New Mexico Springing

 We’re having a real Spring.

 The air is often cool in the evenings. We can sleep with the windows open.

The mornings dawn gentle, orange or pink in the eastern sky, with nary a breeze before it.

Afternoon clouds usher in a welcome sprinkle, or rainstorm for the lucky few, while the flowers, what seems like every single plant, are exploding with color, heavy laden in bloom. Reaching to the vibrant sun they seem to express the gratitude I feel. 

 

I am not misremembering previous Springs. This is all so not like the New Mexico I know.

 

Monsoon typically begins mid-June (if we’re lucky,) not May, and carries on into September.

Predictably, every Spring, flowers make their appearance but carpets of flowers? Fields of yucca? Blankets of Blanket Flower? Not like this year. The Algerita bushes are yellow bombs of sweetness, their tiny blooms full of promises of tiny, red Autumn berries bursting with goodness. My dogs took a moment to smell the first early blooms of the Yucca  baccata. Curious, I took their lead and inhaled. I grew up with yucca but never got so intimate with them, such a sweet, fragrant heaven wafting from blooms so plentiful I now know the source of the honeyed air. Desert Verbena, desert primrose, coral mallow, claret cups (or kingcup cactus,) lupine…

 

This abundant Spring couldn’t have come at a better time. Winter lasted longer this year, beginning earlier than I am used to and extending deep into March. I was ready, we were ready, to get on with the new season. We haven’t been left wanting. Even after the big die off (due to starvation) last year, the birds are plentiful. Hummers arrived early. The caterpillars, pre-ordered bird food in early April, bustled across rock and road as if train cars on tracks. Miller moths made their appearance, falling out in numbers from the creases in my screen door, a bird smorgasbord. And, the nest making is in high-gear, a veritable frenzy of grasses, dog hair, bailing twine, flying through the air in bluebird, towhee, peewee, raven, dove, blue jay, mockingbird, house finch, wren, goldfinch, oriole beaks. The color on the ground echo the colors in flight. 

 

Jackrabbits and cottontails are making a comeback after the devastating viruses that wiped them out, first one and then the other, the last two years. They are again playing chicken with cars on our country dirt roads.

 

I hate to get too excited. It almost feels like a last hurrah. But maybe it’s a promise?  Still, I ought not get lost in future concerns nor draw blinders over my eyes lest I miss what’s right in front of me right now. It’s all we’ve got after all, this moment and this one…

 

I shall dance in this afternoon’s rains and raise a cuppa to the early morning sun. The Earth has laid out her gifts before me and I am not found wanting, not for a moment.

 

























 

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