Fogged in

I was treated to a misty spectacle this morning: I sat up in bed at 6:30 a.m. and looked out my open window and saw nothing but fog. Heavy ghostly fog obliterated my view of Pedernal, our landmark peak; and the mesas and distant mountains. A thick cloud sat like a soft pillow on the alfalfa field.

I have never seen fog here. Oh, wisps will float over the mountains after a rain; but never thick fog on the ground.

I knew I would not be able to drive that twisting dirt monastery road in the fog, so I had the luxury of turning over and going back to sleep for an hour – the first time I have done that in six months.

But first, I put on my robe and went out and stood on my front hey porch and looked at this wonderland of mist; and when I did get up and go to breakfast at 8, the fog was the talk of the breakfast table.

My fellow volunteers had gotten up at dawn and driven up to the mesa to stare and take pictures. The old-timers had never seen the ranch wrapped in fog.  This is the only place I know where people revel in the beauty of nature, be it sun or magnificent thunderheads or smothering fog.

Even more ethereal was when the sun finally began to eat away at it, and little by little the mesas reappeared, ghostly at first; and then the distant mountains; but pillowy clouds remain far out over the monastery road, and they are soft and fluffy against the achingly blue sky.

Since I could not go to Mass, I went to the service here, and it was simple and warm, about 16 of us gathered around the table for Communion as the fog began to lift outside the glorious windows of the chapel. I came home, hung  laundry out to dry in the sun.

Life is so simple here, the way it was meant to be.

Good-bye, Jay Leno: life without TV

 Here is my column that appeared in last week’s Sun News about life without TV.

ABIQUIU, New Mexico – So you think you’d curl up and die without television? You’re wrong. You might be very happy.

I write from experience. I gave up TV in March when I came to volunteer and live at Ghost Ranch, a 22,000-acre education and retreat center in remote north central New Mexico that does not have television.

In just five months, TV has dropped off my life like a dried-up scab. I’ve forgotten about it. I think America would be far better off if we funneled the energy and time we devote to TV into our families and neighborhoods.

The thought of life without TV, though, provokes fear and terror. Even the Ghost Ranch application asked if I could handle its absence. I said I could, but what did I know? I’d never lived without it.

I knew I’d miss PBS, the Weather Channel, “Meet the Press” and the NBA finals if the Cavs got there (I should have known better) but my real fear was morphing into a cultural dunce who couldn’t name the “American Idol” finalists at a party.

TV is the duct tape that holds American culture together. Nearly every American has it. Some Indian pueblos out here lack running water, but they all have satellite dishes. We Americans have a TV in every room of our homes, at every airport gate, every waiting room, every restaurant — everywhere except here.

I give thanks for that every day.

The transition to a TV-free life was a breeze. Within days, I realized that most TV programs are as expendable as dryer lint. I began to truly experience life for perhaps the first time. Not life as a spectator sport, but life I could see, touch, taste, smell and feel.

Without the “Today” show, I took a walk at sunrise. I let go of the Weather Channel and handed the sun, the rain et al back to Mother Nature. She, not Jim Cantore, had been in charge all along.

I kept up with news by word of mouth from the 3,000 guests who came to the ranch this summer. Little of what passes for news on TV these days is relevant anyway. And the farther I got from “What Not to Wear” and “Dancing With the Stars,” the dopier they seemed. Now my life centers on people, not HGTV or A&E.

In the evening, instead of loafing in front of “Jeopardy,” I eat with friends in the dining hall, then join them for walks or Scrabble. I read, write letters, do crossword puzzles, maybe call home. By 10 p.m., I’m in bed. Without TV, I’m sleeping eight hours a night and waking up without an alarm clock.

Gone is the irritating TV racket. TV shouts and blares and jumps around. The blabbermouths at Fox, CNN and ESPN bicker, bash and grind the news and sports into a puree, to what end? It’s a relief to be free from all that.

Best of all, I’m rid of commercials. I never realized how ad-soaked and ad-driven our culture is until I had no TV.

TV batters you with ads. You are told over and over that you need a car, allergy pills, cat litter, diapers, lawn fertilizer, a Michigan vacation, an online degree, whatever. This 24-hour-a-day assault has soaked so deep into the American psyche that most people are continually shopping.

Without TV badgering me to buy, buy, buy, I don’t buy much. I don’t need to. I realize I have everything I need. Shopping as recreation no longer tempts me.

