this case a novel – hoping the phone does not ring. Soon, I shall abandon this ship and get up each morning, return phone calls, run a business for another season.

Well, I hope you all have enjoyed the winter, used it to its best use. My biggest question is how much per gallon of gas and diesel will they bilk from us this year?