Courtesy of the Winds

Or Letting Go

The desert olives impress me most.  They have an actual strategy, and a long-term one at that.  The winds have been blowing here, you see—and blowing, and blowing:  the hard, buffeting winds of spring.  They are the real test of adaptation in these parts, and many exotics that fare well in drought and sun receive their last rites from the wind.

My oldest nephew gave me a book on wind a while back (Wind, it's called, by Jan DeBlieu), because he said it was such a leitmotif in my blog.  It does have force of character here in New Mexico, a personality you either learn to live with or—well, you just have to learn to live with it.  All across the world, of course, living things have learned in remarkable ways to cope with the wind.  Trees change shape to reduce the drag of it in their crowns, to keep the force of it from breaking them apart or knocking them down.  DeBlieu writes of different species rolling their leaves into tight cylinders or folding them in half, or even clumping together in masses:  all ways to reduce the force of wind in those top-heavy crowns.

Desert olives (Forestiera neomexicana)

The desert olives just let their leaves go.  They leaf out heavily in early spring, each twig and branch thick with apple green leaves on fragile stems.  While the days are lengthening, and the sun is still cool and pleasant, they photosynthesize like mad.  But as the seasonal winds rip through them, whole stems of delicate new growth get sheared away; the garden is littered with leaflets.  The dense shade beneath the trees begins to dapple.  By mid-June perhaps a third of the leaves are gone—mid-June, when the sun is reaching its strongest, and desert plants are ready for relief.  The olives will have harvested enough energy in spring to thrive, and in summer, thanks to the wind, they will have fewer tender surfaces that lose moisture, fewer that require it.  They use the spring winds to help them survive the summer sun.

Treating the wind as an asset, rather than something to be endured—other species have different tactics:  conifers and cottonwoods, maples and elms.  They all count on the wind to cast pollen, seed, and samara far and wide; the wind helps their kind survive.  Whole ecosystems rely on the wind.  DeBlieu writes of aeolian biomes in the extreme heights of the Himalayas, beyond the range of growing things.  Insects live there by scavenging pollens and seeds or bits of insect wing that have blown in on the wind.  I look at the ants hunting and gathering in the garden with renewed interest.  What exotic treats do they enjoy—or even depend on—courtesy of the winds?  Saguaro pollen from Tucson, perhaps, or microscopic mineral crystals from the great Salt Lake; a taste of the tropics from the Gulf of Mexico.  In the utter bareness of the Himalayas, the wind is the sole provider.  In the relative plenty of the high desert, it's harder to tell what needs might be met by the wind.  Perhaps none.  Perhaps many.

I've been thinking about aeolian biomes and windborne nutrients as the third anniversary of Microcosm has approached.  I am more astonished every year at what the winds of cyberspace bring us, and how they cast our words far and wide, scattering bits of our personalities around where they may take root or be enjoyed by others.  I'm especially astonished at the friendships and community those winds have blown into my life.  They have brought me beauty and kindness; they have made it possible to adapt to illness and thrive.  Now, though, as the winds of a New Mexico spring are fanning the fires of summer, I find that other aspects of my life are calling for attention.  I think it is time to let Microcosm go. 

I'm drafting this out on the patio, while the silky threadgrass ripples on the breeze.  The wind has been growing for a while now.  A gust almost knocks over the empty iced tea glass perched on the arm of the Adirondack chair.  It's strong enough to chase me inside, and from there I watch the desert olives twisting and bending.  A few leaflets blow onto the patio.  It seems a good moment to close—and to thank you for the gifts you've given so generously:  your readership and comments, your time and ideas, and most of all your friendship and caring.  You all mean the world to me.  May the winds of the world bring you many good things to savor.

And may you always discover the gifts they bring you.

