My residency at Wupatki was split into two phases. (If only other institutions would allow artists this option). Phase one took place the first two weeks of May, while phase two occurred the first two weeks of December. Spring winds blew nearly every day I was there in May, but to my surprise, there was hardly any wind in December. In May, the sun would begin to rise over the Painted Desert about 5 a.m. and I kept the living room window blinds closed to keep the Rock House cool. In December, the rising sun, now more south would come up over the Navajo landscape about seven. Each morning I would open the blinds to let the sun's warmth shine through the 120 panes of glass, the two "Hopi" buttes standing in the eastern horizon some fifty miles away.

The historic Rock House was built in 1940 as a home for the monument's second "custodian" (superintendent), Davy Jones and his wife, Courtney Reeder. They had already spent the first two years as newly weds living inside the actual Wupatki ruins, climbimng up a ladder into two ancient rooms.

In 1938, from her unpublished memoirs, Courtney writes these words, "we went on up to Flagstaff in this old beat-up truck we had. The next morning, Paul Beaubien came from Walnut Canyon National Monument to take us out to Wupatki. It was a warm morning, sunny, as we went out past the bean fields and turned off on the black cinder Sunset Crater Road. We went among the twisted trees and over the side of Sunset Crater."

"Pretty soon we came to the place where you can look out and see the Painted Desert, and that was going to be our view from Wupatki. It's pink and blue in the distance, and on the far horizon are what they call the Hopi Buttes. We went on winding down and down this black, sandy road for what seemed like forever. It got more and more desert like, but it's a colorful desert, and I grew to love the colors of that country. The only trouble with the first sight of it was that if got later and later, near noon, which is a terrible time to see any desert."

"If you are going to the desert, you really ought to see it just after the sun comes up or just before the sun goes down. During the middle of the day, everything flattens out and gets pale and washed-out looking."

Davy and Courtney Jones were the caretakers of the monument for twelve years and now I was blessed to live in the house built for them.