Spirit dancerIsn't he wonderful? He's a giant Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer, sculpted and cast in bronze by San Carlos Apache artist Craig Dan Goseyun. He stands about 3m (10 feet) tall, caught in perpetual motion. Though he's so big, and has been sculpted in such a chunky way, you can still see all the tassels flying on his deerskin, and almost hear the bells round his hips and knees. To say nothing of all the feathers swirling about him.He's outside Santa Fe's spectacular Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, in the beautiful courtyard gardens of Museum Hill, off the Old Santa Fe Trail.When I was a kid in England, I was crazy about North American Indians. I even made myself an Indian shield out of cardboard, copied from an encyclopaedia, slathering it with textured paint to simulate ochres, and using my fingers to paint figures on it. There were feathers as well — though they would have been from English wild birds, not eagles or anything exotic! It hung over my girly bed, with its candlewick bedspread instead of the softened animal pelts and deerskins I dreamed of ...
:: I spent hours, yesterday, looking online at property for sale in Perth. I was really very pleasantly surprised — especially when you get out of the western suburbs. So many amazing places for sale! We'll be renting when we first get back, then eventually looking to buy in North Perth, Highgate, Inglewood, Mt Lawley and Maylands.
:: Poor Lily has not had the best news about her broken foot. She is going to need surgery. Bugger. And the orthopaedic specialist told her that in that one mis-step, she'd done so much damage to her foot that there were several chipped and broken bones (ligaments ripped off bones, taking bits of bone with them as they tore).
So, we'll be getting hold of a wheelchair and helping her get about in New York next week. It'll feel familiar to her: last time she was in NY, two years ago, she broke the other ankle, and ended up in Cedars-Sinai hospital.

On isolation I watched a great documentary about Annie Proulx last night. It was a few years old, and in it she was researching and writing That Old Ace in the Hole, which I think was published in 2003. It was a fascinating documentary, though i confess I haven't read anything of hers since Postcards, which I didn't like nearly as much as The Shipping News, which remains one of my favourite novels.
Anyway, the program told of Annie's great love of driving herself all over the US, and how she lived in the Panhandle areas of Texas, in a little house all by herself, to research the hog farms and rural environment of this largely neglected part of the US for Aces in the Hole. And then, to write her book, she took herself off home, briefly, to her house in Wyoming, where she lives way out in the sticks so she can ski in winter.
There, she organised all her research material, and eventually took off again for her other house in a tiny little seaside village in Newfoundland.
All of which brought to mind our recent visit to Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico. On two or three hectares in the middle of this huge ranch, Georgia O'Keeffe had a low-slung adobe house, Rancho de los Burros, in which she lived off and on from the 1940s, in contented and productive solitude.
Her husband, Arthur Stieglitz, remained in New York, holding showings of her paintings, pushing up her profile and her prices. You can visit Ghost Ranch and stand on spots that must have been darned close to the actual places O'Keeffe set up her easel to paint some of her landscapes. But unfortunately, you cannot visit her house, which remains private and inaccessible — though you can catch a glimpse of it from the track. (If you click on the pic, you'll get a bigger image.) Well, I was enchanted by all this, and in raptures over the desert landscape. I joked to David that this would be a perfect set-up for us. I could live out here, painting and working in the beautiful wilderness, while he could live in some city somewhere, doing amazing PR for his wife and organising fabulous exhibitions of her work. Just the ticket.
But then I got thinking about the solitude. The place is remote even today. In O'Keeffe's day, getting into Santa Fe, which is about 95 kilometres away, or Taos, almost the same distance, would have been major undertakings on dirt roads in slow vehicles.
She had no electricity at her house, either.
I could get by without TV and computer, and maybe even radio, so long as I had the means to listen to music or something.
O'Keeffe had occasional help, and visitors and even guests, and the main ranch house was only about a a couple of kilometres away.
But those evenings must have been very long and quiet.
I don't think I could have hacked it — and even if my set-up was more like Annie Proulx's, with electricity, and connections to the outside world, I'd still find that solitary life unsettling, I think.

Gold in them hillsI was unprepared for the beauty of northern New Mexico. I think I expected dusty deserts, candlestick cactus, rocky mesas and barren plains.
But the reality was so totally different.
We went for a drive up, up, up to the Santa Fe National Forest, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where they run the ski-lift in the autumn — way before the ski season starts — just so you can get up to 3500 metres (11,500 feet) and look down on all the wonderful colours.
It was a wild day, really cold up there, with driving rain and big winds, the tail end of a hurricane that had been blowing in from the south-west across Baja California. So the chair lift wasn't working.
Now, my Dave is scared of heights, so I'd been curious to see how he'd deal with a ski-lift — and he didn't disappoint me. When he saw what he'd have had to sit in, his immediate reaction was, 'Where are the seatbelts?' So it was sort of lucky for him that rain had stopped play!
On the way down from the mountains, the wind really whipped up and the sky was for a moment filled with swirling yellow hearts as the aspens lost their leaves. It was breathtaking.Apparently, this clear hillside of aspens is where there was a big fire in the 1880s. The evergreens were killed, and the sun-loving aspens wasted no time in getting established in this sudden gap. Eventually, the evergreens will grow again and squeeze out the aspens, but for now there's this little piece of wonder to enjoy.