Open and Shut

or A Change in the Weather

Some winds close you down, slam!  A cold, hard gust smacks into you, and suddenly you're huddled around yourself and sprinting indoors, with the door banging shut behind you.  Other winds open you up—the warm, wild winds that smell of freshness, and maybe rain.  They lure you outdoors to stand tall and stretch and breathe deeply, as if you were a fish in water, and your whole body were gills. Those are the adventure winds, the ones that make you wish you could sweep out into the world on their tails, rushing away over the desert and straight up the sides of the Sandias—and from there, who knows.

We've had a little of both this week, the opening up and closing down, stretching out and huddling in.  The weekend gave us a warm wind and a rainstorm, and clouds that scudded low and fast across the sky and came just shy of thundering.  It could almost have been spring.

Spring is an opener, too.  Even the thought of it can set you to adventuring and make a world of possibilities open wide in your imagination.  When the thought coincides with warm, fragrant air and a wind that feels pleasant through layers of fleece, you find your senses quickening, your spirit stretching out in new ways to life. 

When that happens in January, you start to wonder if you might be forgetting something, like February. 

I believe there may even be a bud on that front crocus...

So I was doubly glad to see those crocuses coming along.  The leaves have been up for a while, but they're beginning to open out in the sunshine, rather than staying huddled in a tight sheaf.  It's good to know that if I am mistaking a fluke of the weather for a Sign that gardening season (which is not really the same as Spring, but close enough) is at hand, I am not alone.  The garden seems outright convinced of it.  It's unfurling new leaves, and not all of them belong to crocuses.

Those are genuine raindrops!  (Also golden columbine, Aquilegia chrysantha v. chaplinei 'Little Treasure')

As the work week began the weather changed, with cold, slamming winds and a sudden drop in temperature outdoors, and a duck-your-head-and-work-to-the-deadlines end of January indoors.  A friend blew into town in the midst of it—a long-lost kindred spirit and her father, on their way from Texas to Oregon and then to Taiwan.  We enjoyed a whirlwind dinner before they swept back out into the world on their trip across the desert.  I've found myself looking up in wonder since then, remembering in the midst of a shutting-you-down sort of week that breath of fresh air.  

Now the weather is changing again, with beautiful timing, just as the weekend is...if not knocking at the door, at least coming up the walk.  It should be warm and springlike, with a good breeze blowing, maybe even an adventure wind. 

You can never really ride the tails of those winds, you know.  They just open you up to possibility, and suggest wild vistas to your imagination.  They make you itch for the adventures that stand before you.

Another raindrop!

Let the gardening begin.

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...

Tall in the Saddle

or Worlds Unto Themselves

'Kerala Red' Amaranth

The south winds are the worst.  The garden is fairly well protected from our prevailing northwesterlies, but there isn't much shelter for it to the south.  Last Thursday night a windstorm came through, the kind that bends the upper branches of the trees at right angles and has all your perennials leaning to starboard for a day or so.  It was a night of sudden thuds and thumps, of wondering idly whose patio furniture was going to be where by morning.

The raised microgarden took a hit, more than the plants at ground level.  I had just planted carrot seeds—lightweight, insubstantial, surface-sown carrot seeds—and have no idea whose yard they're gracing now.  Judging by where they've begun to sprout, the arugula seeds drifted up against the amaranth on the microgarden's north end before finding safe harbor; perhaps the carrots have done the same.  The tomatillo plants, which are just now setting on nicely, were pushed over into the amaranth, too, and some are still leaning heavily against it.  Without its support, they might have blown over altogether.  I've almost begun to think of amaranth as my right-hand man in the garden—I don't know what I would do without it.

Not that it fared particularly well.  Wind is its Achilles heel, and its oldest, windward leaves are looking extra shreddy and battered now.  It's been having its own private little autumn for about six weeks anyway; it has flowered and set seed and is nearing the end of its life span.  Despite all that, despite age and weather, it's still sitting tall in the saddle, its stems like laser beams keeping the north end of the patio alight, its younger, leeward leaves luminescent in the sun.  It's still feeding the goldfinches (and I do wish they'd let me get a photograph).  When I pulled the spent summer veggies last week, two mantises emerged from the amaranth's shelter to protest, one of them pawing at the air with a front leg, for all the world like a dog, if a dog were green and angular and thought mostly "Oy!"

