Daily Digest
Ty's Take Thomas Ocie Williams, who died this week at 89, was the kind of man you'd see at the Mesilla Valley Fair or working his land, the quiet sort who didn't need much fanfare but left a mark on how things got done
Daily Digest
Ty's Take You lose people in this town and you feel the weight of it different than you do in the cities up north. Carol Ann Knapp Foreman knew these valleys. Clarence Villemez worked them. Shannyn Caldwell and Timothy Hourigan were part of the fabric here, the kind
Daily Digest
Ty's Take There's a particular kind of contentment you see in people who've found what they're good at and decided to chase it without apology. That's what catches you in a story like this one, where someone's divided
Daily Digest
Ty's Take The Noble Spear has always been the kind of place where you walk in expecting one thing and leave with something you didn't know you needed. That's the whole point of a community theater, really, especially in a town that's
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Carol Ann Knapp Foreman was the kind of woman who showed up, and in a town like Las Cruces, where the Mesilla Valley keeps turning over and newer folks keep arriving, that matters more than you'd think. The death notices today remind us that
Daily Digest
Ty's Take There's something worth watching in how NMSU keeps threading the needle between what it was and what it's becoming. The university's always been the spine of this valley—Aggie football on Saturday, research dollars flowing into the ag college, kids
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Carol Ann Knapp Foreman, Clarence Villemez, Shannyn Caldwell, Timothy Joseph Hourigan—four names in the paper this week, four people who lived their lives in this valley and left it different than they found it, the way it works here. You don't get to
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Dog days of summer and the TV guide is what we're working with—which tells you everything about how quiet things get around here come mid-July. But that's not nothing. It means the schools are empty, the Aggies aren't
Daily Digest
Ty's Take The obits page today carries names that mean something in this valley—Knapp, Villemez, Hourigan—people who were here when the orchards still stretched wider and the water fights were mostly about farming. Meanwhile down at the other end of the paper, you've got
Daily Digest
Ty's Take The TV guide hits the desk on a Wednesday in July, which means somebody's already thinking about what folks will be watching when the heat settles in and the sun doesn't quit till after eight. That's the rhythm of a
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Most weeks in July, the valley empties out a little—folks heading to the mountains to escape the heat, or down to visit family across the line in Juárez. The obits page tells you who stayed, who made it through another season tending pecan trees or
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Clare Villemez was the kind of man who showed up—to the fields at dawn, to the church on Sunday, to help a neighbor move irrigation pipe when the Rio Grande ran low. He spent his life in the Mesilla Valley doing work that doesn'