Windfalls

or Making Room

The rain fell hard.  It struck an orchestra's worth of tones from the hardscape of the city:  dull, thudding drum notes from the roof, staccato tinklings off the metal gate, resonant pings against the windows.  The sidewalks hissed, the swamp cooler chimed like an untuned bell.  The water rushing from the canale by the kitchen door sang as the cistern caught it.

In the garden, amid the living things, the rain fell more quietly.  As I sat slicing peaches near the kitchen window I could hear the soft pattering of droplets on leaves and earth.

The peaches were a gift from an acquaintance.  A windstorm the night before had blown several bushels of soft, ripe fruit from her trees, and she was anxious that they be put to use.  I gladly came away with a couple of bags, and spent the evening peeling and pitting, cutting away bruises and blemishes.  The fragrance of peaches, the fragrance of rain, both of them were unexpected and precious.  They mingled beguilingly while the wind blew cool.  The practical part of me, the part that wasn't giddy with ambrosia, wondered what to do with the quantities of fruit.  As I worked and pondered I kept a watchful eye on the canale.

The canale in question (on a sunnier day).

It's in an odd place, draining over a tight corner between the house and the little wall and gate that divide front from back.  Left to its own devices in a heavy rain the canale can send torrents of water gushing down.  The force eats away at the base of the wall and washes little arroyos into the crusher fines on the path between the houses.  It's my own flash flood zone in miniature, a small version of the floods that are always the flip side of drought.

In Albuquerque, with the sheer limestone and granite cliffs of the Sandia Mountains on the edge of town, the sun-baked, packed earth in the foothills, and the concrete and asphalt of the city, an intense storm can send a mountain's worth of rain down from the heights to flood the valley in short order.  Hard surfaces can't take in all that water at once, so you have to divert the water and temporarily make room for it elsewhere.  The city has an extensive network of arroyos and catchment areas to cope with the problem.  I have a much smaller problem, and a cistern.

Sorry about the trash can, but it has to go somewhere.

A glazed pot, really, partially filled with gravel.  The pot catches the water pouring from the canale, and the drainage hole in the bottom of the pot lets the water out again in a smaller stream.  To slow the water even more, a shallow trench, deepening as it gets farther from the foundation of the house, is filled with gravel and planted with vinca; the far end of the trench waters one of the boxwoods. 

The rain that night was the hardest we've had since I set up the drainage system, and I was pleased to see that this bit of hardscaping worked.  The flow from the cistern wasn't forceful enough even to budge the gravel underneath; the overflow from the trench puddled in the crusher fines but didn't wash them away.  The rain was a lot of a good thing rather than too much.  It was a windfall, like the peaches, a generosity in life to be enjoyed all of a sudden.

The peaches have been turned into a simple sauce, ripe for a touch of culinary brilliance, should I have one, this autumn or winter.   Fortunately I had just cleared out the freezer anyway, making room by chance for all this bounty.  The pint jars glow with summer light every time I open the freezer door.

Peaches and rain:  reminders to make room for those moments when the feast-or-famine winds of life turn sharply toward feasting.  Room, so that a windfall isn't left to lie, feeding no one.  Room, so that a shower of good things doesn't run off unyielding surfaces.  Room, so that good things can soak into the soft places, bringing life to thirsty roots.

Room to enjoy a lot of a good thing, all of a sudden.

A Bad Time for Swamp Coolers

or Why a Rainstorm Is As Good As a Workout

A swamp cooler is a fine thing, if the water line doesn't split, and the belt doesn't break, and the pump doesn't give out, and the float doesn't sink, and the weather isn't too hot, and the humidity's really low.  We usually manage the last one out here pretty well, and when the stars are properly aligned and all the other things work out and the swamp cooler's chugging along, well, it's a fine thing.

If we're going to be technical (and you know me, I'm all about technical), we should really call it an evaporative cooler, that little box that sits on top of a great many houses in dry states.  (Dry as in climate, not Prohibition.)

"Swamp Cooler on a Hot Tin Roof"

In it is a pump, a fan, a water reservoir, and a set of pads.  The pump sends water over the pads, the fan blows air across them and into the ductwork, and as the moisture evaporates it cools the air.  The swamp cooler uses more water than none but not so much as to be entirely wrongheaded, and takes a lot less electricity than refrigerated air.  Especially when it doesn't work because the belt's broken, or the pump's given out, or...you get the picture.

