The cliff swallows have returned to Madroño Ranch. They’ve expanded their housing development under the western eave of the Main House to several eastern eaves, one of which we can see from inside the house. We watched them build their nests, swooping down to the creek in droves and hovering, beating their wings like oversized butterflies, then soaring back to the house, landing under the eave with grace and precision, using their tails as props as they constructed—with no hands!—their elegant gourd-shaped mud nests.

Then we watched their babies poke their heads out of the nests’ mouths, opening their own mouths for food, their ever-busy, ever-graceful parents helping rid the air of the countless blood-hungry insects the recent rains have brought. I now know that the insides of these nests are also carefully padded with grass, having found a fallen nest on the porch last Tuesday morning. Also in the fallen nest were five tiny, almost featherless hatchlings, dead, and one eggshell, still improbably intact; it was so fragile that it disintegrated as I tried to pick it up. They hadn’t had time to crush their first homes before their second home crashed to the floor. The disoriented parents flew back and forth, but as I sat on the porch that morning it seemed they’d submitted to the new reality and moved on.

The swallows are a nuisance; they leave a significant mess under their nests. But I love them for their athleticism and the magical moment in mornings and evenings when they fly in mesmerizing patterns from nest to air and back and out and back again. If you sit on the kitchen stoop or stand in the driveway, you can feel as if you are the nucleus of an atom, part of something coherent and powerful, as if their trajectories were weaving some kind of electrically charged nest around you. And then you go back inside and they seem to do their chittering, beautiful work without you just fine. You weren’t the center after all, as pleasing as the illusion was.

One day during our recent trip to Big Bend National Park, we left the cool, dry air of the Chisos Basin and drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District by the Rio Grande. As we drove through the relentless desert, with not a tree to be seen, I realized that the innumerable yellow splotches I was seeing weren’t blooms from the recent rain but yuccas killed by the drought—how, I wondered, could there be a drought in the desert? The air-conditioned car suddenly felt as fragile as an eggshell.

By the time we got to the historic district, it was 95 degrees and humid, and the idea of sitting in the hot springs had lost much of its appeal; besides, they were closed due to the rains. It wasn’t quite a wash, though; we got to see the post office/store and barracks-style rooms built by J. O. Langford, a Mississippian who moved there sight unseen as a homesteader in 1909, with his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old daughter, planning to turn the hot springs into a business. He had heard about them as he was seeking a cure for malaria in the high, dry air of Alpine, Texas. Several people had already tried to claim the place through the Homestead Act of 1862, though none had been able to meet the requirements, which included a minimum of three years residence on the property. A west Texas old-timer is reputed to have discouraged Langford: “Nothing down there but rattlesnakes and bandit Mexicans. And it’s too far away—that damned country promises more and gives less than any other place I saw.” It was an eleven-day journey from Alpine, the nearest town (now about a three-hour drive). The Langfords held out until 1912 and left, not returning until 1927. In 1942 Langford sold the property for inclusion in the new Big Bend National Park.

What were they thinking? Floods, drought, implacable sun, virtually no trees, snakes, bandits, two young children, loneliness as relentless as the sun. And yet they made some kind of living—enough to build the post office/store, the modest set of rooms for visitors, and a bathhouse (now gone) at the springs.

The next day we drove to the other end of the park to Lajitas, one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been. The road to Lajitas winds through an even fiercer landscape than the one to the hot springs, if that’s possible—the soil toasted a lunar white, virtually nothing growing. We went through Terlingua, the dusty former quicksilver mining center, now the self-proclaimed Chili Capital of the World. Another ten miles toward great looming cliffs and we found ourselves in what could have been the set of an old western, but for the lush grass at the golf resort.

Although Lajitas has been a modestly populated and popular river crossing for centuries, it didn’t get weird until the 1970s, when a Houston businessman bought and poured $100 million into it, building an airstrip for small jets, an 18-hole golf course, 92 luxury rooms, and an upscale restaurant. Not surprisingly, the place went bankrupt, but another optimistic Texas businessman bought it for $13.5 million or thereabouts. When we were there a few weeks ago, admittedly the beginning of the low summer season, the place was virtually empty. The cliffs continued to loom, and despite obviously steady watering, the golf course was beginning to turn brown under the imperious sun. The high in Lajitas yesterday was 104 degrees. What are they thinking?

On the one hand, I admire the moxie of these people who go into the vast west Texas landscape thinking they will somehow outsmart it, or at least wrest a modest living from it. On the other, I’ve become aware of the necessity in every life for submission to some other force. In Big Bend country, most people would find that force pretty hard to ignore. To quote Flannery O’Connor, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”

In recent months I’ve found that the power of Love is as startling as the force of nature. When I found that my life was as fragile as a nestling’s egg, disintegrating as I tried to pick up its shattered pieces, something appeared, an unexpected padding, to help me into a new life. The realities of death and illness, grief and anger—the possibility that this new home will fall—never stop looming. But over time the steady swooping kindnesses have built an improbable nest in which I have been, for now (and what else is there?), protected.

Despite years of thinking and reading and analyzing, I’ve been overwhelmed by the steadiness of Love’s flow, as powerful as the wind and water eroding the west Texas vastness and almost as impersonal, a force that needs an outlet, that seeks to move where it is not. I’ve stood in the midst of the swallows’ enfolding flight and seen that it continues when I step out of it.

