Snow Day

or Usefulness

The old year faded out in snow.

Not much snow, but enough to yield 3/100 of an inch of moisture, raising our grand total for 2012 to 5.46 inches.  I find it hard to believe that even a native plant finds a dusting of snow worthwhile, but what do I know?  Maybe having its toes tickled occasionally is icing on the cake to Mormon tea (Ephedra viridis)—an enrichment activity that makes its life in the desert all worthwhile.

Now, Colorado, that was another story.  Flying to Denver for Christmas along the front range of the Rockies, looking out the scratched airplane window and away beyond the wing, you could really see snow.  The fourteeners sparkled in the sun.  Even their vertical crags were caked with powder not yet scoured away by arctic winds.  Colorado doesn't have nearly as much snow as it should—snowpack is only about 60% of average—but some places have 30 or 40 inches so far.  Even if that isn't really enough, it's still useful snow.  Come spring, when it starts to melt, the streams and rivers will rise, and the reservoirs that give life to the west will fill with water.  (At least, that's the idea.) 

Half an inch of snow is not so useful.  It doesn't replenish the aquifer, deep inside the earth; it doesn't even water the garden.  It settles the dust; it enriches life a little, it offers a moment of refreshment, maybe even excitement, for those of us who are easily entertained—and then it goes away.  I'm not complaining, mind you.  I don't much like snow any more, and half an inch is plenty to give my soul all the cold, watery refreshment it needs. 

We have the luxury to enjoy "snow as enrichment" in Albuquerque because the useful stuff happens elsewhere.  For the most part, our water doesn't come from around here.  It comes from the Colorado River basin, way up yonder.  We cheer on the cold, deep, lingering, powdery, useful snows that happen in the high country.  They keep that basin flowing with life-giving water.  And we revel in the pleasant change of pace offered by our half-inch storm that goes away as soon as the sun comes out.

From the patio.  (With the zoom lens...)

I've been thinking some about usefulness and enrichment lately—about the pipes and pumps and tunnels and other marvels of engineering that let clean water flow from a tap in the desert; and about those less tangible, less obviously necessary things that offer pleasure and refreshment, that tickle your mental toes and then melt away.  The contrast between those ideas might be kind of a theme here off and on for a while.

If it isn't a useful exercise, it might (if we're lucky) at least be an interesting one...

Filling the Rain Barrel

or Resources

I remember the day when it rained last April.  We had a thundershower, the first one of the year.  It lasted for fifteen minutes or so and dried up just as quickly; its droplets clung to the 'Bright Gem' tulips until the sun came out.  The storm gave us 3/100 of an inch of moisture.

Tulipa batalinii 'Bright Gem'

It was also, if I recall correctly, the last rainstorm until the end of July.

With drought gnawing at the bones of the southwest and Texas last year, news channels were full of stories about sinking reservoirs and cracked river beds (and fires, and fires, and fires).  One story I read online had a comments section, and a commentator from somewhere back east wrote in about the virtues of rain barrels.  We should all get rain barrels, he said, and that would help reduce demand on the water supply.  Others chimed in, agreeing, full of ideals and good will.  Finally one Texan said laconically, "You have to have rain to fill a rain barrel."  And that pretty much ended the discussion.

When your experience of drought is "less rain than normal"—a shower every couple of weeks rather than every few days, a quarter of an inch rather than a whole one—it's hard to grasp the idea of no rain at all.  Eking out resources is only something you can do if you have resources to begin with, not if you have none. 

Last year my empty rain barrel kept blowing over in the wind and damaging things, so I just set it on its side, out of the way, for most of the summer.  Black widows took shelter undisturbed in the shade beneath it.  When I stood it upright in July, a cloud of dust slid off.

This year, however, the rain barrel is not going to blow over.  On Monday night raindrops began doing a slow tango on the roof; Tuesday morning the dance was still carrying on.  By the time I'd finished my tea before breakfast the rain had turned into a swandive of fat, heavy snowflakes that splashed and rippled in the birdbath.   In the damper climates where I've lived the day would have been all too ordinary, a dreary disappointment strong on umbrellas and weak on cheer.  Here the umbrella stayed home, because getting wet was pure pleasure.  The gray skies and slushy streets had the magic of possibility to them.  Surely anything out of the ordinary can happen, you feel, in a spring when it rains and snows, and the streets are wet.

The snow lasted through the morning, all but an inch of it melting on contact, and then the clouds drifted off on their own.  The storm gave us .81 inches of moisture:  27 times the yield of our storm last April.  We have resources to eke out.  The rain barrel is full, and nothing needs watering.  The ground is wet, deep down among the roots.

The next day as I was tidying some blown twigs out of the garden, I noticed that one of the big sand cherry's branches had gotten caught between the boards of the bench.  I bent down to release it and set free a shower of white petals and fragrance.  As I stood up clouds of blossom slid off me, brushing my fingertips as they floated down.  The ground was already covered with the petals that had fallen during the rain.

Spring is never quite so beautiful, I think, as in those showers of petals as the blossoming ends, the snow-white storms of them drifting past and glinting in the light.  Such short-lived abundance, so full of possibility.  Tiny green cherries are already beginning to form on some of the branches. 

Our 81/100 of an inch of moisture may be just as short-lived as the blossoms and wither away just as surely in the spring sunshine.  Still, even a few resources can open the door to all kinds of possibilities.  It's early to be looking ahead, but after all, the sand cherries are.