I begin to understand why the Aztecs gave amaranth a central role in their most important ceremonies, why Montezuma demanded it as tribute, why the Spanish banned the growing or eating of it after the conquest:  it's so useful, and on so many levels, that you begin to revere it.  It gives shelter to beneficial insects, feeds the birds, offers support to weaker plants, thrives in the heat of summer.  I'm impressed and never even got around to eating it this year, which was, after all, the whole point of planting it.  Had I spent the summer tossing together quick sautés of the leaves like I usually do (olive oil and onion, a little lemon and chipotle chile powder), I might feel impelled to salute.

"Tall in the saddle" is the way you sit when you've done yourself proud. Online definitions vary, but they all hover in the vicinity of staunch, resolute, and heroic. 

I don't really think that amaranth is heroic, you know.  It's a plant, growing the way its genes have told it to.  But some plants need care and fussing and nurturing before they'll reward you with a bloom or a fruit; some cheerfully do what you ask and no more.  Some, though, astonish you by doing more than you ever expected when you planted them, thinking one-dimensionally about summer greens.  From seeds as tiny as grains of sand they become worlds unto themselves, worlds of shelter and nourishment and strength, useful to the lives that depend on them even when they're ready to hand the baton to next summer's seeds, to fade back into the soil.

They do themselves proud.

A Work Week's Worth of Winds

or In Which We Wallow in Weather

Today.  Such a light breeze, one of the rare, perfect kinds—not too hot or cold or strong, and faintly scented of honeysuckle.  A wind to rest—no, to revel in.

Thursday.  Comparative calm. A cool breeze from the northwest at 15 mph, the sky a vast arc of unbroken blue. Even for New Mexico, the sun is radiant. As I sit on the patio writing, a hummingbird lights in one of the desert olive trees.  Today, we are all catching our breaths.

Wednesday. Fitful winds from the west, north, northwest; a fretful sky. The radio blathers excitedly about snow in the East Mountains, but here in town we only get a tight-fisted sprinkling of raindrops, like pennies flung resentfully at a beggar. Late in the afternoon the clouds begin to break apart, and the wisps at their edges go tumbling end over end. From their midst, suddenly, the moon takes shape.

Tuesday. Strong winds, holding steady at 25 mph, with gusts up to 50. They blow from the south, the garden's least protected side. By late afternoon even the sand cherries look beaten down. The desert olives bend from their waists, their upper branches sweeping in circles and figure eights.

The sky isn't any calmer. The cumulus clouds have shredded around their edges, the winds dragging them out of shape. I keep blinking, trying to bring them into focus, before realizing that the clouds themselves are blurry, like the vaguer sort of watercolor.

A glancing blow to the head—my 5'7” self has been hit by one of the topmost branches of the 12' tree. It is time to acknowledge that today, the patio is not a pleasant place to be.

Monday. Dust storms. Winds from the northwest at 35 mph, gusting up to 70. Even my lungs feel dusty. I pour a glass of water in the kitchen and look out at the chard and carrots in the micro-garden, buffeted by this dry wind all day, and decide to water them again.  While I'm at it, I refill the dish I've begun to leave out for every cat in the neighborhood (apparently), to keep them from pawing the pebbles out of the bugbath to reach the water at the bottom. (A voice in my head whispers, “This is how cat ladies are born.”) As if on cue, Sir Marley comes out from under one of the sand cherries and moseys over for a drink.

When the wind blows from just the right direction, the patio has a “sweet spot” that is more or less sheltered. For now, the wind is blowing just right, and I move the Adirondack chair into its lee. As soon as I sit down, Sir Marley jumps into my lap—the first time he's done that. I sputter at him a bit, things like, “Why don't you go back to your own home and sit on your owner's lap?” and “I am not a cat person!” and “Oh, go away!” At the sound of my voice, Sir Marley makes a questioning little "Whhhrr?" and settles himself more comfortably.