It’s almost harder to submit to Love because it is personal: if I were to try to return gift for gift, prayer for prayer, I would run out of time long before finishing. (Also, I would have to learn how to knit, equally unlikely.) I get why those ornery people think they can vanquish the forces of nature—Texans have fashioned themselves as the most stubborn of the stubborn. For a while I drove myself crazy when I tried and failed to respond individually to every kindness. What was I thinking? I’ve discovered recently that people I don’t know are praying for me. How can I possibly pay that back? I can’t. What can I do instead? Say uncle. Throw up my hands. Submit, give thanks as often as possible, bring some beauty into the world.

And be cautious about buying west Texas real estate in the expectation of a quick return.

What we’re reading
Heather: Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales
Martin: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940

Yesterday was the solstice, the shortest day of the year; Heather’s father died last Sunday; and we’ve received various other pieces of bad news over the last few weeks. It would be easy, under the circumstances, to give way to fear and sorrow and the belief that we are surrounded by darkness. But I want instead, on the eve of Christmas Eve, and in the wake of Heather’s last post, to talk about light, in particular the light and joy and comfort of love, in particular our love.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at Williams College. We started dating during the spring of our senior year, which means, for those of you keeping score at home, that we’ve been together for thirty years now, though we didn’t bother to get married until 1985. But I first noticed her during our sophomore year, when we were both taking a course called “Religion and Literature,” taught by a formidable scholar named Barbara Nadel.

Now, neither of us had any business being in this course; we knew very little about literature, despite having declared ourselves English majors, and even less about religion. The course was one of those three-hour seminars that met one afternoon a week, while the syllabus included inscrutable writers like Paul Tillich, Bernard Meland, and Wallace Stevens, which meant that at the end of each class I knew even less than I had at the beginning. The upside was that, since I never had the slightest idea what was going on, I had lots of time to stare at girls, and Heather—glamorous, sophisticated, obviously way out of my league—immediately caught my eye.

She clinched the deal, unwittingly, on the last day of the semester. Babs Nadel, as we irreverently referred to her, had assigned us a final paper, and Heather, as she admitted later, had put it off until she was forced to stay up all the previous night writing it. Moreover, she had come down with a severe cold, which left her severely congested. The combination of lack of sleep and a head full of cotton wool meant that when she came to class that afternoon she sought out the largest individual in class and sat behind him, hoping to avoid catching Babs’s eye. (Babs, terrifyingly, would call on people at random to answer the incomprehensible questions she posed.)

Somehow, Heather had gone that entire semester without once being called on, but of course her number came up on the last day of class. Babs asked some particularly knotty question—I don’t remember what it was; probably something about Stevens—and called on Heather, who had by now slipped into something approaching a comatose state.

Heather later described the awful sensation of gradually coming to consciousness to realize that everyone in the room was staring at her expectantly, apparently awaiting her response to a question she hadn’t even heard. She completely whiffed, of course, and it was at that moment that I said to myself, “THAT’s the girl for me—she’ll never know what hit her!” It took me another two years to wear down her resistance—today I’d probably be arrested as a stalker—but when she finally crumbled, just a few months before we graduated, she quite literally made me the happiest young man in the world.

(Warning to our kids: you probably shouldn’t read this paragraph.) When we first started dating, of course, we were completely in lust with each other, in that embarrassingly hormonal way of young lovers. (When recalling our younger selves, I always think of the Austin Lounge Lizards song “The Golden Triangle,” which contains the lyric “two bodies were thinking with only one gland.”)

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, that intense youthful passion settled into a steadier, more consistent condition, something like, well, love. We’ve certainly had our ups and downs since then, but the former have vastly outnumbered the latter. We’re still happily married (to each other, I mean); we have three beautiful, thoughtful, and compassionate children; in Madroño Ranch we’ve found a fulfilling, challenging, and just-plain-fun project on which to collaborate now that our nest has emptied. Life, in short, is pretty damn good.

Except, of course, when it isn’t. This is traditionally the season of giving, but this year it has been even more disjointed and chaotic than usual, and we haven’t been feeling terribly festive. I finally decided, just yesterday morning, that the best and most meaningful gift I could give Heather was an attempt to tell her how much I love her, and how much she’s meant to me.

Heather has given me gifts all year round, for thirty years now. The greatest gift of all, however, is one that I have not yet fully unwrapped. I’ve always been of a somewhat gloomy disposition, inclined to see the downside of most situations. (“Expect the worst and you’re seldom disappointed” has been my motto.) Heather, on the other hand, always projects optimism, always expects things to turn out better rather than worse. When I was younger, and for an embarrassingly long time, I tended to think that such a stance was an indication of shallowness and/or naïveté, but slowly, over our years together, I’ve come to realize that it is exactly the opposite. It is, in fact, a conscious and deliberate choice, a rigorous and gallant determination not to give in to darkness and inactivity, but to bestow grace and hope by stubbornly shining light on everyone and everything around you.

I know that my pessimism has often frustrated and disappointed her, and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how much I admire her patience, her forgiveness, her determination, her spirit, her steadfastness, her depth. I have learned so much from her; I still have so much to learn. Sometimes it can seem that darkness is all there is, but now I know better. Now I know that where there is love, there is always light.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Martin: Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life