Three of the 40 prints sold to private collectors in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The remaining 37 returned to Sigrid's studio in November. She is planning a second show at the Albuquerque Museum next spring. The second show will include 12 new prints based on the arrays seasonal sun angle geometry across the year. She has begun sketching the new pieces in the evenings.
I bring her coffee. She sketches. We do not speak much during the sketching time. Some quiet evenings are the best evenings of a marriage. The 14 consulting engagements I have taken on across the past year have stretched my retirement schedule in ways I had not expected.
I work approximately 15 hours a week now on the consulting side. Sigrid had told me when I had first taken on the consulting work in spring of 2024 that she did not want me to retire from retirement. I had agreed. We agreed that I would cap the consulting at 15 hours and refuse any work that required overnight travel. The cap has held.
The consulting work is, by my own quiet assessment across the past year, the most professionally satisfying engineering I have done since 2010 at Los Alamos. The work is also entirely within my own kitchen workshop. The work is also entirely on my own schedule. The work is, in plain Placitas terms, the best of both worlds. Sigrid has not, in the years since I started, ever raised a concern about the schedule.
She has, however, raised concerns about my coffee consumption. I have promised to switch to decaf after 3:00 p.m. The switch is, by Sigrid's careful tracking on the kitchen calendar, holding. The kitchen calendar lives on the side of the refrigerator. The calendar lists every Cunningham family event back to 1987. The calendar is, by Sigrid's quiet curatorial practice across three decades, the working family archive.
Edith pages through it on her Sunday visits. She always finds something she did not remember. Aldina, the border collie, listens politely. The calendar's 2024 page has, in Sigrid's careful pencil, three small notations under the 18th of January. FERC testimony, Washington.
And under the 22nd of November, voltage modulation. And under the 5th of May, Tamsin to Grants. The three notations sit between the family birthday notations and the holiday markings. The calendar treats the case events as ordinary family events. Sigrid says they are.
Sigrid is right. The Cunningham family lives among its work. Some calendars say what they need to say. Sigrid's calendar says it cleanly. The pencil does not lie.
The handwriting is Norwegian Lutheran Minnesota careful. The same handwriting she used to sign our marriage license in October of 1982. 43 years of the same hand. 43 years of the same careful curatorial practice. 43 years of the same Norwegian Lutheran Minnesota patience that has carried this family across every season.
The hand has not changed. The work has not changed. The marriage has not changed. Some things do not need to. That is the story of the Cunningham array.