A local bluegrass band called the Duke City* Swampcoolers has a CD titled Drained and Unplugged, which is a little play on words because at the end of summer and before the first frost, swamp coolers have to be...drained and unplugged.  The CD has a cut called "Swampcooler Breakdown," which is another little play on words because not only is a breakdown an uptempo instrumental number in bluegrass, but also swamp coolers tend to...break down.  When the Swampcoolers travel to non-western states, people ask them if a swamp cooler is some kind of a mixed drink.  You see just what an endless source of good humor the swamp cooler can be.  At least, on the love days of the love-hate relationship.

All to say, what with monsoon season being upon us and all, the air is pretty humid these days.

Humidity!

In fact, it's humid enough (sometimes 50%! or even more!) that the swamp cooler isn't working very well.  Which is fine, really.  I find that I don't particularly want it this time of year.  The weather is still hot but not miserable.  By afternoon clouds have moved in and hidden the sun, and the wind has picked up.  It's nice to open windows and let the breeze and the drone of cicadas in, and sometimes the smell of rain.

Of course, monsoon season in New Mexico doesn't mean "all day rain" or anything.  It's the desert version of the monsoon, and not anything to be all that impressed by (unless you live in the desert).
 

Not rainy.

It mostly means clouds and thunder in the afternoon, with isolated showers every few days.  Those showers make you work hard.  With all the windows open, the start of a rainstorm means a mad dash inside the house to close the ones on the rainy side, then a sprint up the stairs to close the ones there, and then a lot of mopping up of water on windowsills.  A few minutes later the rain stops, so you quickly run through the whole house, upstairs and down, opening windows again.  Another shower breezes through:  another mad dash to close the downstairs windows, another sprint upstairs to do the same, another mopping upstairs and down.  Just as you get everything set, the rain changes direction mid-storm.  Mad dashing, stair sprinting, window closing, window opening, mopping.  It's all very good for you, in a breathless sort of way.  A pity that I'm more of a dawdler than a dasher at heart, but there you are.  Like all good things, rain takes effort.  I'm certainly not complaining.  And for all that our rainstorms are hit or miss and stop and start and a lot of work for not much in the way of measurable rewards—

They're still more reliable than a swamp cooler.

________________
* The city of Albuquerque was named for the Spanish Duke of Alburquerque**, and one of its nicknames is Duke City.
** The city of Albuquerque used to be spelled Alburquerque, just like the Duke, but an "r" was removed so that the spelling would be easier, or so says urban legend.  Because the r's are definitely the tricky part.***
*** Other theories about the r float around from time to time.  One involves prunes.

Fifteen Minutes

or Transformations

Photography may be all about light, but townhouses are all about shadows.  In a tiny garden surrounded by walls, with the neighbors' houses spitting distance away*, shadows are eternal.  They may move throughout the day, but they never vanish altogether.  Sunlight is likely to enter the picture as mid-day glare, not the "golden hour" of sunrise or sunset.  In my garden, for a couple of weeks in April and September, the rising sun does shine through the narrow space between houses; for 15 minutes or so the flowers in its path glow in a gentle radiance.  The rest of the year, the sun doesn't top the walls until mid-morning.  For living in, that's just dandy; for taking photographs it isn't ideal.  (And if that's the worst thing I have to complain about, life is pretty darn good.)

I'm certainly not complaining about an excess of shade in July.  It's a welcome respite in the afternoons, generally cool enough to be enjoyable even when the temperature is in the low 90's.  The garden at this point of the season is primarily a green garden, an effect I rather like in mid-summer when so much else is brown.  Like shade, greenery is a welcome respite:  cooling, soothing.  None of the foliage is particularly dramatic—no eye-popping purples or limes—but I often prefer my dramas quiet in any case, more about slight changes of expression, and less about car chases and explosions.  Subtle greens in shade are just the right kind of drama, I think.  Each change in texture or color is like a lifted eyebrow, an upward tug at the corner of a mouth, a speculative tilt to the head.

Not that there's anything wrong with a good car chase, of course.  Or with explosions.  (In movies!  I just mean in movies!)  One of the nice things about a townhouse garden is the stark contrast between light and shadow.   (Nice for photography, at any rate, if not always for plants.)  At almost any sunlit time, you can find a deep, velvety backdrop not too far away.  When the sun is just right, even if only for 15 minutes every other Sunday, it lights up the few flowers in the garden like fireworks, from the normally gentle salmons of licorice mint

Agastache rupestris

to the delicate stars of gaura.

Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies'

The contrasts between dark and light, foliage and flowers, lifted eyebrows and explosions:  I'm still amazed at what extremes a small space can hold, at what transformations a few minutes of sunlight can work.  I'm in the mood to be amazed, because even as I'm writing this, rain is falling.  It's not the first rain of summer (and hopefully not the last), but it's the first to soak through the cushions on the Adirondack chair, the first with potential to fill the rain barrel.  If it lasts for more than 15 minutes I'll be surprised, but the sky suggests (with a subtly lifted eyebrow) that there may be more where this came from.  Suddenly the air is fresh, and the trees are dripping.  Thunder is rumbling across the whole great arc of the lower atmosphere.  The breeze smells sweet.  Dry, dusty New Mexico looks clean and alive.  What a transformation; what a lightning-fast journey from one end of the spectrum to the other.

It's been every bit as good as a car chase.
_______________________
* Note:  spitting is rude.

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.

Clean

or Ambivalence

In the last moments of darkness Orion is almost straight overhead, his stance firm as he tracks the night westward.  He steps across the roofline, and the sky lightens behind him.  His belt and shield gradually fade from view; soon only Betelgeuse at his shoulder and Rigel at his foot remain.  After lingering alone for a while, Cheshire cat-like, they, too, wink out in the growing dawn.

Mornings on the patio have a different flavor these days.  In summer, by the time I settle in the Adirondack chair with a mug of tea, the day is already moving along.  The goldfinches are working on their second course, the hummingbirds on their second squabble, and the garden is lively with light and sound and color and motion.

Now it is still dark when I go outside, the sun barely up when I head back in to get ready for work.  The hummingbirds have taken their squabbles south for the winter, and the goldfinches are still abed.  The crickets have gone silent.  These mornings I cradle the hot mug gratefully between my hands, both for warmth and for company; I had forgotten what the garden is like when it's quiet.  The only sound is the white noise of the highway, the sleepless truck traffic on the long haul to California or Tennessee.

Most mornings are clear, and the distant stars yield gracefully to our own in skies of pale, liquid gold and pink, of Alice blue.  Other mornings are thick with constellations of clouds, nebulae that pulse with energy as the sun glances off them.

Yesterday morning was altogether different, with pearly skies and fresh, moist air.  We had had rain the night before, the kind that lulls you to sleep with its quiet music on the roof and takes care not to wake you when it goes.  It left behind an inch of moisture and washed even the sky clean—the morning was white with thinning clouds, lustrous in the dawn light.

It wasn't a morning for flowers, even though the autumn sage and marigolds and agastache were glowing like jewels under water.  Instead it was a morning for leaves, washed clean of a month's worth of dust, gleaming in the diffused light, gathering, funneling, clinging to each droplet of rain before finally releasing it to quench the earth below and satisfy the thirsty roots at their feet.  A morning for greenery and the cool of serenity.  A morning just right for quiet.

As autumn grows I am aware of night not so much as the waking sphere of hawk-moths and crickets, the appointed time for secret feline rendez-vous, but as the realm of dormancy, of quiet and dreaming.  Dawn is no longer a shifting continuity, the changing of the guard between one set of lives and another, but a boundary between stillness and activity, a line dividing oblivion from alertness.  In the last minutes of darkness out on the patio I am aware of upstairs lights coming on as alarm clocks go off, the rumble of a car starting and the crunch of gravel under tires, the first chirp of the earliest bird turning into a sleepy chorus—aware of each day really being something new, clean, its own, isolated thing, and not the continuation of the moments before.  I'm not sure whether this is good or bad or neither.

Lately, by the time I finish my tea, the last swallow has grown cold.

To the Hilt

or When More Is More

Sometimes restraint is a fine thing—in the use of cayenne pepper, say, or the wearing of day-glo paisley.  No doubt there is a time and place for going over the top with both, but the tricky part is knowing just when and where that might be.

