Weather Watch…

I love reading other bloggers who live in the Southwest this time of year…we’re all on high alert for rain. I think we probably sound boring with how invested we are in the weather, sort of like *new parents* talking about their kid (heh). The Monsoon (not really a true monsoon, by meteorology standards, but rather a cultural term used to describe an annual phenomenom here in July and August of heavy rains, nearly every day) arrives when the dewpoint hits 55 for three consecutive days, the clouds gather themselves into dark and husky thunderheads, and the air smells like minerals. When the first rains arrive, the boulders actually steam from the sudden cooling after months of incredibly hot days. You can see the smoke rising from them. That’s my very favorite sight of monsoon.

It’s on the way, to whit: We’ve had nothing but clear blue skies for–ever–then, all of sudden, today we had this in the sky:

So, I had to check on the last rain we had here. Here it is, on Januaryeffingthirty-first:

Yep, almost six months and not a drop. C’mon mad wetness, c’mon.

Here’s a poem I published several years back about this waiting for monsoon–it all gets just a little bit worse before it gets better:

Rain Delays

We wait like a people of false idols.
By St. John the Baptist Day in late
June, our hands flatten into shadow.
We avoid doorways—places of arrival
and two faces. Salt pools in sockets
—tiñajas—pocking the flat surface
of stones. Granite heats,
waits to smoke like a turbine,
compressed, unspun. We watch
the storm slide down the mountain,
a blanket of condolence
as it was when our mothers pulled
covers up the bed. We lose our bodies.

Hours later, the line of shade and sun
hasn’t moved. It halves
the mountain. The fear of waiting
is that the world dies before
it gets old. Sky offers padding
if only we were upside down,
we could be caught in heavy folds
of but—the conjunction of desire,
always waiting on and. But
desert ignores what it cannot forgive,
long-legged bugs dead in the drain,
the color green. Anger turns opaque,
raises its pitch in the locust wings.
In the distance, water lashes out
from a sprinkler.