After years of yearning, Jo and Doc finally found home in Santa Fe, where Georgia O’Keeffe’s journey mirrored their own patient pilgrimage.
Serendipity in Santa Fe
There is a story behind everything in Santa Fe. And New Mexico, too, for that matter. If there’s a place where nothing is as it seems, this is it.
Just about every building around the Plaza, the beating heart of this magical city, is old. The Plaza itself is old. It exists because five hundred or more years ago the Spanish rulers mandated that every town in Spain should be built around a flat area about the size of a small football field so they would have a place to train troops. When the conquistadors arrived here they brought that requirement with them. Once just covered with grass, the Plaza, in the center of Santa Fe, now has trees, a gazebo and a memorial to soldiers lost in every war going back before the Civil War. But it is still called “The Plaza.”
Many of the buildings have been built on the footprint of adobe buildings that are even older. The Palace of the Governors, a very unassuming one story building built of adobe in the Spanish-Pueblo Revival style, is over 400 years old. It dominates the Plaza more from the sheer weight of its history than from its size. There’s a sense, wherever you walk, of untold stories.
On one corner of the Plaza is a small plaque that marks the end of the Santa Fe Trail. Franklin, Missouri to Santa Fe. Fifty nine years from 1821 to 1880. Carrying supplies and people. You can easily miss it. Don’t. It was an important road to the west. It drips history. Jedediah Smith was killed by Comanches on the Santa Fe trail in 1831. His body was never found.
Not far off the Plaza, on a street still called “Old Santa Fe Trail”, the San Miguel Chapel dreams in the sun. It was built in 1610 to serve the conquistadors the same year Don Pedro de Peralta “founded” Santa Fe. Jo and I attended a performance of centuries-old Spanish Christmas music there in 2022. Freezing cold. Divine music. You could almost imagine the soldiers of Spain sitting around us on the hard wooden benches. It was to be her last Christmas.
Even the name “New Mexico” is rich with layers of hidden meaning. The territory of New Mexico was named by the Spanish in 1621 after the Valley of Mexico, the heart of the Aztec civilization. The country that is now Mexico didn’t get its name until 1821, two hundred years later. Late to the dance.
The people who have lived here for generations are an interesting amalgam of Native American, Spanish and whites. As late as the late 1700s, the Navajo, on the west, the Apache to the south, and the Spanish settlers in Santa Fe frequently raided each other for slaves. The children captured by the Spanish and brought to Santa Fe were baptized, given different names and raised as Spanish. There was even a name for them: genizaro.
All of that brings me to the picture at the top of the Gallery page on this website. And Georgia O’Keeffe.
Georgia O’Keeffe first came to New Mexico in about 1927 and fell in love with the wild landscapes and the mountains, the unusual light and the Native American culture. It became the inspiration for some of her most iconic paintings. Georgia took more than twenty years to finally move here and years later she would say: “From my first time here I was always on my way back.”
It was Jo who brought that to my attention after we had been coming here every year for about eight years, yearning to live here, and feeling frustrated because we couldn’t make it happen and it was Jo who always made me feel better when she said: “It took Georgia twenty years to move here, Doc. Don’t despair.”
No trip out here was ever complete without something Georgia. She became something of a patron saint. A drive out to her little house in Abiquiu, a drive to Ghost Ranch, and later, regular visits to her museum when one finally opened in town.
Years ago we chanced upon the ruins of an old adobe church on the way to Abiquiu. I took pictures, one of Jo, standing in the courtyard ruins, hands in the pockets of her tan Bermudas, face turned to the breeze, eyes closed. It was on the bookcase in my office for years. We always said we wanted our ashes scattered there.
It was in the days before Google and we were never able to find out anything about it, and strangely enough, for some crazy reason, we were never able to find it again. Had it been our imagination? Was it some kind of Brigadoon thing? We always looked for it. Nothing.
And then, not long after we moved here, we decided to drive to Abiquiu. A short hour’s drive from our house. It was a beautiful Sunday morning. Turquoise-blue New Mexican sky. Intense sun. We stopped at Tesuque Village Market as usual to grab a loaf of their other-worldly green chile cheese bread and turned north on the highway feeling very special because, of course, we were now locals.
And then, there it was. A few miles short of the Abiquiu turnoff. Sitting quietly in the sun. The ruins of the church of Santa Rosa de Lima de Abiquiu. Built in 1734 at a small town that was called Plaza de Santa Rosa de Abiquiu. The town was finally abandoned ten years later because of the frequent raids by Comanches and Utes.
We were thrilled, like we had encountered an old and dear friend. We spent a long time there. Took it as a sign. We were finally home.
Gotta go…