TV is like wine. One glass is sweet, but too much can flatten you. Without TV, I’ve gotten my life back. I have time to read, to write, to hike and to daydream beside the Chama River on Sunday afternoons. I have time for friends.

I’ve found a freedom I never imagined. When I come home, I may never go back.

Rescue at Chimney Rock

Leslie from Santa Fe is lucky to be alive. She turned 44 Wednesday. She celebrated with her life.

She arrived at Ghost Ranch by herself Tuesday morning and, as she had done frequently for eight years, charged up Chimney Rock, a 1.5-mile hike to a Ghost Ranch landmark. But at the top of the mesa, after a 600-foot climb up, she did not turn to the left, toward Chimney Rock, like most hikers do  She turned to the right, off the marked trail, leaped down to a ledge a few feet below and began snaking along the west face of the cliff, where there is no marked trail. She has done this so many times.

But there is no margin for error, and when she stepped up on a boulder to hoist herself up to another ledge to eventually get back up on the mesa top to the trail back down, the boulder gave way. She should be dead. She should have fallen 400 feet to her death. The rock face is sheer. No ledges, no handholds, nothing. Instead, she was able to dart into a tiny crevice in the rock four feet deep and perhaps 10 feet high, but just two feet at its narrowest point. She could not get out because there was no place for her to climb onto. The rock all around was sheer, falling straight down.

There she was, alone, 5o feet down over the ledge of the Chimney Rock mesa, and 400 feet up. It was around noon. The west face of the cliff faced nothing – desert, juniper, the Casa del Sol Road (seldom-used) and far out, Highway 84. In her pocket she carried an alarm device to use in case she got lost. It emitted a piercing sound, so she set it off four times, but nobody heard her. She began to call for help.

Meanwhile, a painter had climbed up the Chimney Rock trail and set up her easel on the east side of the mesa. After awhile, she moved to the west side. She thought she heard a child calling. Then she thought she heard the words “help.” She investigated, looked down, and saw this woman stuck in that crevice. Luckily, she had a cell phone, it worked, and she called the Ghost Ranch office for help.

Down at the Ghost Ranch office, they got the call. They called 911. They sent Sam, the nurse this week, and she and Mark, the spiritual advisor, first went to the west side of  Chimney Rock, on the Casa del Sol road, hiked back to the face of the cliffs half a mile, and looked up. They saw this woman, a tiny speck in a dimple in the rock, because of her white shirt. Mark stayed at the ase f the cliff, Ted Collins eventually joined him, and Sam harged up the Chimney Rock trail in a tank top, athletic shoes, shorts and half a bottle of water.

This was 2 p.m. All afternoon they stayed with her – Sam calling down to her from the top and Mark and Ted calling up to her from the bottom. They all ran out of water. Meanwhile, the state highway police showed up, and an officer charged up the trail to assess the situation and take pictures with his cell phone and transmit them to Search and Rescue so S&R could figure out what kind of teams to send up.

All this took time. It takes a good hiker about 45 minutes to get up that trail, one way. Search & Rescue didn’t show up until 6:45. Meanwhile Leslie would panic, saying, well, I will just try to climb up? I can climb rocks. Sam – who is a colonel in the National Guard and one tough cookie  said, no. Stay there. Leslie wanted them to put a bottle of water on a rope and throw it down to her, but Sam said no. She said if Leslie reached out to grab it, she could fall to her death. Leslie wanted them to just throw her a rope and pull her up but that would be lethal too. She was too far down, too wicked a spot, and throwing a rope over the edge of the cliff was iffy because the edge of the cliff was crumbly.

At 6:45, p.m., after dinner, Ted Harsha, Nancy Collins (Ted Colins wife, who was worried about her husband in the hot sun ad no water or food all afternoon) and I went to the bottom of the west cliffs to watch the rescue. The S&R team, loaded with gear on their backs, had charged up the trail.  mountain. The sun was beginning to set and darkness was a threat. We saw Leslie in that little crack and could not imagine how she’d gotten there. We watched S&R crews peer over the ledge, then recess back. It took forever, it seemed, for them to begin the rescue.

They decided to rappel down to get her, but the edge of the cliff was crumbly. They threw loose pieces of flagstone off it and put heavy plastic “lip” over it to give them stability. They tied ropes around three juniper trees up there (shallow roots and not real stable) and then had six men holding the rappeling ropes for the man who would do the rescue, but they worried about the cliff edge. Had it given way, they all would have fallen to their deaths.

