Two days after returning to Santa Fe in August 2025, I drove south to Cerrillos to housesit for Tish & Dave. The timing mattered. I had only just gotten back to the city after a long, difficult stretch away, and before Santa Fe could fully become routine again, I stepped into a different kind of New Mexico quiet. Their place sits in that broader high-desert stillness where the land feels more spread out, and the silence is not absence so much as atmosphere. I had my notebook, my dog Pipes, a smaller set of obligations than usual, and no real agenda except to pay attention. That is often when the best writing shows up for me: not when I am demanding it, but when the conditions are clear enough for me to stop interrupting it.
The housesit gave me something I had been short on for months: spaciousness. Not empty time, but breathable time. The kind that lets a thought complete itself before you move on to the next one. I walked the property, looked out at the worn structures and the open sky, and kept noticing how much the place held weather without looking defeated by it. New Mexico has that gift. Weather marks things here, but it also dignifies them. The land does not apologize for age, wear, or exposure. It simply keeps standing. That mattered to me more than I knew at the time. I had come through a season that had marked me too. Cerrillos gave me a landscape that did not ask me to hide the marks or explain them away.
Echoes in the Desert Homestead came out of that housesit in exactly the way the best poems do: with enough surprise to let me know I was listening instead of manufacturing. The cabin, the sky, the dry air, the sense of history held in wood and dust and light—all of it was already there. My job was simply not to miss it. I wrote more cleanly in Cerrillos than I had in other places that year because the place itself was doing part of the work. It steadied me. It gave me an image world that was specific enough to trust. I am always chasing specificity on the page. Cerrillos offered it in every direction I turned.
Echoes in the Desert Homestead
Beneath the vast New Mexico skies, Where clouds like cotton softly rise. An olden cabin, walls weather-worn, Stands solemnly in the desert, forlorn.
Read the full poem →There is also something to be said for writing immediately after return. August 2025 was not just about beauty. It was about recalibration. I had come back to Santa Fe carrying the emotional residue of the previous months, and the housesit let some of that residue settle into language instead of just living unnamed in the nervous system. Pipes needed care. The day had its simple tasks. But around those ordinary anchors, there was enough silence for me to hear what the season had done to me and what it had not managed to take. That is part of why I trust this entry. It does not read like an abstraction about the desert. It reads like a person, recently returned, standing inside a place that helped me remember my own outline.
I drove back to Santa Fe carrying more than a draft of a poem. I carried a reminder that stillness can be an active collaborator, that landscapes sometimes return language to you when people and appointments and harder seasons have worn it thin, and that a housesit in Cerrillos can become a precise marker on the timeline for when the writing began to feel available again. It was only a few days. It was also exactly enough. Some places are generous that way, and Tish and Dave's place is one of them.