Together, we sink into our haven of quietness and watch the wind.

Bending Before the Wind

or Flexibility

Some of the noises have been truly startling—the thuds and thunks and clanks as patio furniture, garbage cans, and who knows what else have tipped over and gone flying.  The morning started out clear and still, but the forecast 60 mile per hour winds arrived at about noon.  When I sat down to lunch I could see the Sandia Mountains 10 miles away; by the time I'd finished eating, they were hidden by blowing dust, and they haven't re-emerged since.

This morning's sunrise—you can see the Sandias between the houses.

Fortunately, these winds were forecast, and many of us planned our weekends and battened down the hatches accordingly (Thunk!), with varying degrees of success.  Now, curled up on the bench in the kitchen, I'm enjoying the sight of the wind in action.  Through the window, I can see the sand cherries as their remaining petals go flying (I will be surprised if they stop this side of Wisconsin).  Watching the branches is like watching a fire—sinuous, supple, always moving, always different, always the same; it's completely mesmerizing.  The cherries' leaves are too young yet to have much character, but in summer their dark green will have a metallic sheen, and in motion they will look like flickering lights.  They show to advantage in the wind.

No mountains—even the sky is gray with dust.

Through the glass kitchen door, on the other hand, I can see the boxwood bushes.  Their leaves are shiny, and they gleam with every movement, but the movements themselves are stiff, almost arthritic.  (I think about Monday mornings and sympathize.)  The bushes are too sturdy to suffer in this wind, but they don't bend naturally before it.  In their stiffness, they look awkward—the only condition in which I've known them to do so.  From an odd sense of courtesy, I leave them in privacy and turn back to the sand cherries.

A photo experiment that didn't work, but it sure was windy.

Watching that hypnotic, liquid motion, I find myself envisioning a wind garden.  If I had the space to do it justice, I would put in a garden with plants that can not only hold up to the wind but that would look spectacular in it, that would make a windstorm a thing not only of power but also of beauty.  Against that irresistible force I would pose a few immovable objects—some agave and prickly pear, perhaps—for ballast.  The rest of the garden would feature plants that have turned bending into an art form, all of them airy plants to begin with:  Western sand cherries, of course; desert willows, with their curving, ripply branches and long, slender leaves; chamisa, or rabbit brush, its clouds of sulphury blossoms billowing over feathers of sage-green; the flowers of gaura, blue flax, and angelita daisies, dancing on long, wiry stems; undulating tufts of Indian rice grass, the seeds sparkling like whitecaps in the sunshine; Mormon tea, its upright, bare stems quivering like Aeolian harp strings; and Apache plume, its seed-heads charmingly wind-blown even when the wind isn't blowing.  (If water were sufficient in this fantasy garden, which it very well might be, I would add the Rio Grande cottonwood, for the delightful clatter and inimitable twinkle of its leaves in motion.)

All of these plants are able to yield while maintaining their individuality; they don't struggle with the wind or resist it, and yet their own strengths and quirks and characteristics still shine through.  They yield with such grace, and yet they yield nothing of themselves.  They are not flattened, like the plants with insufficient strength, or shredded, like the tender, broad-leaved aliens, or broken, like the brittle ornamentals.  They have not simply hunkered down to endure a bad situation, like the sturdy boxwoods.  They have adapted; flexibility is in their nature.  The wind moves through them rather than against them. 

Paradoxically, it is because they yield to the wind that they can also hold their own with it.

In Our Element(s)

or Staying Off Balance

The breeze this morning was a gift from our friends in Canada—fresh, brisk, invigorating.  And, not to sound critical or unappreciative or anything, it was also rather...cold.

The sun, on the other hand, was strong and warm—warm enough that despite the cool 23° temperature I could take advantage of a day off work to spend some time on the patio.  Dressed from head to toe in black to soak up the sun's heat, I was perfectly toasty.  Wistful, perhaps, to be all dressed up to be in a spy movie and then not to have one handy, but toasty.

