SantaFe.com

The sidewalk at the Carriage Hill Nursing Home in Maryland was lined with yellow and purple pansies, flowers my grandmother always had around her home since I was a little girl. Up on the second floor, my grandmother didn’t look like she always had. She was 99 and dying.

"Hello, Grandma! It’s Claudette," I announced by her bed, where she lay awake but with eyes closed.

"Ah, Claudette," she said in a weak voice, opening eyes to look at me briefly and smile. "I love Claudette."

I rested my hand on hers and sat by the bed. Her aide, Beverly, filled me in on recent changes in my grandmother’s...

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
by Claudette Sutton • Tumbleweeds

Wood Gormley Elementary School parents weren’t buying it.

“Who will this benefit?” asked parent Dan Baker, as Santa Fe Public Schools representatives explained a proposed rezoning plan during a meeting at the elementary school Tuesday evening.

Under the plan, beginning in 2010, an estimated 40 students from Wood Gormley will have to transfer to Atalaya Elementary. Those students will come from families living on streets with access to Old Santa Fe Trail, except East Zia Road.

An unknown number of students from Alvord Elementary — children whose parents don’t want them to attend Alvord...

Wednesday, May 14, 2008
by Polly Summar • Journal Santa Fe

The Santa Fe Botanical Garden (SFBG) is a nonprofit organization, established and run by gardeners, botanists and environmentally oriented volunteers. Santa Fe Botanical Garden celebrates, cultivates and conserves the rich botanical heritage and biodiversity of Northern New Mexico through community service and education on environmentally responsible garden design, including plant selection and care, as well as conservation techniques for water catchment and harvesting. Santa Fe Botanical Garden manages two properties as natural preserves: the Ortiz Mountains Educational Preserve and the...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Is it an open air market, a high-class furniture store, a local tradition or just plain fun? Yes. It’s Jackalope. How best to describe this retail fun fest? If you set a group of leprechauns loose in the desert to design their own strip mall this is what they might give you.

You don’t just drop by Jackalope; it’s a destination. There’s planning involved. Hat, water, sunscreen and carrots. (You’ll see.)

A jackalope proper is a mysterious, rarely sighted creature, a large rabbit with antelope horns on its head. You can believe the trail-fatigued ranch hands who claim to have seen them or...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by AnnMarie McLaughlin • SantaFe.com

Okay, I admit it. I like pavement. I like air conditioning and cold water. I also like adventure. If you can relate, Kasha-Katuwe is the outdoor adventure for you. Known in English as Tent Rocks, this national monument is an easy drive south of Santa Fe on Cochiti Pueblo land. The last segment of road is dirt washboard that makes pavement lovers like me feel as if they’ve really gone off to do something daring.

A one-mile trail loops through the park and is even and smooth. The day I visited there was a woman making the trek in stilettos (really) and while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend...

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
by AnnMarie McLaughlin • SantaFe.com

You’re standing in the grocery check-out line, staring robotically at the covers of People and the National Enquirer and it’s verging dangerously on dinnertime when suddenly the child in the cart just ahead lets out a banshee wail so high-pitched it pierces your fillings. The mom is saying, “You have to let the nice lady have the box of popsicles so she can put them in the bag;” the child’s screams now resemble the shrill intensity of a car alarm. Ignoring you and everybody else around her, the mom resolutely tugs while the child holds on for dear life to the ripped open box, a...

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

Santa Fe is one of the coziest cities on Earth for the holidays. One of my favorite Christmas Eves ever was spent on Canyon Road, drinking more hot cider than I ever thought possible, oohing and aahing at the various forms of luminescence. I had several moments where I was certain I had somehow been transported to a Dickens novel–when the carolers sang “Good King Wenceslas,” when it began to snow ever so gently and a fire crackled nearby, and when I saw a small child clap his red mittened hands excitedly as a shopkeeper leaned over the counter to give him a cookie. It’s not that I don’t...

Tuesday, November 1, 2005
by Emily Beenen • localflavor magazine

What happens when you take someone who’s used to spending the bulk of every waking hour in a tiny, fluorescent-lit office cubicle, hulked in front of her computer screen, breathing dead, re-re-circulated air, and you toss her onto a wily rubber raft floating precariously down river? That person–me–whose everyday experience continues to be one of being a giant head carried around the world on stilts, is in for an adrenaline rush.

Or at least, so I thought when I told my friend Ed I’d go with him and a group of his friends on a rafting trip. It sounded like such an idyllic adventure:...

Friday, July 1, 2005
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

Snap, snap–methodically my grandmother and I snapped the ends off the ripe green beans we had just picked from her garden. Thirty-five years later, I still smell their green, a green full of earth, sun, rain, laughter and hope. During the past few generations fewer and fewer urban children experience a bond with the land under their feet. Recently, however, programs have blossomed in New Mexico to introduce these children to the earth that everyone’s ancestors–somewhere, sometime–farmed.

For older youth, the Indio-Hispano Academy of Agriculture Arts and Sciences (IHAAAS) offers one such...

Sunday, May 1, 2005
by Lynn Goodwin • localflavor magazine