Postcard from the Greening Desert

May was one long rainstorm here, proving that 200 times the normal rainfall isn’t zero after all, but brimfull cisterns and water rushing down rivers and streams and acequias. For weeks folks kept asking each other “Are we still in New Mexico?” but a friend returning from New England said we could stop worrying: this was indeed still the desert. Well Amen to that.

I am delighted to once again be carrying buckets of dishwater out to the garden, thought it is nice to see springtime snowpack on the mountains instead of fires. We make our way each evening to the river and the willows, but never have a mosquito interrupt dinner under the apple tree. A happy medium, indeed.

A friend moved to the mountains where she has this acequia running past her house. It feels vaguely sinful, all that green right out the door, but I couldn’t help but recite Wendell Berry on the log crossing:

The god I have always expected
to appear at the wood’s edge, beckoning,
I have always expected to be
a great relisher of this world, it’s good
grown immortal in his mind.

In town, where our green belts are slightly less orgiastic and school is letting out for the summer, I think of my friend and her family in the mountains often. What would Katie do? I wonder to myself, thinking of her contentment to quietly spend the days tending her home, watching her children play, welcoming visitors.The same things that content me, but are easy enough to toss into the rushing current of life. I keep the calendar as free as I can, and savor this high season in which life is less about doing, and more about relishing.

Rather than being carried away by the figurative runoff, I want our roots to be well-watered, our leafy crowns reaching to the sun. Moored to the unfolding days, to our unfolding lives that blossom in the quiet garden.