The contrast between wind and sun was a delicious one, the line between cold and warm sharply drawn.  Each was experienced with the same intensity at the same time—they reminded me of a sink in an older house, where the hot and cold water run from separate taps.  It was the kind of day in any case where you're vividly aware of wind and sun, a giant blue-sky day free of clouds from horizon to horizon, the kind where you soak up freshness, space, the blue of the upper atmosphere, the white-hot ball of sun burning its arc across it.  I guess I don't normally experience wind and sun quite so independently of each other as I did today. Their separation had something bare-bones about it; they were reduced to their elements:  Air.  Fire.

Earth.  Once I started thinking about elements, earth wasn't really hard to find.  In the garden plenty of bare earth still shows, whether in the bed I haven't yet had the energy to mulch with gravel, or in places where the winds have stripped away the bark and leaf mulch.  At this time of year, it is a dusty place, and a microcosm of the New Mexico landscape in general, where plants always seem to get stuck playing second fiddle to the plain old ground.  Usually, every wind carries a comet's tail of dust along with it; today's didn't, and the earth stayed put.  It was kind of nice.

The only element missing from the picture this morning was water.  That's really no surprise in the high desert—if I had to come up with an elemental recipe for Albuquerque, it would be something like three parts each of air, fire, and earth to one part water.  (Mix until crumbly.)  The normal balance of the elements is one that's out of balance. 

Even for here, though, things are dry.  Last week's snow and ice didn't yield much moisture, since the wind evaporated them before they could melt.  We really haven't had much precipitation since a wonderful rain in December, and the ground is dry for a long way down.  I was trying to decide this morning whether to water when it warms up this weekend—whether to tip the balance a bit more in favor of moisture, in favor of the young plantings that probably don't have the roots to withstand prolonged drought just yet—or whether to leave the balance off-balance, and let the plants' need for water play second fiddle to earth, air, and sun for a while longer.  Normally when I try to fix things like that, I mess them up instead, so for now it's probably better to let the balance take care of itself without my interference.

After all, in the wild the plants don't seem to mind second fiddle.

Give Me Shelter

or A Nook in the Middle of Nowhere

The wind chimes are jangling frantically, chaotically.   In a gentle breeze, their tones ring true, but not in a blast like this one.   The wind is back in force after a few days' lull, this time heralding a cold(ish) front on the horizon.  From the kitchen, I can hear it battering at the windows.  The damper on the vent above the stove "chk"s constantly, like the hi-hat on a drum set.  The glass in the porch light rattles.  The slight gap between the front door and its frame (which for reasons I won't bore you with can't be properly weather-stripped) whistles, anticipating the tea kettle, which is just coming to a boil.

I'm curled up on the bench by the kitchen window, watching the wind scything through the garden, and am intrigued by how irregular its pattern is.  One tree is quivering along its full length, its upper branches whipping wildly.  Eight feet away, the tree closer to the house is almost still.  The autumn sage and rue along the east wall are all but flattened; the sand cherry beside them dances frenziedly.  Right next to it, in the corner, another sand cherry waves a bit in rhythm but otherwise seems unaffected, while the oregano seed heads in the bed across the path swirl in fits and starts.  I am always realizing anew just how tiny the "micro" in micro-climate can be.  The garden has all the dead corners, active spaces, open sweeps, channels, and funnels of a pinball machine.

Still intrigued, I pick up my mug of tea and walk out into the garden.  After righting a footstool and rescuing a seat cushion from the autumn sage (or alternatively, rescuing the autumn sage from a seat cushion), I start around the circle path.  My hair whooshes into an Einsteinian mop; my eyes are half-shut against blowing dust, and one hand covers the mouth of my mug.  I approach the south wall and kneel down, wanting to inspect the tarragon in the central bed for frost damage.  (None yet.)  As soon as my head drops below the height of the wall—it's quiet.

It's so quiet.

