It’s pouring.

It poured most of last night, and it’s doing the same again today: monsoonal-pattern rains that are failing to follow their usual patterns at all. We don’t mind, of course; the earth here needs the precipitation to desperately to quibble about when and how it arrives. But fewer than ten years ago, we had long-established cycles that decreed that the rainy season would begin roughly the latter half of June, clouds building form late morning to early afternoon, storms then arriving in wave after wave until some small time before sunset. Rain at night, never mind overnight, was virtually unheard-of, as was rain in the morning, and May was always one of driest months here.

If this were simply a shift in months and time of day, there would be relatively little cause for concern. But in recent years, when the rains have arrived this early [if at all], it’s been a prelude to a long, hot, arid, dangerously dry summer.

Of course, the forecast for overnight tonight and for tomorrow morning is for snow, so we know that we are at the mercy of the elements and their most capricious whims now.

That said, the weather is glorious — not only for the amount of steady, insistent rain that continues to fall, soaking deeply into the thirsty earth, but for the extraordinary patterns and colors of the clouds that we have been granted these last two days. At this moment, rain falling steadily, the whole sky is pale gray; we are directly beneath the base of the cloud mass, the storm resting low overhead. But each shift and drift and dance of this line of storms has brought us everything from iridescent high-climbing puffs of white to every imaginable shade of gray stair-stepping its way up and down the sky to intensely hued blue-black walls of cloud moving inexorably toward us, then above, then beyond while we await the next line of weather.

It’s nothing like the blue in the image above that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, of course. That one is far more typical of what we would normally expect to see now . . . and, indeed, it’s a photo from time of year nearly to the very day: one week shy of five years ago exactly, on May 12th, 2020. It’s one that Wings captured opportunistically, a casual shot taken with his cell phone as he drove up the main highway toward the old village in late morning. It’s a familiar vantage point, one that we used to travel daily when we still maintained the brick-and-mortar gallery at the Pueblo.

It’s also a beautiful panoramic shot, one that captures the electric blues of the late spring sky, the puffy white clouds that, a month onward, would daily form themselves into towering thunderheads. It gives one a good grasp of the vastness of this place, of the mountain ridgelines above the fields laid out below.

And yet, there were already signs of trouble, clear to those who know what that scene should have showed.

What will catch most viewers’ eyes first is the land in the foreground. You can see an encroaching green on the right, helped along by the stands of coniferous trees at the base of the mountains. But to the left-hand side of the shot, the land is still mostly a wan yellowish-gray, the color of local grass during winter dormancy. In winter, of course, that’s fine. By well into the second week of May, it should have been already greening apace.

That was half a decade ago. Now? What was for a quarter-century a five-hundred-year drought has, in less than a decade, deepened to a twelve-hundred-year record, and it shows. Today, or world might seem, at a glance, to belie that: Our own fields, still half-yellow yesterday, are now suddenly more green than gold, courtesy of the rains last night and almost all of today.

But were one to travel beyond our boundaries, to look at the larger fields in the lower parts of the backcountry and the prairie lands to the west of here, it would be another matter. Oh, there would be new green, certainly, but like our own small corner here, drought, aridification, and increasing winds’ stripping of the topsoil year after year have all damaged much of these lands beyond recognition.

Which makes these rains all the more valuable now. As I write, the great blue-black wall of clouds to the west/northwest have begun to turn into something more; we have rotational winds now, in such conditions, to a degree never seen before. The forecast is for snow overnight and tomorrow morning, but it appears that before the mercury plunges enough to crystallize the rain, we may find ourselves at the mercy of something more powerful still.

The winds are rising again.

But, as always, we will ride it out, whatever comes. So will the land.

And despite the chance of rain in the extended forecast, there are moments of clearing in it, too. A couple of days from now, the blues of the late spring sky are slated to return . . . and with them, so is the warmth.

And it appears that for perhaps the first time in eight years, we shall be able to plant on schedule.

That would be a gift beyond price.

~ Aji

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