This summer—maybe this summer will be one of abundance.

Dearth and Plenty

or Relativity

C. chrysanthus 'Cream Beauty'

A number of years ago I found myself in Paris at the end of January and was delighted to see pansies blooming everywhere—in window boxes, public parks, tucked into private courtyards—cheerful splashes of color wherever you looked.  I commented on all the flowers to a French acquaintance, who looked at me in perplexity and said, "There are no flowers.  There are only winter flowers."  She never did quite believe me, that across huge stretches of North America "winter" and "flowers" don't go in the same sentence together.  And she never did seem particularly impressed with the pansies.

Vermont, of course, is one of those places where winter is not a flowering season.*  The snow generally arrives mid-December and doesn't melt again until mid-March.  On clear nights temperatures can drop to 25 below Fahrenheit, and some winters they don't warm above 0°F (or C, for that matter) for weeks on end.  Even the most reckless crocuses wait until spring is well advanced (in calendar terms) to make their appearance, and then only in protected spots against west- or south-facing walls.  They are truly spring flowers, blooming in early April, and mighty welcome they are.  They are loved not only for their beauty, but also because they Mean something:  winter may still have some fight left in it, but it's fading fast.  Soon the spring peepers will start calling from every pond and puddle, and from then on you're off and running.

C. chrysanthus 'Blue Pearl'

The little snow crocuses that I love are early bloomers.  In my garden they usually open at the end of February, but this year they started blooming on Groundhog Day, more than six weeks before the equinox, right smack dab in the middle of winter.  I'm wondering whether they can even properly be called spring flowers here in Albuquerque, or if they're really winter ones—not a herald of change on the horizon at all.

Thinking about the mental divide between winter and spring has set me to thinking about dearth and plenty, and how relative they can be.  In places where flowers bloom year-round, I suppose it's easy to think that even a park full of pansies makes a meager show.  Compared to the abundance of summer, winter leanness might be enough to leave you unsatisfied, wanting more.  Where flowers don't bloom for six months of the year, though, and the landscape is a blanket of white for three, any flower is a treasure.  The pinpoint of color from one little crocus can fill you with joy enough to share with the neighborhood.  Dearth—if there's hope at the end of it—teaches you the knack of turning a morsel into plenty.

Whether crocuses here belong to spring or winter is really pretty moot—they will bloom in February one way or the other.  I suppose the question is more one of attitude.  Are they "only winter flowers," not yet the real deal, or are they spring flowers that Mean something?  Do they belong to an attitude of dearth, or do they get to be the plenty at its end?

Today the weather came down on the side of winter, with snow this morning and again late this afternoon— large, sleepy flakes that kissed the flowers lightly before melting away.  The crocuses, with their colors of cream and pearl, were just as gentle with winter in their turn.  They accepted its kiss kindly, on the cheek, as between old friends.

And when the sun came out, they turned their faces toward the spring.

_______________________
* My entry for Understatement of the Year.

Imbalance

or Building Character

After a howling beast of a windstorm Thursday night and a fussy, festering day on Friday, Saturday morning gave us a snowfall, the first (and for all we know, only) one of the season.  It was just an inch, but it fell beautifully, and its .11 inches of moisture helped to offset the desiccating effect of the earlier winds.

Offset, but not negate.  The snow didn't compensate fully for those drying easterly winds any more than it returned the two inches of fallen leaves and four inches of pecan shell mulch that used to protect my garden beds.  The wind scoured them down to bare dirt in places, and I have no idea where, this side of the Grand Canyon, all those pecan shells ended up.  Perhaps the next time a west wind comes along it will return them, but that may be a little too much symmetry to ask for.  (And may I just say, it is really exasperating to lose 240 pounds of mulch the very week that the cold weather hits.)

The snow didn't return things to neutral.  It didn't right the balance, but then, I'm not really sure we had a balance to set right; a lack of equilibrium is what gives New Mexico its character.  The relations between earth, air, fire, and water are normally out of kilter here, heavy on the first three and light on the last, and this year water has been nudged almost off the scale altogether.  The snowstorm helped it hang on a little longer is all.  We're just happy that it settled the dust—and oh, it smelled so fresh. 

By the time the day was bright enough to allow photos on Saturday morning, the snow was beginning to melt.  It was in that nameless in-between state, neither frozen nor liquid water, not even properly slush, where it still had snow's ability to negotiate with gravity, but the negotiations were beginning to falter.  It balanced or fell at random places, filling out the wrinkles in some of the withered sand cherries and turning them almost round again, sliding from others and leaving them gleaming wetly along every ridge and fold.  Each little bit of branch and stem shaped water differently.

On the sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes), the water droplets dwarfed the tiny seeds they haloed or came to rest at odd places along the symmetrically branching stems.  They reminded me of a hanging mobile, all delicate weights and counterweights and wires that are just unbalanced enough to move at a light touch, to create a new shape every time they come back to stasis.

Generally speaking I'm a confirmed—nay, obsessed—symmetry fiend.  I don't mean to be; it just happens that way.  So there's a certain irony in my singing the praises of unevenness and imbalance, the way they give rise to character and beauty, the way they bring particularity into the foreground.  A talk with a friend today and other bits of happenstance recently, though, have reminded me of the joys of letting a passion throw your life out of balance—or put another way, of finding an idiosyncratic balance among out-of-kilter elements. 

It will either build your own character, or the characters of everyone who knows you...