Meanwhile Leslie was thirsty, tired, wondering what was taking so long, terrified that Santa Fe TV crews would show up. We had offered to call her fiance but she said no, “I dont want him to know about this.” However, by 5 p.m. when she had not come home, he called the ranch, so he did know. Leslie also had a 14-year-old son. And she’s a recovering alcoholic, so she was in her crevice hoping she could make her 5 p.m. AA meeting. Sam kept her sane. They talked and talked and talked. Down below, Mark an Ted had promied to stay until she was rescued.

Finally, as darkness was falling, from down below I saw the tiny rappeller come down over the cliff, lower himself to her, put a harness on her (yes, I needed binoculars to see this) and slowly, slowly, rappel with her back up to safety. She had to rappel which she had never done, and the cliff face where she had to put her feet kept crumbling away. They would go 10 feet and call out to the team above that they’d make 10 feet. Then 10 feet more. The six guys holding the ropes at the top were holding on for dear life. Leslie’s life depended on it.

Finally they got her up, but we had to turn back and get out of the face of the cliff area right before they did because darkness was falling and we had no headlamps and the land back there is rutted and uneven and arroyos cut through and there are snakes and there is no trail and we had to be out before dark or risk injury in hiking back to the road. I kept wanting to watch but Nancy kept saying, come on and later I thanked her for that because I could have been hurt on the hike out.

We went to the Chimney Rock trailhead, then, and met the rescuers an Sam and Leslie and the 13-member crew coming down. We saw their headlamps bobbing down the ridge in the darkness. Leslie seemed surprisingly calm. She just wanted to drive home. She said she was able to. She came up to me,  just said I worked at Ghost Ranch and we were so glad she was safe. Then Search & Rescue took her off to interview her. And everyone went home. The S&R teams were amazing. They are all volunteer. They were jut at Ghost Ranch a week ago to rescue a hiker off another trail. Again, he’d gone off teh trail and gotten stuck and could not get back up.

Ted and I took Sam some water. pie and bread. She sat in her little nurse’s apartment then and she told us the whole harrowing story. Meanwhhile, Nancy had ice water for Mark and Ted and she had taken food for them from the dining hall after dinner, and she fed them. Sm, Mark and Ted all said they were still dehydrated and weak all the next day.

So much conspired to save Leslie’s life. Only two people hiked Chimney Rock that day: Leslie and the painter who heard her cries for help. Had the painter, Jenny not heard her, she’d have been there all night and perhaps died of exposure. We had no rain that afternoon or evening. Rain would have soaker her. Lightning could have killed her. Had Sam, Mark and Ted not been thre to talk to hr, she might have tried to escape from her crevice and fallen to her death. Then Search and Rescue complted the rescue within mere minutes of darkness – and they said they culd not have rescued her in the dark. She was down too far and the crevice too inaccessible to do in the darkness.

She is lucky to be alive.

But all that effort for one woman nobody knew. Sam an Ted and Mark staying with her, the unpaid search and rescue team heading up that trail and risking their own lives to save her…it’s like the lost sheep story in the Bible, I think.

Lightning!

The monsoon season continues here, with frequent afternoon and early evening thunderstorms, and last Thursday Mother Nature put on a spectacular fireworks show.

Storms built up to the southwest just as everyone was finishing dinner, and soon the lightning began. The dining hall looks out over the sprawling alfalfa field, half a mile in length; and it sits at the top of a slope, so you can see a mile out to Route 84 and beyond to the mountains.

Forks of lightning here,  jabs there, and soon all of us were just watching it and oohing and aahing in awe. There must have been 60 of us, including about 10 people from Japan here for a workshop in the Alexander Technique, a kind of massage therapy/muscle training program; and it turned into a great party.

Then one bolt hit the ground out by the highway. we saw it reach down from the sky and touch the earth; it stayed there for a few seconds and then a big puff of smoke rolled away from where it struck. That really got us excited! At that point, we made everyone come onto the dining hall veranda from the picnic tables undeer the trees on the lawn. (The Japanese were the last to come in. They said they don’t have much lightning there? Can this be true?)

then the wind picked up and a big cinnamon-colored dust devil got going in the desert on the other side of the road. Someone said it was a tornado, but it wasn’t. It was really spinning.

Finally the rain began, and it rained so hard it blotted out the mountains, and it looked like we live on the Great Plains, with nothing but gray sky out there in the distance.

When it was over, out came the finale: a great rainbow that reached all the way across the sky, from horizon to horizon.

