Chellis Glendinning

I am not sure how it all began. Did I know that summer pueblos had dotted the Santa Cruz River near my house in the centuries before the Spanish arrived? Had I been told that the women would break up their old pottery and scatter the sherds back into the earth a half mile from my wall? Or that more recently the kids in the village would come upon intact pots and, in adolescent rebellion, crash them against the rocks?

I don't remember. I just remember dipping my hands into the New Mexico soil and finding the ceramic fragments of a people who had lived hundreds of years ago in what was now my neighborhood. I remember thinking about those people, wondering what they saw and felt. And I remember carrying the clay pieces to the rise above the arroyo and arranging them into a jigsaw circle in the dirt.