My Page: Carol Mell
Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
A Navajo Roots Story
In the days of the Indian Mission schools, choices were stark. Parents could either lead their children in the Navajo Way or turn them over to the White Man's Way. Both cultures preached separation and even a person who tried to live in one world only could not escape the bifocal realities of an Indian's life in America.
Pat McCabe's efforts to reconnect to traditional ways has led her into a journey that resulted in a traditional Navajo celebration of her daughter's coming of age, called the Kinaalda.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Spring is the Squishy Season for Skunks and WritersSpring is around the corner when I open the bedroom window and inhale the tang of squished skunk.
Why do Le Pews cross the road?
I know, I know—to get to the other side. Trouble is, as all our noses know, a bunch of them never make it before a car sends them to squishyville. Their jelly-roll bodies litter our highways and byways. Their final odors cast a pall over what should be, according to the Hallmark people, the soft season of love.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Help, Flat Roof Owners Have More Questions
The flat roof controversy continues with more questions than answers.
Does anyone out there know why we even have this flat roof and what to do about it?
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
I’d Like to Blow Away Lent, Birthdays and CronesThere I was on Fat Tuesday feeling fat.
I had just completed my own sorry celebration, a landmark birthday in which I knew that as soon as the party was over, just like those Mardi Gras revelers in the Big Easy, I’d still be needing to be rebuilt at great expense.
As they get older, some women embrace their cronehood. To them, the crone is the dark mother of wisdom, magic, and power. She aids the dying as they pass over, and knows the secrets to prepare the bodies of the dead.
Oh, very nice. I never imagined I could get a personal power boost from learning the recipe for embalming fluid.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Should New Mexico Give a Tax Break for Tribe’s Coal-Fired Power Plant at Desert Rock?On Feb. 5 the grandmothers and 300 others protested at the New Mexico State Roundhouse to protest what amounts to a taxpayer subsidy for the Desert Rock plant. The Sierra Club has vowed to fight it alongside tribal members because of the environmental impact.
According to the Sierra Club, the Desert Rock Power Plant will send 10 million metric tons of CO2 emissions into the air per year. That amount would nearly cancel out the 10.5 million metric ton reduction Governor Richardson’s executive order requires by 2012.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Taos Mayor’s Hummer: A Symbol of Achievement or Consumption?The talk in Taos is beginning to die down on the subject of the Mayor’s new Hummer.
Tone deaf to the outraged cries of our more environmental-minded sector, the Mayor defended his choice. If I remember correctly he said that he was raised in a big family with not much money and that after 40 years of hard work in the roofing business and life being as short as it is and him being 60 something that he deserved to have a Hummer if he wanted. When he was asked about using so much gas, he answered it was no problem because he could afford it.
While some saw his Hummer as an example of conspicuous consumption and a slap in the face of global warming consciousness, he saw his spiffy new vehicle as an example to the kiddies that if you work hard, you too can achieve your dreams.
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Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Roof Shoveling Backaches a Long Tradition in New Mexico
Why do we even have flat roofs?
Catch that great word “even” in the middle of the quote as if to suggest that maybe no roof would be better than a flat one. I’ve been thinking this way lately with my garage roof holding water about as well as a colander.
That would be the part of the roof that had a pinhole leak a few years ago, the part we had completely rebuilt that leaks in ten places now instead of one. We’re not the only ones. Four other houses in our neighborhood, all with the flat roofs that were probably required by some building code, are leaking like crazy.
How did we get the goofy idea to build flat roofs, a homeowner’s nightmare, in the land of heavy snow and sudden rains?
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My husband and I remember two features of elementary school valentine rituals.
1.That the kind of card you got and the kind of card you gave told everyone just how much money your parents had. My husband even remembers real cheap valentines he had to cut out then make the envelopes and even make homemade glue to seal them. If our parents bought the most expensive Valentines would we have been more popular?
2.The second feature was that we spent most of our time figuring out who would get our favorite cards and who would get the duds, forcing us to come up with an absolute ranking system amongst our little comrades so that by the end of the day we knew with far more certainty who we liked and who we didn’t.
In figuring out what kids we thought were the dorks, dweebs, jerks and uglies, did we really need all that extra adult encouragement and guidance? Was it good for our little psyches to find out just who thought we were dorks, dweebs, jerks and uglies?
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New Westerners
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If you’re lonely and looking for a partner, honesty and practicality work stronger magic than a fistful of roses, at least that what I learned while interviewing Taos’ own mortgage broker and sometime lonely heart’s broker, Nancy Diamond. She has organized a singles mixer in Taos for Friday night where honest people who are looking for company can meet more of their own kind.
"You have to put your need out there," says Diamond. "You’ve got to end the charade.”
That's what my Great Aunt Eunice did about a century ago when she got on a boat for Alaska where she hoped to find a husband.
“In the gold fields I would dance with anyone,” she once told me, “but if a man wanted to kiss me he’d have to marry me first.”
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to HUMBUG MOUNTAIN
From Super Bowl Envy to Oprah’s Imaginary Wedding, Humbug Mountain Explains it AllI don't get the Super Bowl. As far as I can tell, it's all about odd balls, bouncing female anatomy, beer, Roman numerals and a few cars thrown in.
You ever notice how the Super Bowl bends the normal laws of physics? Let's say about 70,000 guys are in the stadium, 40 guys are in every sports bar in town and your husband with six guys are in your living room but somehow also in the living room of every other long-suffering wife you know. This would be a boon to single women if it weren't for the fact that guys aren't even thinking about sex on Super Bowl Sunday.
No wonder women suffer from Super Bowl envy. When will we have a day when jobs, wars, cleaning, bank accounts and diets vanish? A day when we don't have to spend one second thinking about our guys?
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