2021-08-26
Greener Pastures, These Monsoons Bring

GREENER PASTURES, THESE MONSOONS BRING

Tonight, I sat silently in my super-comfortable secondhand lounge chair, with my feet up upon the window sill, while cradling a large fiesta mug of grainless granola, dried dark cherries and pecans - all drenched in coconut milk.

As I slowly scooped in crunchy soft spoons of delight, I patiently watched the amazing show of lightning sprawling horizontally across our mountain-view windows.

Earlier in the evening, during dinner, I saw the closest and biggest lightening strike I’d ever seen - ever. It was so close that there was merely a half-second delay before the clap of thunder gently shook the house.

Over an hour, from 9 o’clock or so onward, after every one else was in bed, I watched the flashes move gradually southward and away, and listened as the thunder rolled back extensively and exponentially into the unseen horizon.

Nature gracefully replaced the mesmerizing display with the tranquil patter of rain upon the thirsty earth, the trill of horny crickets and a cool breeze wafting through the throng of wet Junipers set upon the hillside descending before me.

The lingering cloud cover all but extinguished the starlight, so that existentially my experience was limited to the sound of the pitter and the patter upon the clay and the gravel and the bedrock that make up this mountaintop, along with the gentle breeze that mercifully relieved me of another mercilessly hot day at Hacienda Dominguez, with the little-to-no-shade that besets this bald spot atop the northern hills of Cerrillos.

By 10:30, as my eyes begged to be relieved of looking blindly into darkness, the steady pour upon the roof became an impossible stream of waves breaking incessantly upon the shore - shhhhhh the sound lulling me further into la la land, somewhere between the sand man rising on the other side of the pane and the soft count of sheep jumping gently upon the greener pastures that one hopes these monsoons bring.