Southwest Summer

June 13, 2021

Howdy folks,

Well, it finally turned hot with every day this week hitting 90F. It's nothing like back home with the high humidity, though, and although it feels like you're in an oven, the air is moving and the shade offers plenty of relief. The highest that I saw that the humidity was this week, during the day, was about 20% and the lowest was 4%. Then, come nightfall, we open the house up and let the cool air in: at first with both ceiling fans on and all the windows open; then, by 1-2am, the fans are switched off, windows start to get closed and blankets are sought out; finally, by dawn, we're just about freezing(with the temperature in the high 50Fs/low 60Fs) and we're looking forward to the heat of the day again. By early to mid-morning the temperature shoots back up to the 80Fs very quickly and the cycle starts all over again with lunchtime seeing the mercury hit 90F again usually. Most days don't call for any rain, but it is not at all uncommon for a thunderstorm to pop up late in the afternoon or early at night and soak everything quickly before moving on. Just as often, they are dry thunderstorms and bring plenty of thunder and lightning, but with no rain reaching the ground. Monsoon season should start within the next month and last into the early fall...we'll see how that goes. The last few years it's brought such little rain that they've been calling it the 'non-soon.' We've still not seen a live rattlesnake and just don't see the food for them around here. Years ago Kim told us that there were lots of pack rats here, but after a fair amount of time with lots of outside cats, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. And, unless the snakes are eating all the lizards that are everywhere, I just don't see what they would have to eat. Still, we're being careful with the dogs and doing one-on-one walks with them when possible, but have also been letting all three out while we're there to keep an eye on them.

After an initial wave of the prickly pear and other smaller cacti blossoming into lots of beautiful flowers, the cholla are now starting to do the same. There are lots of bees, dragonflies and other insects buzzing around all of the flowers that are everywhere: on the cacti; tiny and low ones spread out on the ground; shooting up out of yuccas and other succulents; and on the dozens and dozens of potted flowers and plantings that Kim has all around her house and ours. The pond brings lots of wildlife in, including a cloud of mosquitos that live nearby and over it, and then at night, with the windows open, you can hear all sorts of action going on down there, from coyotes yipping and wild(or loose) dogs snarling at each other...we haven't heard a panther scream yet, but some nights it really sounds pretty wild out there and you never feel the need to wander too far away from the cluster of houses in the middle of night. From the pre-contact days to the colonial days and then from the frontier to the present some things never change...wandering a little too far away from the homestead in the dark can be very hazardous to your health! The drought is ongoing and ever-present out here, but we seem to be in just about the best part of the state, as far as its effects are concerned. The Rio Grande barely has enough water in it to roll on into Texas and more and more people are pulling from it, balancing human needs with agricultural needs. The bigger cities are doubling and tripling across the region. And, in general, the western and southern parts of the state are burning up with the rest of the Southwest in this mega-drought that we find ourselves in, but from the front range of the Rockies east out into the plains, the sleepy, northeast corner of the state seems to being doing better than most of the rest of the state and the plains right now are just about as green as the pictures that I see coming from back home in Pennsylvania. We seem to have found this magical crossroads that historically connected the plains to the Rio Grande, ties the landscapes of the desert to those of the mountains and brings the eastern weather systems(storms, tornadoes, humidity) into contact with the huge high pressure systems that park themselves over Arizona and Utah and just burn them to a crisp...what an interesting place to have found ourselves in. As we learned in The Hobbit, it's a dangerous thing to step out of your front door, because you never know where you might end up!

Now, for the best part of the weekly letter home...the pictures! First, an image that I played around with a little that shows us coming down out of the mountains towards all the old volcanoes in the northeastern part of the state. Next, a whole bunch of dog images: Ela chasing frogs; Rui chewing grass; and then four shots of Willow doing laps while Ela watches. Then, some shots of a morning hike out to find where the horses were at...hiding in the far back corner of the property, of course, after I had already walked the rest of it: a look to the mountains north of us with some of the horses down below; the herd once I finally caught up with them tucked into a ravine; and Rosie out on sentry duty, glued to a tree(I spotted her, talked to her, walked up to her and then walked by her before she ever moved). Next, a shot from the job site where I framed out a spot to pour a concrete slab on. Then, four landscape shots: first the chollas pushing out their flowers; then a view of Starvation Peak on my way back to the house after my horse hunt; and then two shots of a thunderstorm hanging in the sky, over the plains, as I made my way along the interstate outside of Las Vegas. Finally, a shot of me in the buggy the other morning at 5:30am as I manned the gate on the main ranch road so that I could let the convoy of three cement trucks in and all the guys that followed them to pour the garage and breezeway at the new house. The new guy that is taking care of the ranch road even came out to check me out as someone told him that security was posted at the gate now...I don't know if that meant that I was doing a really good job or a really bad one, but I just went with it...

Be good, everybody, and have a nice week!