For whatever reason, this is one of those spots that the wind—or at least, this wind—can't reach.  In the middle of a windstorm, in the middle of a garden path, it is warm and calm and sheltered.  If I stretch out my hands in any direction, my fingertips will brush blowing leaves.  Above the wall, tree tops reel drunkenly.  But right here, in this little two-foot area out in the open, the wind doesn't come.

Astonished, I sit cross-legged on the path and try a sip of tea.  Sir Marley, who has been curled up under the sand cherry (the blasé one, not the frenziedly dancing one), uncurls and stretches laconically before moseying over to rub his head against my hand.  (The one holding the hot mug of tea, of course.)  I begin to understand his smugness—the extra smugness that doesn't just come from his being a cat.  Even though none of this is my doing, I still feel rather pleased with myself, like a child building a fort out of a blanket and a chair and hiding gleefully in plain sight.

Tea finished, I brave the wind again to return to the house, while Sir Marley takes over my spot.  I right the footstool again and rescue the cushion, this time weighting it down with a rock.  I duck into the kitchen, lock the door, and settle back into the nook by the window.  The door frame whistles, the glass rattles, the vent "chk"s, the wind chimes jangle.

On the path in the garden, Sir Marley curls back up to sleep.

The Wind Blows Where It Will

or Mapmaking for Beginners

Suddenly, today, Renaissance cartography all makes sense.  You're probably familiar with the kinds of maps I'm thinking of—beautiful woodcuts from the early days of European empire, shortly after the discovery of the New World.  Blobs with randomly scalloped edges depict the continents.  Waves and the occasional sea-monster disturb the oceans, emphasizing the terrors of the deep.  Grumpy, bodiless, messy-haired gods personify the winds.  They puff out their cheeks and blow strongly and visibly in the directions of the compass rose.

All to say, it's been windy lately, and I'm ready to do some personifying.  The wind the last few days has been a capricious one, with whims and moods and changes of heart, possibly even ADHD.  It's the kind that picks up loose drifts of leaves, whirls them into mid-air and sends them spinning across the street, and just as suddenly loses heart and lets the leaves lapse into drifts again.  It grabs hold of a flock of blackbirds and tosses them into an updraft, where they swirl helplessly until the eddy falters, freeing them to huddle in the closest tree.  It plays with skirt hems and old newspapers, seed pods and dusty roads, tree branches and telephone lines, fingering everything with an insatiable curiosity (while it lasts), teasing, questing. It isn't a storm wind, but still one that would make setting out to sea in search of a new world seem like a Very Bad Idea.

It's a wind that keeps us all busy.  As I walk back from the mailboxes, I'm trying to keep my skirt at bay with one hand while clenching the mail with the other and holding the keys in my teeth.  The neighbor's miniature dachshund is perched on a patio table, her nose working frantically to process all the wind-borne information; she is clearly ready to explode with excitement.*  The blackbirds make occasional attempts to go wherever it is that blackbirds want to go, flapping with all their might to no purpose before subsiding into their tree again.  The inanimate world looks perilously close to being animated.

One knows that it is just wind, a product of high and low pressure systems coming to grips, or something of that meteorological sort.  Isobars might come into play (N.B.:  a handy NY Times crossword puzzle word to remember, even if we don't really know how to use it correctly), but probably not grumpy demi-gods.  Yet the wind is so willful that it seems like the product of some sentient being.

This is where I draw the line between myself and Renaissance cartographers.  (The Cartographers' Motto:  You have to draw the line somewhere.)  If I were planning to risk my life crossing the Atlantic in some wooden planks with a sail or two on top, or to send my ship/collection of wooden planks on such a voyage, or to fund it, I'd probably portray the wind as being pretty irascible, with god-like powers (and ferociously messy hair) myself.  As it is, I'll be hanging out inside a nice warm house in a fuzzy bathrobe this evening.  I can afford to see it more generously, not as an inimical, superhuman being, but as, say, a golden retriever puppy of a wind—one that doesn't know its own strength yet and that has no fine (or even large) motor control, allowed out off the leash after a long, cooped-up day.  One moment it slams into you, robbing you of breath; the next it comes and whuffles enthusiastically in your hair.  It flings itself headlong after a scent and then suddenly can't remember what it was doing and so flings itself headlong just for joy.  It wreaks havoc with your garden, your patio furniture, your outfit, and your sanity, but it doesn't actually mean any harm.  Good luck calling it to heel—when it comes, you will be bowled over, laughing.