I can't remember where I saw the advice to flower photographers not to "overdew it," but it has stuck in my mind as something to remember in case I ever see dew again.  (It doesn't feature much in desert life.)  With rain or dew, restraint is generally a photographer's friend.  Two or three drops of water to adorn a perfect bloom and evoke the freshness of morning, or perhaps one large, precariously balanced droplet to catch the sunlight, ting! and reflect the sky in a beautifully distorted, fish-eye lens kind of way—that usually says everything that needs saying, and says it eloquently.  In other words, less is more.

Water practically gushing from a canale during a thunderstorm

Yes, well, that advice went out the window when we had a second thunderstorm this week.*  The official measurement was "a trace," but my neighborhood had good, drenching rain for about half an hour and probably received at least a quarter of an inch.  As I was wandering around the garden afterward, camera in hand, looking at a world dripping with water, I thought, why on earth would I want to be restrained when we've just had rain?  Why capture one droplet when the whole excitement is that we've just been doused by hundreds and hundreds—no, thousands and thousands, or maybe (gasp) even more of them?  Why adorn a plant with restraint when it is glorying in saturation?

Admittedly, a quarter inch of rain isn't that much, but that's precisely why it deserves some over-the-top revelry.  It may not be a lot, but our alternative to "not much" isn't "plenty," it's none at all.  When an enjoyment—a necessity—is scarce, you live it to the hilt when it comes along and thumb your nose at good taste.  Restraint is for those with a better range of choices, who can minimize a pleasure and still have plenty left.

Right now, we in the southwest are delighting in all the raindrops we can, because there's no knowing when we'll see them again.  This is our day-glo paisley moment, our time to relish a hair-raising, eye-watering, smoke-coming-out-the-ears mouthful of hot pepper intensity.  "Overdew" it?  You'd better believe it.  We've done "less."  It wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

The tasteful, restrained flowers of 'Wild Thing' autumn sage

Right now, more is more.


________________________
* I promise to stop talking about the weather soon.

A Perfect Storm

or In Which We See a Puddle

I was leaning back in the Adirondack chair early yesterday evening, idly watching the clouds and daydreaming a little, not really noticing what I was seeing.  Eventually a slow bubble of awareness rose up through my thoughts and burst, and I realized that the cloud I was staring at, the one right overhead, hadn't moved in several minutes.  It hadn't moved.  It wasn't winging across the valley, spinning into shape after shape, or fading to nothing in the desert air.  It was just...still.  So were the clouds around it.

That's when hope leaped high.  I stayed outside watching the clouds growing, thickening, blocking the remnants of sky, until the first rumble of thunder chased me inside to close windows.  By the time I'd finished, the rain had begun, the kind of steady, soaking rain we've been dreaming of here for months.  A harder rainfall would have been almost useless, as it would just have run off the sun-baked brick we call the earth.  This one was slow enough, gentle enough, to soften the surface first.  It trickled into the soil to ease thirsty roots, it washed the patio and sidewalks clean, it set the leaves on the sand cherries and desert olives trembling and flickering in the fading light.  Occasionally a gust would send the rain slanting against the windows, but mostly the wind was quiet, and the rain fell straight.  Thunder growled but never roared; the goldfinches didn't even bother to leave the feeders.

For the hour that the storm lingered, I drifted from window to window, door to door, indoors and out, watching droplets splash on the sidewalks, puddles (puddles!) on the streets glint in car headlights, colors in the garden take on new depth and intensity, water run freely from the canales.  The moment when the rain barrel overflowed—that was a triumph.

From an objective standpoint, I don't know why a rainstorm, even in the desert, should be quite so exciting to us city folk.  Rain or no rain, the indoor and outdoor taps still flow with water on demand.  In immediate, practical terms, extra moisture doesn't really make much difference, and in the quest for long-term sustainability, one rainstorm is so small as to be meaningless.

Even so, everyone I met today was wearing an air of ease, as if something wrong had righted itself.  It has been 216 days since our last "significant rainfall event"—one that brought us more than a scant two or three hundredths of an inch.  Yesterday, different parts of town received anywhere from 1/10 to 9/10 of an inch; I'm guessing my neighborhood fell somewhere in the middle.  In one hour the storm more than doubled what we've received in the last seven months altogether.  It's as if a long, drawn-out dissonance has finally resolved, as if someone has been singing the first seven notes of the scale, "Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti—" over and over until we've grown used to the tension of incompleteness in a teeth-gritting sort of way.  Now, suddenly, sweetly, that last "Do" has been given a chance to resonate.  We are relieved.  We are beside ourselves with joy.

