Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
There is something eternally hopeful about hanging up a fresh calendar.
Or nine.
I recently completed that time-honored annual tradition of trading out all of last year’s calendars for current models.
The newest one from the Roosevelt County Electric Cooperative hangs front and center above my computer.
The artwork on it — a lovely rendering of the Rogers community school as it looked in the 1940s — takes me right back to seeing the original in progress when I met Arch artist Gayle Walker last summer.
Behind me on the wall are smaller calendars with complete years on them — one for 2019 and one for 2020. They help keep me fixed on the big picture.
Near the washer and dryer, I have a calendar from cowboy cartoonist Etienne “A-10” Etcheverry. His droll humor and intricate details are a good diversion from the tedious task of sorting socks and folding t-shirts.
I have two friend-made calendars this year, one filled with beautiful photos from the fine western writer and photographer, Julie Carter, and the other documenting a breath-taking visit to Wyoming by a dear family from Colorado and California.
Calendars like those not only keep you on the right day, but they also remind you of connections forged with others across the years.
The workhorse calendar is next to the kitchen table. No, there are no horses on this one, although some years there have been. This is the calendar that will log our journey through 2020.
The one it replaced ended up with something written on almost every day: appointments, funerals, meetings, visitors, trips, birthdays, anniversaries … you know the routine.
When it’s time for a new calendar, I transfer over a few things from the previous year.
The first is always last year’s rain total. We managed to pour a total of 13.99 inches (much of it accumulated only a hundredth or two at a time) out of our gauge during 2019. When I write that number down, I always hope it will be bested by New Year’s eve.
I move over the birthdays we need to remember, the doctors’ appointments that are already scheduled, the handful of special events we know are on the way, some visitors who said they might be coming. There are always lots of question marks penciled in.
As I’m shuffling calendars, I think of William Least Heat Moon’s book “Blue Highways,” that came out in 1982.
Least Heat Moon said there was “one infallible way to find honest food at just prices in blue-highway America: count the wall calendars in a café.”
He warned travelers against eating at a place with no calendars, and cautioned that if there was only one calendar, they’d likely only find processed food. A two-calendar diner was passable, “only if fish trophies present.”
A café with three calendars offered the potential for hearty “farm boy breakfasts,” Least Heat Moon said, and four calendars meant good pies.
If you stumbled into a place with five calendars, Least Heat Moon said to keep that “under your hat,” a secret too good to share.
“One time I found a six calendar café in the Ozarks,” he wrote, “which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since. I’ve never seen a seven-calendar place.”
Well, sir, I may not have a café, but I’ve fed my share of folks over the years, and I have nine — count ’em, nine — calendars on my walls.
Come on by and we’ll see what we can serve up.
Betty Williamson loves a fresh start with plenty of salt and black pepper. Reach her at:
