GRACK! is Back…

Greetings from New Mexico!

If you haven’t bookmarked this page, maybe the latest **free** online column will do the trick. I call it “Peaceful Heart” and think it has a lot to say. Even if it doesn’t, the photographs are pretty cool, and who can complain about the cost?

Here’s a special extended excerpt, the first few paragraphs actually, exclusively for MyMac readers. You may be surprised at what follows this when you read the whole thing, but here you go for now:

‘Sometimes you learn a lifetime’s worth, just by listening.

The other day my 74-year-old neighbor told me of a time she heard a voice inside her head and built a house. The undertaking was enormous, and she wondered whether she was up to it. Fortunately, the voice said “YES!” and the rest is glorious history. She said the house was built with tons of love and laughter, and you feel that sitting on the simple earthen patio. The years have taken their toll the way they always do, but it’s still a beautiful place, with a solid adobe first floor and a framed-in upper story bedroom, set just above a flowing acequia on a steep hillside with views of mountains all around.

One winter night several decades ago, she and her partner had just moved in when a fearsome blizzard blew in from the Rockies. There was plastic stapled up in lieu of windows, and the unfinished structure rattled and shook. The fellow decided he’d had enough and trudged next door to seek shelter with a friend who always stayed up late. My neighbor would have none of this and burrowed deeper in the covers while the snow piled up. (“If it was going to blow away, it would have to take me with it,” she recounted.) Later she heard noises, shouting maybe, through the roaring wind: outside was her lover, staggering through the drifts to get back home. She climbed down the ladder from the loft and hurried out to haul him in. Safely back inside, the question of the moment was just what his friend had been doing behind adobe walls at 2:00 a.m., while the storm was raging all around:

“Just sitting there, staring at his shoes…”

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If I’ve typed the URLs in wrong and can’t update this post, just go to JHFarr.com or hit the GRACK! ad on your right. Onward, muchachos. It’s a short life and we have to make the best of it.