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el martinez service
I’ve been this place a lot of times but never even gave it a second glance. So maybe I missed seeing when it was open, seeing what the local customers were doing.
Or maybe, it’s been closed so long that if I had noticed it before now it would have looked approximately like this.
(Reason 1 to go back over and over to the same place.)
Truchas, New Mexico
photographed 9.3.2024
planning ahead can be helpful
I’ve seen a lot of things in cemeteries, but this was the first “reserved” sign I’ve ever noticed.
I found a book called Spanish Surnames, Older Baptismal First Names and the Origins of the Spanish Language at a tiny grocery store in New Mexico earlier this month. I bought it because it seemed like the right thing to do (it’s less a book, honestly, than it is some photocopied pages stapled together) and because it seemed like the sort of thing that might come in handy. And that’s why I can tell you that the name “Rael” previously appeared “as the name of a soldier, Real de Aguilar from Lorca, Murica, Spain, at paso del norte in the lower Rio Grande in 1689.” My new book further notes that as a surname, “Rael” is of Jewish-Greek origin.
And that concludes today’s lesson. Please carry on.
Truchas, New Mexico
photographed 9.3.2024
window saint
This adobe house sits just across the narrow dirt street from the town’s famous church. It seems like it’s close enough to perhaps get by without a window-saint, but the residents evidently felt otherwise.
Truchas, New Mexico
photographed 7.2.2024
Bitter edges of a winter day
Christmas Eve in a cemetery seemed quite bleak anyway. And there was snow and a new storm moving in, both of which added to the feel of the day.
And this plastic, brittle and broken in the cold, and barbed wire? It just got worse.
Los Llanitos Cemetery
Truchas, New Mexico
photographed 12.24.2015
One Day | One Image 