 I am learning what hard rain can do. It forms little channels on the dirt roads and chews them up. It pours through the arroyos (dry washes) and carries twigs and stones. This storm caused two landslides on the road to the monastery, closing it for a brief time. I drove to Mass today and I saw where boulders came down an arroyo and washed out part of the road.

And after a hard rain, we all say: let’s go see if there are waterfalls from the mesa tops! They form quickly and disappear quickly. I have not seen them yet.

Feast at Santa Clara

Indian dances,  Indian tacos, Indian crafts! Yesterday afternoon I went with two Ghost Ranch college staffers, both named Emily, to the feast day at Santa Clara Pueblo.

There are about 19 Indian pueblos (or so) along the Rio Grande River here in New Mexico, settled by descendants of the pueblo tribes who settled Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde.  The Spaniards converted them (forcibly) to Catholicism, so they all have annual feast days honoring the saint for whom they are named. Feasts open with Mass, a procession, then dancing, plus food.  Everyone around here goes, even the Anglos.

About eight of us were scheduled to take the afternoon off and go, but for various reasons only three of us went, and I decided it was a lot like a mini-version of the hoopla surrounding the Indy 500.

We had to park on a side street 10-15 minutes away and walk to the center of the pueblo. Along the way, Indian craftspeople had set up booths to sell jewelry, pottery, etc. We could hear the drums for the dancers several blocks away – although this is a little pueblo with one-story adobe buildings, so think tiny hamlet, not a suburban neighborhood.

The dances were visually spectacular. Men had on white tunics, foxtails, evergreen boughs, bells, and they held rattles. Their headdresses were spectacular. Women and little children danced too, and even the smallest tots knew all the steps and kept up. The dances were very lively. They danced to what I called a “drum committee,” with five or six men beating drums. Several dances went on at once, like a three-ring circus; and they would finish dancing in one plaza and then move to an adjacent one. When they did that, the crowds of people followed.

There were so many people, many of them white. On the plaza they had erected a temporary shrine for Saint Clare. Mounted deer heads decorated it on the outside, but inside were colorful rugs and flowers and burning candles like at any Catholic church.

We saw two dances and then it began to pour, so we sought shelter under a portico. The rain stopped, then started again, so this time we sought refuge in the little shrine. Very old Indians were sittingt around the perimeter on benches. We were the only white people in there, and I hoped they didn’t mind us being in there. Then the shrine began to flood because it sloped, and the rainwater ran down and created a puddle that rose to two inches deep. Some of the dancers grabbed shovels and made a little dam with the gravel (the plaza is dirt, not paved) to divert it. Otherwise, we’d have been in water up to our ankles.

We had hoped to eat traditional feast foods like posole and naquavi (mutton stew) at the home of Gilbert’s mother. Gilbert is an Indian who helps with the farm at Ghost Ranch. However, we never found him so we had to settle for Indian tacos at a booth like at the county fair. I was disappointed.

After lunch, we saw the buffalo dance, with elaborate buffalo headdresses, and more harvest dances. At one point, some white women threw candy to the crowd from white plastic laundry baskets, a pathetic imitation of the way Hopi kachinas throw food and gifts to spectators. I wondered who these white women were?

Around 3:30 it began to rain again, so we left. I told the two college girls all about Hopi ceremonies on the way home.

The Hopi ceremonies are religious, so the carnival atmosphere is absent from them. Only men dance, and they stay in their oblong formation (a long line) and the footwork is simple and minimal.  They have one drummer in the middle, and kachina fathers in shirts and jeans who oversee it all.

Many elements of the kachina apparel are similar to what I saw yesterday (foxtails, evergreen boughs, mocassins, rattles, etc. and elaborate headdresses ) but the Santa Clara dancing was far more energetic and choreographed, and women and children participated.

At Hopi, nobody talks during the dances. Yesterday was a carnival, with so many people, esp. so many white people, coming and going, eating, talking – lots livelier.  I saw two people I know: Marianne from Medenales, and Barbara from Hopi, whom I met at a dance over there a month ago.

In June, Joe and Janice went to the feast day at Okeh Owingeh (formerly San Juan Pueblo until it took back its old Indian name, which it had before the Spanish arrived) and decided there were too many white people there, so they hightailed it up to Taos for a corn dance that the whites didn’t know about! 

Anway – it was colorful, and the two college girls enjoyed it. They head back to Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan next week , so it was a memorable way to wind up their summer here.

Tuesday was the 330th anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt! I bet few of you learned about that in school. I didn’t either.