I've been fascinated this week by the way early modern maps combine fantasy, experience and geography:  they actually show weather conditions, risk, and adventure in more detail than they show the land.  A plan of Albuquerque drawn in the same spirit might show, instead of leviathans, signs saying "Here Be Scary Drivers;" instead of waves, seas of potholes and undulating orange construction flags.  The actual streets wouldn't be labeled—but then, so few of them are.  Golden retrievers would sit, panting, on the outskirts of the map.  Or, if we were to stay with demigods, possibly the ambivalent, boundary-pushing trickster, Coyote...

Now there's an adventure waiting to happen.

______________
* But then, she is always ready to explode with excitement.

On Not Spitting into the Wind

or Matching Games

I'm sketching this post from my favorite chair by the kitchen window, the one that lets me overlook the garden.   A storm is brewing, though so far it's all sound and fury and no rain, like so many of our storms.   It's impressive enough, but it would be nice to be drenched as well.

Still, the wind is impressive.   It has bent the supple branches of the desert olives nearly double and bowed many of the perennials nearly flat to the ground; the sand cherries are whipping around like dune grasses.   We get very little severe weather here in Albuquerque—or, put another way, the severity of our weather mostly happens over the long haul.   We may live perpetually on the edge of killing drought, but at least we don't have tornadoes, blizzards, floods, hail, or ice storms.

What we do have is wind.   Every so often I catch glimpses of why some of the early pioneers went mad from the relentlessness of the winds.   Spring is the only season when it's really excessive, but it blows plenty often the rest of the year, too.   The true test of a plant out here—and possibly of a person—is how well it holds up against those fearsome blasts of wind.   As a general (and obvious) rule, the more native the plant, the better able it is to cope.   Our oft-scorned native redroot amaranth, with its small, widely spaced leaves, still looks fresh and whole, even in the middle of a storm; the broad, beautiful leaves of my much-loved burgundy amaranth are shreddy and battered.   The wildflower yarrow stems spring back into place almost as soon as the wind stops; my "Coronation Gold" yarrow bent at a 45° angle after our first big wind storm and has leaned lower and lower ever since.   The sweet potato vine and chard in the micro-garden are getting ripped apart; the purslane looks as good as new.

Like all of us, plants shine best under certain conditions—the key is to match them up properly.   I'm reminded of a day-trip I took a couple of years ago to Abó, an old mission site that is part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument.   It lies on a dirt spur road off U.S. 60, in the middle of low hills and scrub desert.

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

In the parking lot at the visitor's center that afternoon were two vehicles other than mine—a bright red Corvette with California plates and a New Mexico sky blue, 1950's Ford pickup with those wonderful  rounded wheel wells and hood.   In that place the Corvette was like a pair of stiletto heels on a hiking trail—out of place and a little silly.   It looked expensive, but in a worrying sort of way; I found myself wondering about its clearance and thinking about the windshield getting dinged up on the dirt road.   The Ford, on the other hand, radiated the cool of an old pair of Levis—classic, comfortable, even honest.   It was a harmonica blowing at sunset, chiles roasting over an open fire, feet up on the porch rail at the end of a long day.   Some things just go, and that Ford belonged out there in the desert in a way the Corvette never could.   It's all about being suited to the circumstances, about reflecting the actual reality around you rather than the hothouse atmosphere of another place, of wishful thinking.

The storm has passed for now.   I do a quick look around to assess the damage.   Some of the drumstick allium seedheads have broken off (which is fine, as I'm rather tired of them), but the native Mexican hats look invigorated, ready for another round.   Both flowers "bloomed where they were planted," a phrase which is all very well in its way.

But it works best if you get yourself planted in the right place to begin with.