She was tall, stunning, deeply spiritual and put a rebounding traveler to work cleaning rain gutters, repairing screens and clearing woody debris from around her cabin at Cowles above Terrero. She showed a hardened tourist around Santa Fe driving up Canyon Road then to Montezuma to see the castle that houses United World College.
Her cancer was in remission after surgery took her left breast so an inelegant couple spent the nights watching movies without clothes, smoking cannabis and exploring each other. Her property was wired to the grid but it had no well and little rainwater harvest so she and an abandonment-averse man collected water from the Pecos River, heated it and bathed together in a huge tub. Her studio was a gallery of its own and she sculpted clay furiously during the day usually ready for the kiln the next.
Learning that a long term relationship wasn't going to happen the short story ended and a discarded suitor skulked back to the Black Hills but moved to rural southwest Santa Fe County for good in late 2011. We checked in when the 2013 Tres Lagunas Fire nearly torched her place.
That was the last we spoke. Rhonda died in 2022 at 71 years.
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