(nonai,

Fire!

Last Thursday we had the first real thunderstorm here since I arrived in March – and lightning started a wildfire.

We had hard rain, thunder and marble-sized hail that kept pelting down for a good 20 minutes. I began to worry about my car getting dented, and it pelted the skylights hard. Rain filled the arroyos. It was something!

Lightnng hit a cottonwood tree out in the desert behind Georgia O’Keefee’s house, but cottonwoods have lots of water, and it was two days later (Saturday morning) before it finally went from smoldering to erupting into flames and setting adjacent rabbitbrush and saltbush on fire. A passerby on the highway saw it and called 911. 911 called the ranch.

It was in such a remote area of the ranch that Julia and Ted, two volunteers, went out to try to find it. Finally they did, after parking and walking to where the passerby said she’d seen flames. They called the fire department, which came and put it out (tanker truck since we have o water out there) but then it rekindled a couple of times.

The firefighters were back today to make sure it was out. They cut down the cottonwood tree because it was weakened, and parts of it fell down.  They said the area was about 100 square yards.

Meanwhile, after the storm, I headed off to Joe and Janice’s Thursday afternoon because I had an appointment with a magazine editor in Flagstaff Friday morning, I was low on gas, but several stations are about 25 miles away, respectively. The first was closed. My low-fuel light came on. I kept going.

The second station was also closed and I was in a pickle. I would not have enough gas to get to the town of Cuba, 25 more miles away, where there are more gas stations. Luckily the station owner saw me out there. He came out and said the storm had knocked out the power, so I could not pump gas. Aha! That is why the first station was closed.

I said if he could give me a gallon of gas from a lawn-mower can or something I could get to Cuba, but he said, “If we’re out, Cuba is out. The storm knocked everything out from here to Jemez Springs.” There was nothing for me to do but wait there – why head down the road and chance running out of gas on that lonely winding road with nothing but poor Spanish-owned ranches?

So I sat and watched the mountains and the cattle grazing. There was nothing else to do. I was content.

In about a half hour, the power came back on, and I filled up and went on my way. When I went in to pay, the man had turned on his TV in the little cafe section of the convenience mart, and I heard something I had not heard since last summer: a baseball game. Televised. Strange.

Working the shirt!

My cousin Joe and his wife Janice sell their original “Don’t Worry, Be Hopi” T-shirt in their arts and crafts shop on the Hopi Reservation.  They wear it to the Hopi Cultural Center and walk around talking to their friends, all the while marketing their shop, the only place you can buy one.

I have this shirt, and my Ghost Ranch friends bought them when I took them to the rez back in June. So Sunday, when Ted and Melissa McLamb and Melissa Koch and I headed off for a day trip to Taos,  Ted and I wore our Don’t Worry, Be Hopi T-shirts.

We stopped for lunch at a restaurant named Dragonfly, and a woman came up to us and said, “Where can I get that shirt?” I wrote down Joe’s name and phone number etc. She said she is an Albonquin/Iroquois Indian and a native filmmaker, Nancy Red Star.  She wants to go to the rez and interview Hopi people. She said she has made a film on Hopi legends. I said, “Which one?” She said the one about the aliens landing in their spaceship.

Somehow I kept a straight face. I realized many Taos folk are way, way out there. Lots of hippies settled there in the 70s. She said she had a friend who had filmed the Hopi puberty ceremony. Joe, I’ll await your comments.

Then later at some shops, a woman said the man in the shop next door was married to a Hopi woman, so I went over there. Three Dog Taos. Sure enough, his wife was born in Second Mesa, and adopted out to a New Mesico family in 1957. He doesn’t know what village she’s from but they went back and traced her family lineage and he said she was welcomed warmly and “we sat in on a council meeting.” He said she is now a shaman who has studied for 20 years with global experts.

He said she knew Thomas, my Hopi medicine man, but Thomas hasn’t been to any fancy schools.  His gift is intuitive. I doubt if she has what Thomas would call “the gift”? He had her business card. She sounds pretty pricey.

Anyway, this man also wants a T-shirt. 3X, in any color.

Joe, do I get a commission?

We had fun in Taos, exploring old churches and little Spanish villages; and we watched kayakers thread rapids from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge – which is impressive, but can’t hold a candle to the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia. The peaks around Taos are as gorgeous as anything in Colorado.

Taos tales

The Taos Indians have no word for “poverty.” We all have what we need. we are rich in the intangibles.

