Louisa's Letters Home — December 1946

December 28, 1946

Dear Mother,

I hope this finds you well and that Christmas in Charlotte was everything it ought to have been. I imagine the dogwoods are bare now and the garden sleeping, and that you have your fire going in the front parlor the way you always do after Thanksgiving, and that the house smells of pine and whatever Margaret has been baking this year. Please give her my love and tell her that her fruitcake recipe is the only one I have ever encountered that I would eat voluntarily, and that is a compliment of considerable weight, as you know my feelings on the subject of fruitcake generally.

We had a lovely Christmas at Casa Blanca. The house was decorated in the way I have come to prefer out here, which is to say with what the country provides. Juniper and piñon boughs along the portal and in the hallway, red chile ristras on the doors, and the luminarias along the front walk on Christmas Eve, which are small paper bags filled with sand and a candle, and which cast the most beautiful amber light against the adobe walls. I have described them to you before and I suspect you think they sound primitive, but I assure you, Mother, they are lovelier than any decorating scheme Cousin Margaret has attempted, and I include the year she imported twelve dozen oysters from the Chesapeake for her New Year's display.

Degarrin is well. He is in good spirits, which for Michael means he is in adequate spirits, which for most men would count as positively ebullient. The fall shipping went well and the ranch is in good order and he is already thinking about the spring, which is what Degarrin does, think about the next season before the current one has properly finished. He has his eye on a bull at the Denver sale in March. He has been talking about this bull the way other men talk about automobiles or women, which is to say with a specificity of enthusiasm that I find both endearing and slightly alarming.

Ignacio outdid himself for Christmas dinner. Posole and tamales and his green chile stew, which is the finest thing I have eaten in twenty-five years of eating on this ranch, and I have eaten well. He also made his peach cobbler, which the crew regards with something approaching religious reverence. Rufina produced her bizcochitos, of course, and they were perfect, as they are every year, and Rufina accepted compliments with her usual air of a woman who has done nothing particularly remarkable and cannot understand why everyone is making such a fuss.

Sophie came for Christmas. She seemed well. She is doing nicely at the University, by all accounts, and Tessa speaks very highly of her application to her studies. She was in good form at dinner and played the piano afterward, which she does beautifully, as you would expect given the years of instruction we provided. She played Beethoven, and then the carols, and the house was warm and the evening was pleasant.

The weather has been cold this week but clear. We had our first real frost in mid-October, early for us, and the nights have been in the teens. The mesa is brown and bare and the sky is that particular winter blue that I have come to associate with this time of year, very high and very clean, and on clear mornings you can see the Sangre de Cristos from the portal, snow-covered and sharp against the sky. I will say this for New Mexico, Mother: the light is extraordinary, even in December.

I hope the new year brings you good health and every happiness. Degarrin sends his regards, as always, and I send my love.

Your devoted daughter, Louisa

P.S. — I forgot to mention that Degarrin's horse threw a shoe last month and he walked eight miles home. Eight miles. In his boots. He did not call for a ride because he did not want to bother anyone, which tells you everything you need to know about the man I married. I told him he was ridiculous. He told me the walk was good for his knees. We have had this conversation approximately four hundred times.