Back roads journal, New Mexico--II

Abandoned store at Ocate,  NM 120, at the end of the pavement. What a roof.  It breathes "weathered."What a painting to be.

Weathered adobe, wood and geography at Ocate.

Weathered. There's got to be some personal symbolism or identification for me to so love that word, and the many times I stop to take photos of weathered buildings and fence posts and more. 
So it was this trip. Rusting tin roofs. Drooping wooden rafters. Vacant windows. Peeling adobe.  Eroding granite and limestone in the mountains. But to really discover weathered, you have to get off the main roads, take the less traveled roads, slow down and look and feel.

Abandoned dugout in a nameless Texas Panhandle canyon.

Weathered...it makes you realize how small and impermanent mankind is...our monuments return slowly to dust, while the ancient earth also erodes, on a scale of size and time that dwarfs us. Those are lessons from the back roads, where there is time and space to think.

Abandoned church at San Isidro cemetery on NM 94, tin, adobe, wood, mountains, graves, weathering away.

More than man-made posts weathers...eroding Hermit's Peak, from dead end NM 266 near San Ignacio.

The "Tooth of Time" weathered landmark on old Santa Fe Trail, on NM 26, near Cimarron.