I've been trying to explain to my husband how the sky looks different in Sante Fe than the sky in Minnesota, different than the sky anywhere else I've been. It seemed huge and of intense color no matter the time of day. It wasn't uncommon among the people I was with to just stand looking at the sky or walk down the sidewalk with one eye on the sky. I took a few pictures but not many. This one, obviously, is of a sunset. It doesn't really convey the full glory of the sky but it's the best I have to offer.

Yesterday afternoon I was reading Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. It's about a French priest who is assigned New Mexico as his diocese, with Santa Fe as his vicarate. At the time of the story, mid- to late-1800s, New Mexico is a new territory. I was very happy to come across this passage about the sky, which I read to my husband. These words conveyed the glory of the Santa Fe/New Mexico sky much better than mine had:

The ride back to Sante Fe was something under four hundred miles. The weather alternated between blinding sand-storms and brilliant sunlight. The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!