Las Mañanitas

News from the Pleasure Palace on Mesa Sea Road

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Alonso

On Saturday, April 12, the mesa welcomed a new member. Alonso was born at 8:30 a.m., wobbling on his spindly little legs a few moments later, and within an hour was sporting a jaunty red jacket. His mom, Val, was doing fine, despite the fact that the birth took place outside the normal 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. birthing window (anything too much earlier or later would have been a sign of fetal distress and very dangerous for the mother and baby). Karen, the alpaca herd's owner, was out of town, so our neighbor Maggie was responsible for checking the afterbirth to see that it had been properly delivered (watchdog Lars ate the whole thing soon afterward, making sure that no coyote-attracting scraps remained). Maggie also had to put iodine on Alonso's new belly button to prevent infection. This was Maggie's second "solo" delivery, and this time she was much less panicked about the whole thing (frequent phone contact with Karen helped to ease her worries, too). By the time we visited Alonso, he was six hours old and seemed quite content with all the attention from his mom, who made constant cooing and clicking sounds. Alonso's many aunties (Maggie calls them the sister-wives) gathered around too, giving licks and nuzzles and surrounding him with warmth on this cold, rainy day.

Alonso and Val:


With the sister-wives:

Hard Times

Besides the fact that a repairman will now answer his phone on the first ring and show up at your house within the hour, there are other signs that the recession has finally reached Taos. The saddest and most obvious are the empty storefronts. In a small town with few storefronts to begin with, the darkened windows of once-booming tourist shops, art galleries, beauty salons, cafés, and restaurants cast an eerie pall over the Taos Plaza and nearby streets. While there were a fair number of people gallery-browsing and walking their dogs near the Plaza on a warm April day, we still had the feeling that a major change had taken place. The lead story in the Taos News last week outlined how the recession had turned the local housing market upside-down, and for the first time ever, the glossy real estate insert listed several foreclosures on every page. On the bright side our favorite restaurant, Sushi Hattori, was packed with locals at lunchtime. But even this very popular place, which had stopped advertising years ago because it couldn't handle more than thirty customers at a time, now displays its own placard on the big wooden sign at the Overland Ranch complex.

It's tempting to think that punctual repairmen and no more condos are great things for Taos, but many Taoseños struggle with unemployment in the best of times. For their sake, we hope that the economy will bounce back sooner than expected and that a "closed" sign will simply mean that the owner has stepped out for a quick lunch.