It’s raining.

Just a soft morning rain, the steady, soaking kind that holds no risk of flood, only the gift of medicine.

That could change, of course, and rapidly; the radar map shows dots of extreme weather all around us, and a shift in wind direction would be enough to bring it to us. But the current pattern suggests nothing but beautiful, badly needed rain here.

None of this is normal, of course: not the rainy morning; not even the rain at all. The monsoon season here historically began in earnest around mid-June, perhaps a few days later, and would continue into early September. In other words, it was a full season, with at least some small amount of rain virtually daily, and virtually always in the afternoon hours here. But historical patterns no longer exist, and now we take the rain as it chooses to come.

One thing that is also different in these earliest days of June is the temperature. June used to be our hottest month, precisely because the rains had not begun yet and therefore had not lent their cooling properties to the summer air. Yesterday was the warmest we have seen in a while, and yet the mercury barely cleared eighty. Today, our high occurred around 9:30 this morning, with a temperature of sixty-nine; it’s now several degrees cooler.

Today is a hard day, though: It’s the fifth anniversary of the day that two of our dogs were taken. We let them out early, and as usual, they took off for their usual run around acres fenced entirely by close-woven chicken wire. There was no way for them to get out on the own. But when they didn’t respond to calls some small time later, we went looking; there are, as it happens several spots where they could be hiding, sitting, or lying down that puts them entirely our of sight from the house, thanks to shifts in the land’s gradient, trees and stands of red willow, and clumps of chamisa and sage large enough to hide even a tall dog from view. To make a long story short, they were nowhere to be found, there was no sign of either of them, and no sign of injury, either. And while the hound would easily have become preoccupied enough with a new and interesting scent not to realize that she had ventured out of range, the cattle dog was so bonded that he would never have left voluntarily; one of his many nicknames was “Velcro Boy.” We searched for weeks, on foot, by vehicle, all over the county and across county lines, and while there were several reported sightings, sometimes in far-flung places, not a single one came to anything. We suspect that we know the who, if not the how; it followed a few months on the heels of an extortion attempt and threat to our dogs. But we’ll never prove it, and we’ve had to accept a presumption of the worst.

That day, June 2nd, 2020, was a much more seasonally hot one: brilliantly sunny in the morning, unusually hazy and humid in the early afternoon, and suffocatingly warm for that kind of search. In the morning, though, while it was still cool, Wings took the ATV up into the back country to search [to no avail, obviously, but he traveled long miles and covered a great deal of ground in the process]. And the image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation [like those that will appear in tomorrow’s post], is one that he captured while conducting that particular search.

It’s a cow’s skull, one that he came across lying exactly as it rests in the photo: perfectly centered in the morning sun, the light casting shadows from the horns and the skull’s muzzle, as well as the flowery appearance of the leaves of the chicalote, a species of prickly poppy common here. It grows on our land in places, but it thrives in the backcountry, the leaves manifest in rich green shades that distract from the sharp spines that edge them all, the flowers deceptively gentle in appearance with ruffly white petals encircling a round collection of golden stamens topped with a tiny touch of red. [They, too, will make an appearance in tomorrow’s post.]

It was not, perhaps, the metaphor that either of us wanted from that day five years ago, but it’s an instructive one all the same: Yes, we must deal with death as it comes, but we must also engage with life, and the latter is always all around us. And in a world now filled with horrors beyond comprehension, most of which we are helpless to ameliorate in any way, we must recognize and honor life’s flowering gifts to us whenever and wherever they might appear.

Even when our grief is so profound that we can perceive nothing more than their shadow.

Today’s cloud cover erases any possibility of shadows now; bands of fog cling to the peaks, raising, stretching, growing, expanding to veil them from sight. But the light is still with us.

So is life.

We are obligated to be grateful for it . . . and to nurture it for the generations that will follow us.

~ Aji

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