That is what Cameron Martinez, who lives in taos Pueblo, said saturday when he spoke to a small class out at Casa del Sol, where I lived my first six weeks at Ghost Ranch. The class was led by Father Larry, a Franciscan monk who lives at an old mission in San Miguel, Calif.  He taught a class last week on following the path of St. Francis of Assisi.

He and I talked over several meals last week and he has worked with Indians at Jemez Pueblo here and at the Mescalero Apache Reservation. I told him I had connections at Hopi, one thing led to another, and Father Larry invited me to come to his class to hear Cameron speak.

Cameron is 53, very cool, with a long ponytail, wearing a neatly pressed shirt and khaki slacks. He has been a forest ranger and worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He has a master’s degree, so he has worked in the white man’s world and now lives back up at Taos Pueblo.

He talked for two hours. We asked quite a few questions, but the questions from the group of 10 were more intelligent than the ones Joe gets in his arts and crafts shop.

He said the pueblo has many “societies,” each with its own creation story. He did not share these stories with us. He said the tribe has many sacred sites all over the Four Corners area, not just within the pueblo, which is northeast of Taos, the city. He did not tell us what they were. He said the tribe has lived on that land for 2,000 years, moving a mile or two for better land on which to grow crops, but that is their home, he said.

when his son was 9, he was chosen to spend two years preparing to be a society leader when he grows up. the son could not have any contact with non-whites for two years. He did not go to school during that time. Cameron took him up to the mountains and taught him all about the natural world – the animals, the trees, the plants. The Indians believe everything is alive, that everything has a spirit.

I asked Cameron what his son learned that he could not learn in a classroom (I knew the answer; I wanted to hear him say it.) He said, without hesitation, that his son learned self-reliance. He learned about the natural world. He learned to improvise when necessary and use his head to figure things out. Cameron said it was the best time of their lives as a family. His daughter, aged 5 then, often tagged along on these outings.

He said his great-great-grandfather several generations back was hanged by the Spaniards for not adopting Catholicism. Many of their beliefs went underground, and that continues to this day. Many of their ceremonies and dances are not open to the public. But everyone in Taos is also Catholic and they all go to church every Sunday. Their spiritual beliefs are a combintation of Catholicism and their traditional Taos religion.

He kept using the phrase “what we are here for..” and I asked him about that. He said they are on Earth to take care of the earth for future generations.

He is half Taos and half Laguna, and his mother is Laguna and I’d expect the family to live in Laguna since many tribes are matriarchal, but when his parents married, they lived in taos.

He said he has his master’s degree in outdoor something or other, but he knew everything the professors taught him because he had grown up in the out-of-doors in a tribe that sees the land and everything in it as sacred, “but I stayed in the class because I needed that piee of paper.”

His family was given the last name of Martinez by the Spanish, who lined the Indians up and gave them Spanish last names. He did not tell us what his Taos name was. (Nobody asked.)

He said too much of American culture is money-driven, that all people care about is money, but in Taos culture you need only enough money to eat. That is why there is no word for poverty. They all take care of each other; everyone has enoughh to eat, and shelter, and we are all rich in what really counts – friends, family, sun and rain, crops growing, etc.

We sat outside at Casa del Sol, listening intently, with sun on the cliffs, thunder rumbling and rain to the south. What an afternoon.

Rolling thunder

For storm lovers like me, monsoon season is my favorite season here in New Mexico! Monsoon season is July and August in the Southwest, when it rains almost every afternoon.

It is clear and sunny in the morning, but clouds form like cauliflower in the sky, and then somewhere, it rains. we can see it: dark blue skies over the mountains to the south, rain coming down like veils in the distance, and rumbles of thunder. It does this somewhere, anywhere, in any direction.

All afternoon Saturday, thunder was growling. First to the ast. Then to the west. Then to the south. And around 4 p.m. the sky got very  very dark to the south, and the storm obliterated the mountains. It is always mostly rain; it is not the violent thunderstorms we get in the Midwest, but it is a treat to watch.

I do not understand these weather patterns. At home it is nice, a cold front comes in from the west, it storms, then it is nice for a few days again until the next front. This pattern repeates itself.

But this – these storms are just zooming all around, in every direction, and sometimes we get rain and sometimes we don’t. It rained in the night last night, and after a rain the fragrance of the sage and pines is so delicious and sweet.

It always rains in the mountains to the south. Even as I write this, white clouds are massing there, like a white fur hat. I have learned to keep a spare rain jacket in my office in case it rains when it is time to walk to meals.