One half-inch of rain won't shake the foundations of the earth.  It won't end a drought or even adequately water a garden—it didn't really even cool things off.  When I raced outside at dawn this morning to take pictures of raindrops on flowers, and maybe a good wet puddle, they had all already dried up.

But for the hour that it lasted, it was a perfect storm.

So Close, and Yet...

or Monsoon Season, New Mexico Style

It was a dark and stormy ni—well, no, it's really been late afternoon when the clouds have moved in.  Come to think of it, it hasn't gotten all that dark, even with the cloud cover—if you wanted to, you could still wear sunglasses in the shade and see just fine.  Stormy?  Well, maybe in a way, if you're not picky about definitions:  a bit of a cooling breeze, enough humidity that you could actually feel the air (weird!), and the sight of a few thunderheads.  But nothing that qualified as an actual storm.  Not in the sense of actual weather.

A dark and stormy night A perfectly lovely evening, gosh darn it.

Every afternoon for the past couple of weeks, the monsoon clouds have built up over Albuquerque.  We look forward to them all through the blistering heat of June, and early every July the newspaper sports a giant, front-page headline like:

Is Monsoon Season Here? 

According to those in the know, for 2011, it is.  For the next couple of months, the prevailing winds will change direction and start pulling moist air up from the Gulfs of Mexico and California.  As the moisture heats up over the warm earth it will rise; as it cools in the higher air it will condense to fall again as rain.  (It is hardly the awe-inspiring monsoon of the Indian subcontinent, but the wind pattern works the same way.)  Across the west and southwest, we rely on these two months for 40% of our annual moisture, which in Albuquerque should give us a little over three inches.  Since our total for the year so far is still 0.19" (5mm) of rain, we're ready for this.

We want some dark and stormy nights.

But clouds in the southwest don't come in massive storm fronts, even during monsoon season.  No giant "unicloud," as my oldest nephew calls it, stakes out the sky from one horizon to the other and sets up camp for the week, pouring out rain all the while.  Instead the clouds here are separate little puffballs with vague herding instincts.  If the cloud directly over you decides to drop its rain just at that moment, you will get rain.  Otherwise, maybe your neighbor three houses down will.  The next cloud will probably have different ideas.  So will the next one.

The herding instincts of clouds, illustrated.

Even without rain, of course, the season is a relief.  The higher humidity (sometimes soaring to 50%) has been a boon to weary firefighters around the state; the clouds have kept afternoon temperatures a few degrees cooler.  We can water gardens and landscaping a little less, because the water doesn't evaporate quite as quickly.  But still.  We want some rain.

Some parts of the state have received it—Santa Fe, Roswell, Socorro.  Even some parts of town have seen rainfall, especially closer to the foothills.  Here in the valley, though, we've had a couple of wickedly flirtatious showers, and that's been it.  They've been enough to give the air an almost desperate sweetness—a freshness so rare and intense that it hurts.  They've lasted long enough to make the patio furniture too wet to sit on for a few minutes, but not enough to send any water tumbling out of the canales into the rain barrel below, or to dampen more than the surface of the earth.  Not enough to measure.

In the last few days I've stood on the patio and watched the anvils on thunderheads fraying in the icy upper atmosphere.  I've seen the Sandias disappear behind a black sheet of rain.  I've gazed at mango- and raspberry-colored sunsets breaking through the (many) gaps in the clouds.  It's all been dramatic and beautiful, maybe even verging on the sublime. 

But what I'd really like to see...is a puddle.

From the Sidelines

 

or Between the Rests

Someone, it seems, has been overdoing it in the garden.  I've been sidelined again this week by CFS, and have spent most of the last few days alternating between bed, sofa-and-laptop, and the Adirondack chair on the patio.  The restfulness has been critical, but in between lie-downs, I've been walking the (fortunately very short) path around the garden.  It's been a bit like playing the harp part in an orchestral piece—pages of rest, then a few brief, colorful notes, and then pages of rest.

The garden is that way, too, at the moment—little flurries of activity amid plenty of open space.  While the perennials are beginning to fill back in after their late-winter trimming, and the ground covers, though taking their own sweet time, are starting actually to cover the ground (impatiently, I begin to understand the impulse to plant invasives—bishop's weed would have solved this problem long ago), the effect is still a splash of color against an empty backdrop.  I would make a note to myself to plant more bulbs next fall, but a) I would lose it and b) I will plant more anyway.

