Djelloul Marbrook

This is the key to the figures in this famous painting, The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull.

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The relatedness of things has always fascinated me, perhaps because where others collect objects I collect images. When my wife, Marilyn, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia, some of the recent immigrants who worked in our neighborhood mesmerized me. One day, chatting with a housecleaner in our apartment building, I used the word Hispanic, and she said, We are not Hispanic, we are Inca. The Spanish were oppressors. Once I had savored her practiced English, I understood what had caught my eye: so many of these people looked like wall paintings of the Incas.

I had a similar epiphany one day browsing through a National Geographic layout about North African architecture. Our own Southwestern architecture bears a strong resemblance to Moorish architecture in North Africa and Spain. Of course it would: the Spaniards brought it with them to the new world. And yet how many of us think of Moors when we think of Mexico or our Southwest? How many of us think of the great Inca civilization when we encounter immigrants?

I was reminded of my love of these synchronicities recently by an e-mail letter from our old friend, Tom Hester, a native of Lubbock, Texas, who worked for many years in the Justice Department with my wife in Washington and has now retired to Silver City, New Mexico. I had mentioned to him that Marilyn and I, like many residents of New York’s Dutchess and Columbia counties, are very conscious of the life and career of Robert R. Livingston, whose great estate, Clermont, is five minutes from our house in Germantown. Livingston, famous for many things, is one of the figures in John Trumbull’s familiar painting, The Declaration of Independence (above).

Tom wrote this splendid reponse:

Somehow it’s coincidentally significant for us west-of-the-Mississippi folk that you live on Livingston’s former property. Livingston was the U.S. ambassador to Napoleonic France who suggested to Jefferson that our country could obtain Spain’s previous territories.

Silver City lies in a half bowl, surrounded on three sides by steep hills and opening out to high desert that slopes away toward Mexico. When the Mimbres people lived here, they resided on a hill a scant fifty yards from where I write this. Their farms lay down below, for Silver City, like Washington, DC, occupies a marsh or cienega. It was a good place to farm the squash, chiles, beans and teocinte that they grew. The streams ran down from the hills, collected in the marsh and then evaporated as they seeped onto the desert. The village was a large one, by Mimbres or Mogollon standards, comprising about 100 pit houses at the time the drought in 1300 C.E. forced the people south towards their kin in what is called today Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Our street, by contouring scrapers or by nature, is terraced. The first house, built in the 1930s, lies to the east, below us. They did not have to fill, except on the back side of their lot, toward Silver City’s downtown and the desert beyond. The builder of our house, which is firmly set on rock, had to fill both the front and back yards: about eight feet in the front and 15 feet in the back. The yard and the rock patio still slope a gentle five degrees or so and we have a retaining wall, pierced with a wide stairs, that separates the upper back yard from the narrower, lower one where we have fruit trees. It is in this lower yard where I’m digging a pool.

The previous owners tended a lawn in the back and a xero yard in the front. I have kept the gravel and cacti on the north side but I have ripped out the lawn and created mounds and valleys for our native plants. Before coming to New Mexico, I had not heard of penstemons (snapdragons), but what peonies are to Virginians, penstemons are to New Mexicans. I have about six varieties blooming in our garden now, and each has a different way to declare: “Here I am! Catch your breath and look at me!” Bees love them.

Mentioning bees: We’ve lots of bees and butterflies, wasps and beetles. We just don’t have earthworms, even in the compost heaps.

Our eleven-year drought broke last year. For the past decade we had an annual average of nine inches of precipitation. Beginning in what is called the Monsoon Season (July and August), we’ve had more than 20 inches, including some significant snowfalls.