WENDELL FIELD An Artist's Work

The wind is strong on the road leading to the grave yard. Tall cottonwoods give up their leaves to a golden path.

I wonder about the people buried here. Many born in the early 1800's. Our nation was still young. We kept slaves and fought a civil war. While we moved west our government was engaging in genocide against the native population.

Were the souls to who's bones these belong escaping something; the law, a dark secret? Or did they merely not fit in to society; outcasts continuing the migration their relatives most likely began by crossing the Atlantic on a wind powered ship.

I imagine how different it was then. Private jets are landing in the distance, as our economic system is collapsing.

Were these people the artists and thinkers who are drawn to solitude. Were they as the mystics who move closer to God in isolation and through self imposed suffering amid wild beauty? Or were they merely desperate and lost. What was turning their restless hearts.

Eventually my thoughts yield to the wind and are taken away, leaving me to be with my painting. I feel like a child, immersed in the simple pleasure of being alone at my secret spot.

A painter in nature is unique in that few others take the time; several hours or days even, to develop such an intimacy with a place as humble as a bend in the road.

The wind has chilled my bones, the last drops of light pour behind the Tetons like slow honey. The animals always return at twilight. Antelope and mule deer watch me. A lone bison in the distance is a dark mass against cobalt granite.

Yesterday's wind has turned the golden landscape cool gray. Leaves have fallen. In all directions mountain's hide behind thin cloud veils. Their massiveness is revealed just above where the valley floor covers cold rock all the way to lava.

The season's first snow falls gently. My wood pile takes on more urgency.

Day settles in the valley, wet and heavy. Snow thickens the sky.

Luminous against the cairn that began for Alan is a bright orange marigold -alive! It's the only flower left of the many planted in spring. It's Alexi's marigold, an unlikely survivor from New Mexico. Off all the flowers she planted before deciding to leave her body this is the one I chose to dig up and care for in Wyoming. That flower let me grieve in it's watering and offerings of burning sandalwood. It traveled and grew in the small clay pot I gave her one year ago. Like Alexi, yesterday was golden. Leaves sparked like her smile.

Today is heavy and dark like the world she chose to leave. Sure the flower won't survive the snow I pick it and offer it to her picture in a place that is warm. Alexi didn't like the cold, she was sunshine. The brightness of the sunshine I saw in her was also what blinded me to the darkness that caught me so off guard last spring.

There are no what ifs, there's only what is.

Silver pines are revealed behind drifting lakes in the sky. A heavy day clings to mountains while around town there are festivals of October. Brats on the grill at the bike shop, local mead tastings, grilled lamb kabobs and mounds of vegetables are sold. Beer flows around the corner at the brewery. Wet dogs wait patiently for their next calling.

Wyoming is one of those places were seasons are layers of change that lie together long before becoming their own. Pale green holds on beneath golden grasses. Crimson deep yellow glows beneath new fallen snow. Infinite crystals of water rest on lichen and rock before moving through earth, disappearing to come again and again in a cycle that has repeated itself long before memory and will continue long after history.

10 Oct, 08; a very auspicious date in my own lucky number system. I've known ten to be my lucky number since the 4th grade. The number four is also obviously lucky despite what some Chinese may say. I was born on the forth day of the forth month. Two tens then two fours equaling eight.

The temperature barely rose above the point of freezing today. My fire has been burning for days now. I am reminded of the pleasurable company of a heavy breathing tea pot on top the wood stove. There is the sound of crackling logs and steam; outside, creaking cotton woods and frisky horses. The heavy cowbell hanging in the garden sings to the wind that blows hard out of the east.

I celebrated that cold wind and snow tonight with a healthy glass of Montana mead while coiling hoses and pulling carrots underneath a heavy slanted cloud ceiling. There is meat on the grill with a harvest of squash and peppers, onion and chard.

It was dark early. The weatherman is calling for a winter storm tomorrow from Bozeman to Laramie. Up to a foot of snow in the valleys and four in the mountains. If it's going to last. If this is winter, I'm not quite ready.

When the wind blows strong from the north in Kelly Wyoming you take notice. It's the wind that is like a freight train; nothing in it's way from Yellowstone until the wall of firewood stacked outside. It's the North wind that blew the day we gathered in the park to remember Alan, and the wind that makes me glad I replaced the ropes that tie down the yurt only days ago.

By all accounts the heavy snow is still coming. So far the sky has only spit a few stinging bits. The trees between here and the river hold on, tops shaking wildly, releasing leaves before they are ready. Another violent gust hammers my home like a massive wave pounding into a study vessel at sea. This yurt is a sturdy vessel at the stormy edge of a sea of sage, between the Teton range and the Gros Ventres.

Elk are on the move down through heavy timber to their refuge south of here. Edgar lies on the floor, attentive and concerned. Himala I suspect is getting a belly rub in someone's cabin or hunkered down under an elderberry bush in one of her "nests" dug out for a cool spot in the summer. Today I am well aware there is only canvas and wooden lath separating me from the first bite of winter.