Mabel Dodge Lujan by Christina Nealson. Saturday, February 26th, was Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Lujan's birthday. I purchased a white rose at Smith's Market, walked through the early-spring morning and laid it upon her grave. An odd gesture, perhaps, considering I didn't know her and from what I read of her, am not even sure I would have liked her. But her small, simple grave stone speaks louder than all of the written words, all of the stories that bounce like pin balls from the tongues of Taoseñas y Taoseños. This silent stone, not far from my house, grabs my imagination and prods me to get to know her the best way I know how -- through the Taos landscape.
She is, after all, part of my neighborhood. She lived nearby my home, and probably walked the same paths I walk. She witnessed the same winter light through the lace-like branches that grace our winding streets. I want to know Mabel, just as I want to know the people whose names are carved in other headstones in this neighborhood cemetery: Luna, Liebert, Mares, Dolan, Martinez, McCabe, Gusdorf and Sanisteven. It makes sense to begin with my neighborhood. Ferret the metaphors in a handful of dust.
Every day I walk the heart of Taos: along serpentine, creek-side roads, across highways of speeding cars and gargantuan semi-trucks that assault the body with jake brakes, across empty, weed-covered lots, through Kit Carson State Park (where the camposanto is) and into the Plaza. Why would anyone prefer to live out and away from this magnetic, majestic heart? Why not press their daily footsteps into the history-rich earth? In just a few months, I sense the heartbeat of those with whom I share adobe and concrete - a cadre of characters worth the know. The carrot-orange-haired woman who talks of her meeting with Henry James through a toothless grin. The small, brown man in over-alls who never seems to leave his yard work in favor of the outside world. The head-shaven youth in a snow-white t-shirt who steers his way up the Santa Fe Highway in a thumping, vibrating Chevy Impala that sends ripples across my coffee. My neighbor whose children are grown and gone, who works diligently on the birth of a charter school because he believes children should be taught early to love and respect and understand the ecological nuances of their environment. This is the Taos heart upon which Mabel's grave holds court.
When Mabel came to Taos in 1917, she was told the very first night she arrived that people don’t rent houses here; they live in them. And yet she persisted and rented from a hesitant man named Arthur Manby, not the most likable guy on the block. A veritable snake in the grass, as the stories go. Thus, Mabel continued her life-long habit of breaking tradition in her search for personal authenticity.
She broke the rules. She fed from the landscape.
She gave back to community.
She fought and quibbled and pissed off the very friends and writers and artists she brought here.
In short, she fit right in with the chaos that is Taos. The luscious dark side, the orchid light.
"Regalo de Mabel Dodge Luhan" (a gift from ...), says the sign in the Harwood Library and Museum that brims with paintings, bultos and santos from Mabel's personal collection. Collections that must have been easy for her to give, since she wrote that "nothing exists except in use". Collections were symbols that "once had life and are now dead." Were, perhaps, "not only dead but deadly." Which might explain why the largest group of Mabel's santos hangs on the wall on the second floor of the Harwood, above the old, weathered carreta de la muerta, the Penitente death cart that carries Doña Sebastiana, the carved skeleton that bears a big, plump carved heart. "Death with a Heart". One tradition that Mabel couldn't buck. One argument that greenbacks and friends and generosity couldn't win. I doubt that she and Doña hit it off. Mabel, also big-hearted and plump, probably argued with her and pissed her off, too. But in the end, they probably reached a piece of peace. For Mabel, in the name of art. For Doña, in the name of victory and a miniature ox-cart that keeps rolling along the dirt roads of dusty death.
The curved-wire fence that surrounds Kit Carson Cemetery fences out Arthur Manby's grave by a few feet. He was decapitated on July 4th, 1859, and lies not far from Mabel. Forever a neighbor. When I approached Mabel's tiny, stone grave marker on her birthday, a raven was perched upon its crown. It flew onto a tree limb that hung low over her grave, and persisted in calling and cackling the entire time I was there. Her spirit-keeper, one might fathom. "Is it she?" another might wonder. "Just a bird," concludes another.
Indeed, another vociferous neighbor in the heart of Taos, clucking in the midst of sudarios.