Once upon on a time there was a Little Boy and a Fat Man and they lived in the southwest of a big country called Amerika. So one morning Little Boy set off in an aeroplane by the name of Enola Gay to drop his payload on the city of Hiroshima and, a couple of days later, Fat Man did the same to another Jap town called Nagasaki β¦ And the rest, as they say, is history.
Fall is a beautiful time of year in Northern New Mexico β warm, sunny days and clear night skies but there can often be up to a 40 degree difference between day and night-time temperatures! We went through Chamisal and stopped at Las Trampas to look at the San Jose de Gracia Church, built between and of adobe construction, which was re-roofed and repaired in by the Society for the Preservation of New Mexico Mission Churches.
Its mud-plaster exterior is renewed periodically by the parishioners themselves. It has been reported that some make the pilgrimage from Santa Fe, some 28 miles away, on their knees, such is their sense of devotion and need for penance. As the story goes, on Good Friday in , landowner Bernardo Abeyta was doing penance on a hill above the Santa Cruz River when he saw a light that led him to a partially buried crucifix.
Abeyta carried the crucifix to a nearby church in Santa Cruz and, although it was locked inside the church, the crucifix appeared twice more at its original site. There are many who believe that the earth in this room holds magical healing properties and hundreds of visitors come carrying bags and small containers to dig out the soft reddish dirt with their trowels from the sacred sand pit contained within a circle in the middle of the room.
We managed to park our car close to the start of the site, thanks to being directed in by a man across the road who tried to entice us to have a look at his chiles! Here parents of sick children, especially infants, leave toys, clothing, photos and notes seeking miracles in curing autism and other conditions. An old man present, who seemed to be supervising visitor movements around and ensuring that no photographic record was being made, took it upon himself to talk to us about the chapel and, after we had finished looking here, he took me on to the next chapel of which he was particularly proud and pleased as it contained recently installed wood statues of the Holy Family, including the two pregnant women, Mary and her sister, Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus.
