This gorgeous image of a Friesian horse is by artist Sidney-Moonchild. She writes--The horse is said to be associated with travel...freedom. The Fresian is so very magistic and regal...truly the horse of Kings. One of the most intriguing aspects of this painting...when you first see it, you're really not sure exactly what it is. You may only see the horse once it has been mentioned to you. The colors are spectacular...a very powerful painting.

Into this wild Abyss,
...all these in their pregnant causes mixed...
His dark materials to create more Worlds
--Paradise Lost

Our quarterhorse Miss Pinon and I canter up the rutted road, through the melting snow and mud, up to the top of the hill where there's a clearing. I usually like to stop here and enjoy the wide vistas of the Pecos mountains, the blue above the treetops. But jutting out of the snow like a scar is the foundation for a trailer house. Doublewide or singlewide, I can't really tell. Right in the middle of the clearing, the rebar pokes its ugly head up through the snow drifts, the chamisa, and the buffalo grass.

Pinon snorts at this new and unpleasant development on what we have come to view as our stomping ground. Nothing passes by the opinionated mare unnoticed. We walk a wary circle around the site.

One of the poorest states, New Mexico is the land of the trailer houses. Some of the people who live here, usually the ones with the good jobs and the educations, like to call the state the only third world country in the middle of the U.S.A. These trailer houses squat all over the red earth of a thousand New Mexico villages.

The flimsy looking structures always strike me as an afterthought, strewn across the dirt like dice thrown by some dumb god along with a few old cars and some assorted trash for good measure. The trailers are notoriously naked, and they are not propped up, back arched and perky breasted, like those air-brushed women in the men's magazines. They have no porches and most of the time no skirting to hide the skinny knees of their cinderblock foundations, under which more often than not lives at least one pit bull dog. To protect the large screen TV and the satellite dish. Never mind her honor.

I grew up in a 250-year-old farmhouse on Lake Erie. As my horse Pinon paws the snow, I do the math--the farmhouse in Ohio is more like 280 years old now. How long ago is that? I ask myself. Not sure if I mean when I lived there or another lifetime ago altogether. When it was built up out of the ground with what must have been a lot of hope by some industrious soul.

That drafty old house with its crazy slanted floors had weathered a few wars and maybe even a few tornadoes had passed her by. She had three wells and a spring. A red barn with a hayloft and a cuploa. She was surrounded by ancient, gnarled apple trees and acres of Kentucky blue grass. There were maples and oaks. Her roots ran deep, way down to the stone-walled basement with its crooked stone steps, and a dirt-floored cellar beyond a wooden plank door to where it was musty and filled with spiders.

I used to fall asleep at night in my wrought iron bed, the one my antique-collecting parents had so lovingly refurbished, wondering about the people before me who'd slept in the same room. Their shadows were long across the bare hardwood floors with the moonlight streaming through the windows. Someone had made love, given birth to babies, spent quiet afternoons reading, maybe even died there. With her plaque on the front porch proudly proclaiming an approximation of her age, the old farmhouse looked like no matter what happened, she'd always be there.

Or maybe that was just an illusion too.

A piece of blue plastic is flapping off the end of a discarded lawn chair in what must be the beginnings of the trash pile of the newcomers.

Pinon dances.