In a way, however, planting more might be defeating the purpose.  The harp, after all, is a coloristic instrument in the orchestra—its effect depends in part on the relative rarity of its use.  The splashes of color in the garden grab my attention in the way that a whole swath, or a bed, or a field, might not; I know each tulip in each patch, when it first broke ground, when it started to bloom, when it reached its prime, which of its leaves get in the way of the camera.  (I grow species tulips, as their stems are either short or flexible enough to withstand the spring winds here, and they bloom early enough to please the bees even more than usual.  But the leaves do get in the way.)

Don't get me wrong—I miss being active without counting the cost, more than I can tell you.  I wouldn't mind being a violinist—even a second violinist—in the orchestra for a change, rather than the harpist, just for the sake of doing something, even though really, the part itself might not be any more interesting.  But these splashes of activity in the midst of rest do have their meaning.  The pleasure of being home for our first thunderstorm of the season, when the first rain (rain!  0.03 inches of rain!) fell in 64 long, dry days, is one I won't soon forget.

I suppose it's all about context.  Rain in between dry spells means a lot more than rain in a gray spring full of showers.  When quietness is the norm, you learn to savor moments of fullness:  the rain, the flowers, the experiences—

all the things that happen in between the rests.

Ease

or Letting the Dust Settle

The two least restful words in the English language are "should" and "ought."  They nag at you, they poke you in the conscience, they tug at the sleeves of your awareness, they rake fingernails of unease down the chalkboard of your soul.  They are little linguistic chihuahuas, yapping and yapping and yapping for your attention.  (I'm having fun with this one.)  Even when you take a well-earned breather, they whine in the background of your rest, preventing you from gathering the refreshment you need.

This past week, "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang [sorry, I don't know the past tense of gang] aft agley."   Because of a CFS flare, my beautifully planned,  gently paced schedule of Christmas preparations—the one that was designed to manage my illness while getting things fully ready for the holiday—still looks a little too pristine, with no satisfying "X"s next to most items on the list.  The shoulds and oughts are piling up, and I don't see how I can fulfill them all without sending my health into a nosedive.

One of the hardest and most valuable lessons illness teaches is that at some point, if you want any of the healing rest your body demands, you have to shut the door on those two words.  Unfortunately, for me, at least, it seems to be one of those lessons that has to be relearned every time a new "should" comes up.

_____________________________________________

We had rain and snow in Albuquerque this week—about an inch of rain, and a couple of inches of good, wet snow.  We were parched for it, and even though the snow has melted again, the earth is moist, and everything looks fresh.  Some winters we don't get much moisture at all, and then the grit blows in the streets, and the evergreens are dusty and dirty and drab.  For now, however, the dust is settled, the streets and leaves rinsed clean.  With the sun diffused through a thin scrim of clouds today, the catmint, yarrow, and oregano leaves in the garden look spring-green; the boxwoods gleam in the soft light.

An inch of winter rain can be a mixed blessing out here, as roots that like to fight for their moisture resent having to take long baths in it instead—we'll see how happy the rosemary is come spring.  But for now, the garden is wearing an air of ease, as if it is enjoying a moment's respite from the constant struggle with drought.  As I sit on the patio this morning, soaking up the atmosphere of freshness, a tension that I wasn't even aware had been riding my spine begins to let up.

Walking along the path, I notice that some of the newly planted ipheion bulbs have started sending up their fall foliage—one (1) spindly, grassy leaf apiece.  (Next year they will be a thicket.)  I kneel to look more closely and catch a sudden whiff of tarragon from the neighboring bed.  The tarragon leaves themselves are nothing but a wet, soggy mess of compost that still has the misfortune to be attached to the stem, but the moisture and mild sunshine are enough to bring out the herb's clean, anise-y fragrance.  It is a moment of pure loveliness, and I rest in it, free of shoulds and oughts.  The dust settles.  In that moment of ease, I remember what is important.

My family is coming for Christmas, and I am blessed.

Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella

(Because I Seem to Have Left All of Mine in Vermont)

The first time I read Winnie the Pooh and came across Christopher Robin wandering up and down under the honey tree saying, "Tut-tut, it looks like rain," I was deeply perplexed by two things:

1. I could not see the point of saying "tut-tut."
2. I did not know what an umbrella was.

I had never seen one.  My family didn't own one, nor did anyone else I knew.  Growing up in Colorado, with its 300+ days of sunshine a year, an umbrella wasn't exactly a necessity, and I couldn't even begin to imagine a place where rain was such a steady feature of the climate that one needed a shield against it.  After having Winnie the Pooh explained to me, umbrellas seemed like the height of exotic mystery, curios owned by people in far-away lands where people said "tut-tut," and did stoutness exercises in their spare time.

What with all the mystique surrounding them, I naturally asked my parents for an umbrella of my very own; just as naturally (to them), they said no.  I thought they were unreasonable—it wasn't as though I'd asked for a Hundred Acre Wood, after all, or to live under the name of Sanders; I just wanted an umbrella.  What my parents didn't say, but no doubt thought, was that I would probably poke my eye out with it, fight my sister over and/or with it, break a few knick-knacks by playing games with it in the house, and generally get in trouble, but I sure wouldn't need to use it against actual rain.  Some eventualities don't need to be prepared for, and others—well, let's just say that my parents knew which eventualities were the most likely to happen in this instance.   What with the aura of disapproval surrounding them, umbrellas became even more alluring and desirable...

Then I moved to the northeastern United States, and that pretty much took care of that.  Umbrellas became one of the drearier facts of life, and I owned far too many of them:  the light-weight golf umbrella I took to walk Luther T. Dog in the rain; the heavy-weight golf umbrella for walks in rain and wind; the collapsible; the mini-collapsible; the other collapsible I bought when I thought I'd lost the first one; the dressy umbrella (for formal rainstorms?  Don't ask me what I was thinking, because I don't know.); the broken umbrella to be used in Desperate Need.

I have been in Albuquerque for five years this month, and this past week had one of those moments of realization when you're suddenly struck by how your life has changed. Both your former set of expectations and the new reality stand side by side in equal detail, and somehow an umbrella summed them both up.  We've had record-setting rainfall here—the most that has ever fallen in a 24-hour period (get ready to be impressed):  1.77 inches.  That beats the last record of 1.05 inches, set in 1929, by a walloping margin, and most of it fell as good, steady, soaking rain—the kind tailor-made for umbrellas.

But I don't know where mine are.  I'm pretty sure I moved them with me from Vermont, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.  In five years, I have not needed an umbrella; a smile really has been adequate protection—that or simply waiting out the storm.  Probably they're buried in a closet somewhere, no doubt behind the snow boots, parkas, wool sweaters, and other useless things.  I could look for them, but why?  If it's another 81 years before we get this much rain again, my needing an umbrella is an unlikely eventuality, the kind I probably don't need to be prepared for.

Vermont is a beautiful state—you have to hunt long and hard to find anything that isn't breath-takingly lovely (until mud-season, at any rate).  But it is not a kind climate for someone with CFS and fibromyalgia, both of which are made worse by cold, damp weather.  I spent every September there in dread of the coming months, hunting for new ways to protect myself from pain and exhaustion, trying to hedge myself against the loneliness of being trapped inside for every leisure hour of a long, nasty winter—battles that would get harder each year and leave me less resilient, more wounded, and ever wearier of having to carry on a battle at all.  I don't really believe in spending a lot of time looking backward, but I have occasionally wondered whether the decision to leave academia and move to New Mexico was a wise one.  To realize that all my umbrellas have gone missing, and that that is just fine, is a big thumbs up as far as I'm concerned.

As I walked out the door the other day in the lightly falling rain, for a brief moment I wanted an umbrella.  Then, for the first time in my life, I found myself channeling my grandmother.  In exactly the same irritated tone she reserved for those who tried to take care of her, in exactly her gruff alto, I heard myself growling, "I'm not made out of sugar or salt."  Grandma would have been mildly annoyed that we were trying to shelter her from a sudden shower, that we would dare to think that she, a woman in her mid-90's, was not perfectly stout, that she needed protection from something that just didn't matter.

Isn't that lovely?  The rain just doesn't matter.

If I ever find my umbrellas, I shall show them to my youngest nephew, who has probably never seen one.  They will be rusty and faded and open complainingly, and we will look at them, shake our heads sadly, and say "tut-tut" together.

Because a smile is really all the umbrella we need.