Passing squalls … sun … blue sky … squalls … clouds piled high on those mountains a mile above this valley’s floor. In place of Sweat Bees, a half inch of water lies in the bottom of the rain gauge.
All posts by Cindy Salo
November 23, 2013
Rained in the night, the dawn is colder, the rain continues through morning. The cold increasing as the hours move along tells it is the moment, then, when Autumnal Spring becomes Vernal Winter. The high of 55 in the wet feels downright frigid.
November 22, 2013
I wake in the Cowboy Caravan (the RV most everyone else calls, “The Chateau”) in a cozy, humid warmth, with rain pattering down through mesquite, rain that brings in the delirious fragrance of Creosote Bush drifting from far off in the deserts that surrounds us. It is dark all day.
November 20, 2013
The Arthropods have stripes today, including a spider in a web in the little mesquites, with zebra legs. Rain could be felt a-building, maybe not today but the sky all around and the odd light on the land announced it, and I check the rain gauge to empty it of dead flies. There are no flies, but instead in the bottom are two dead little bees, and two that still live. One is frantic, angry, half of it metallic Mallard green with the other, rear half black and white zebra-striped: that most perfectly named Metallic Green Sweat Bee. The two dead ones lie curled up below, their bodies instead are ultramarine though equally metallic, equally beautiful.
It’s still pleasantly warm enough that frogs are jumping into The Stockpond at my approach, the cold that will come at the trailing edge of the expected storm will put an end to their very long party and these are the last I’ll see and hear. No dragonflies buzz along over the frog-rippled water today.
November 19, 2013
As I scurry about opening hydrants to get the day’s seedling pasture watering started, I spy something that stops me cold for a second: what looks like a puppy obviously dead, out in the field edge quite far from the road. Once the irrigation chore is got into motion, it cannot be stopped without dire consequences and I can tell from the angle of the limbs that the poor fella will be no less dead if I concentrate on getting the irrigation properly going. In some little while I hesitantly approach it, only to see that it isn’t something that had ever been animate: it’s a stuffed toy! How, oh how, did this end up there? I find something else to do on purpose and so stall returning until I’m nagged too much by curiosity, and with a mixture of fascination and creepiness I walk up to it with a long stick, and turn it over. Will it blow up? Did it fall from a plane? Was it dropped by a Mexican child who had to let it go and is right now suffering from the loss of this friend … or suffering far worse things? It’s not a puppy. It’s a cow, and not just any cow, but a purple cow! Well, actually a white Holstein with large lavender spots. I name it Ogden. I just can’t bring myself to touch it for most of the day, it’s all so disturbing. Finally I come back and carry Ogden to the fence along The Lane and leave it still within the pasture, and plan to pick it up from there later. Our cow Mycha, however, in the meantime had noticed there’s something new there, and when I come back later I find her with her head pushed as far as she can stretch it right through the barbed wire fence, with Ogden’s head inside her mouth, and she’s chewing him like cud. “Damn it, heyyyyy! Get out of there!” I bark … Mycha has chewed off both of Ogden’s little Holstein horns, nearly severed the left ear, and eaten off his right eye though he is rather cleaner from all the slobber.
I take Ogden home and sit him upright on a shelf in the window of the new Cowboy Caravan, despite the risk of his coming alive at Midnight. If he does he’ll be able to function pretty normally, after Pat made him new horns and got one ear reattached …
November 18, 2013
It’s not cold, oddly, after the “winter front” passes through. Is it a specter of Global Warming, and what does that portend? Instead, the day soars to 80 degrees and this brings out great numbers of dragonflies around The Stockpond, and massive flights of the little Polka Dot Beetle. Some of those beetles sport brilliant blue abdomens.
The miniature annual “Mediterranean Grass” (a Schismus sp.), most beautifully green, is germinating in every bare spot across the pastures. It is tiny, but the cows will avidly seek it out.
Only two Poorwills in the road dust on my twilight drive home–and they will be the last of these mysterious yet engaging birds that either take a long winter’s nap here, or slip into Mexico in the night while we ourselves sleep.
November 16, 2013
The day’s range of temperatures spans only 15 degrees–neither cold nor hot–and so with this second Pacific front the Sonoran Desert year’s quiet season’s weather pattern is set. A sprinkle comes to us and our ranges, but no more than that; all that’s really to be had from this storm is a high and annoying wind who desiccates the germinating pasture grasses. A few dragonflies manage to hover on through it all.
Mesquites are sprouting from the seeds left behind by cows in piles of manure. London Rocket (mustard), too, showing millions of pairs of cotyledons; Sweet Clover is in lush, sudden renewal low to the ground in #2 Pasture; the handsome flat rosettes of what will be tall Gaura next warm season suddenly are just there, having scattered themselves through the native grass plantings. So are woven together this year and next, on the loom Arizona’s multiple and complex seasons, a marvelously eye-catching quilt that decorates no other land but ours. Just now it is Autumnal Spring–sometimes long lasting, always delightful, sometimes regrettably short.
November 14, 2013
First true leaves have come shooting from out the oats cotyledons. Mid-November, and the chartreuse and black grasshoppers, those Polka Dot Beetles of mine, and the Red-winged Grasshoppers are still abundant.
A Phainopepla, after the sun is gone, calls a soft, “Pert … Puurrt …” from the mesquites that mark the borders of his own querencia.
November 13, 2013
Pastures are noticeably green, their winter forage now well-sprouted.
November 12, 2013
The vibrant blue sky of morning turns to a limp gray, and a strange light like that of a solar eclipse comes over everything: a dust storm, haboob, tormenta de polvo. The Galiuros fade into ghosts, their peaks into wraiths there and not there. Ravens knew that the aerial surf was up and where they’d catch righteous waves, and 50 of them come to roll in the wind and clamor out their fun. Were they still-photographed, the dozens in the flock would look like a Liszt musical score, if filmed as a motion picture would look like a symphony playing a wild rhapsody, with how the birds move in great wheels, always some to be seen rising, always others falling, others weaving together the whole.