Summer Nights
I love summer nights in Albuquerque. They are the gifts given so freely that we might come to take them for granted. But I don’t.
I revel in them. The air is so soft you can’t feel it, but you know it is there, as little cool breezes pop up now and then to stir a leaf or your bangs, and disappear out into the darkness. Perfect!
I end each day on the patio in a blanket of that soft air with the dense darkness of our ever present mountain showing me it’s there by the lights of the restaurant on top shining like some kind of lighthouse in an ocean of Albuquerque darkness.
I hear crickets and cicadas and then much later, coyotes yipping their coyote songs. I imagine them sitting around a campfire deep in the grounds of the Academy telling coyote stories.
If we are lucky, our fifth season monsoons roll in and add thunder to the song the night sings.
Not long ago my brother was visiting from California. We were sitting out on a glorious night telling people stories when suddenly Kurt exclaimed, “Listen to that!! It is beautiful!”. I thought I was losing my hearing because I couldn’t hear anything at all! I was kind of alarmed when I said “What?? Hear what??!”. “ Silence, he said! And crickets!” Though he was raised here he has been away for 25 years. And then he said, “And I can see the stars!! I haven’t see the stars in years!”.
I worry about my brother living in California for many reasons, but this added a new one to my list. How can it be that a cricket is a foreign sound and you haven’t seen the stars in years??? Who lives in a place like that? (They also tax your garbage by the way).
I heard a saying that has stayed with me. “That which goes uncelebrated will exit your life.”
I write this as a celebration of the night. Of the simple beauty of soft air and crickets. I write this as a celebration of the simple things. Simple things that are miraculous when you think of it, and complex if you think of creation. With a world in chaos, I find peace in knowing that each day will end and with that end comes the night. The beautiful Albuquerque summer night.
By Kurstin Johnson, Owner of Vista Encantada Realtors, LLC