O'Keeffe's New Mexico home a shrine to her fans

The house itself is easy to find. It sits at the top of a cliff, overlooking farmland and the curious winding road to Espanola she liked so much.

But if you're wanting to step inside, well, that's not quite as easy.

It'll cost you $30 in check form; please mail a month in advance. That's the word from the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which is charged with such matters. You'll be escorted to the house in a shuttle that leaves from the Abiquiu Inn about a half-mile down the road. It's better that way, I'm told, because it discourages folks from bothering the neighbors with questions and traffic and the snapping of camera shutters.

Three times a week, a dozen or so people pile into the shuttles. They hear about this painter who fell in love with the West even while her home was back East. They crane their necks for that first glimpse of the house, up on that cliff, peeking out between thick layers of trees.

O'Keeffe's Abiquiu is a small town on a small hill. It rises above the Chama River Valley and faces red cliffs and white rocks. The shuttle, once it's over the incline, comes to the first house on the left. That's O'Keeffe's place, surrounded by willow trees and adobe walls and the occasional "No Trespassing" sign.

Faces press against the bus window glass for a better view.

Some of the faces are streaked with tears. The tourists can't believe they are at O'Keeffe's house, her sanctuary.

Happens all the time, Judy Lopez, the house manager, tells me. Or she says something like that. I wasn't allowed to write it down. I wasn't allowed to write any of it down. Well, any of it after her explanation: The ambience and the experience of the house is lost when we have that going on.

By that, Lopez means photography, recording devices (video or audio) and note-taking. I was allowed to carry my car keys, my wallet and my wonder.

Lopez is charged with ushering tourists through O'Keeffe's property, where O'Keeffe lived most of the last years of her life. She died in Santa Fe in 1986. The tour usually consists of the massive (relative to Abiquiu) garden area, the sparse but well-kept kitchen and pantry, the courtyard, called a plazuela.

The places where things really happened — where she painted and wondered and entertained — all have real adobe floors, and thus cannot abide the shuffling of tourist feet. (The kitchen is marked by linoleum, and the occasional wandering lizard.)

If those weeping tourists had gone into the living room, though, they'd have seen a glimpse of a woman far ahead of her time. She had installed a sort of stereo surround-sound system. She liked mod furnishings.