Oh here comes the light gray foggy rain shimmering across the hilltops in the breeze.
Today I went down the steep slope west of the house. I wanted to check out the turquoise formation I found at the base of the west slope and while I was looking for it, two bright blue soft stone turquoise pieces caught my eye. About twelve feet farther down the slope I relocated the ledge of calcite that is making chrysocolla right now.
The two cabochons I thought were turquoise because they are green blue and so hard turn out to be “chrysocolla-impregnated chalcedony” according to the Smithsonian book Rock and Gem. Chalcedony is quartz that was compressed while it was cooling so it’s harder than turquoise. Also there are iron pyrites in the two cabochons so they give the appearance of coming from the same source.
It’s late March now. Last week I found no turquoise in the big arroyo. All the lovely wild flowers with their incandescent greens caught my eyes, and they’re all I could see. I got home and right at my front gate, where the path I walk every day is eroded, I glanced down and there was a bit of turquoise rock in a very hard white calcite chip about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide.
Where the trail crosses the small arroyo with the black rock, I found a large piece of old glass that nearly filled the palm of my hand. Its edges were completely sandblasted and smoothed. In the beginning, the piece of glass must have been the size and thickness of the bottom of a mason jar. The jar came from one of the old ranch dumps from the early 1900s. The shard of glass traveled with the rainwater down the hillside from the ranch house. Once in the small arroyo the piece of glass was tumbled smooth in the arroyo sand and heated by the sun for eighty years and was transformed from transparent glass to a pale aquamarine opalescent glass that had the appearance of a natural mineral, no longer “man-made.”
On the trail before the Thunderbird Mine, I stopped to blow my nose and up jumped an astonished mule deer doe that stared at me wide-eyed before she vanished into the flowering palo verde forest dense with yellow blossoms.
I didn’t find any turquoise rocks because the early light was diffuse. I picked up shards of broken bottle glass. Then in the big arroyo I heard rocks crashing and I stopped and turned and there she was again, the same doe, staring at me, and I at her. We both had made half a circle and met up again.
I turned and continued on to show her I meant no harm.
Backlit by the rising sun, even the dry grass stalks and empty seedpods glitter; the spines of the saguaro and cholla are incandescent in the early light. The cool air is perfumed with the blossoms of palo verde and catsclaw along the arroyo. The thick new growth and the blossoms on the palo verde obscure my view of that oval orange rock on the hillside.
Awhile later in the big arroyo, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of turquoise; in an imprint left by a horse hoof I found a tiny bit of turquoise on a square gray limestone. Then up ahead there was a bright spot shining on the ground; I picked up a fragment of crystal quartz that blazed with the light of the sun.
CHAPTER 40
Now Sandino lives indoors in my painting studio in a big cage where he screams and deafens me further. I try to wear headphones most of the time I write anyway. He is supposed to be my muse, but I don’t know if he will help or hinder me.
I painted a memorial painting in tempera to commemorate Bolee and Sandino; I gave her two legs because she is in the spirit world now and is whole again; Sandino is portrayed as he is in life, with one leg.
About three hours ago Sandino started splashing in his water cup, dousing himself with his beak full of water, flapping his wings and crying out with joy. Now on the southwest horizon I see the ocean’s clouds dark blue with rain, hastening to the northeast.
The parrots and macaws sense the approach of rainstorms long before humans unless the humans have Doppler radar or satellite images. The ancestors here in the Southwest called the macaws and parrots “rain birds,” and painted their images on pottery water jars because the water-splashing of the parrots as they bathed attracted the rain clouds.
The desert birds, the thrashers and cactus wrens, sing their rain songs as soon as they smell the sweet rain in the air. The raindrops are an aphrodisiac for the parrots and the desert birds. Tarantulas and desert toads also smell the rain; ditto for the rattlesnakes and the horned lizards.
No thunder, no macho winds, this is a gentle female ocean rain. Later, a big rain cloud over the mountain peak is so luminous it has to be the Sun’s eye.
The macaws and parrots are able to talk to the clouds, to the ancestors; which is why a macaw oracle was consulted to learn what the dead wanted and what the dead were angry about. (The dead become rain clouds — so if they are angry, they won’t appear and the living will die of thirst.) The macaw oracle’s words were interpreted by the oracle bird’s “human servant” who also collected the fees for consultations.
The rain clouds block the sun. The rain evaporates as it falls into the desert heat and reaches the ground as a cool cool breeze that smells of rain. When the masses of nimbus and cumulus clouds began to arrive and covered the sun, a small brown rattler went toward the gate to the patio where the cockatoos sounded an alarm. The snake stopped and looked longingly at the gate all blocked up with wire mesh and rocks so it couldn’t get inside. The patio was a good hunting area after a rain. The snake seemed to consider whether he wanted to bother to exert himself to push under the rocks blocking his way, but then gave up and went into a thicket of aloe veras.
Early May. On blue paper white and gray pastel clouds and the words in turquoise ink:
Welcome to the first rain clouds of the summer. I hope they linger while I draw them. On beige paper in white pastel nimbus and cumulus clouds and the words in black ink:
Some believe the smallest clouds are babies and small children who died.
Then one cloud’s constant transformations all alone in the bright blue sky got my attention. In white pastel on the beige paper I drew a sequence of this cloud as it changed shape and shifted over ten minutes. The sequence begins at the top of the page. I stopped a moment to smear the white pastel into wispy tendrils of the cloud in the six forms it took. When I looked up again at the sky the cloud was gone.
Clouds in white pastel on beige paper and these words in black ink:
More clouds.
In purple ink these words:
It was as if the clouds were communicating with me by changing shapes in the high winds above.
The clouds changed shapes so rapidly the thought occurred to me this might be extraterrestrials contacting me.
Two nimbus clouds in white pastel on beige paper. In purple ink these words:
The clouds were teaching me how to communicate with them.
It requires long periods of watching the sky in stillness. I seem to have the most interesting encounters with single clouds. Large masses of clouds pay no attention to me.
As I walked into the room I share with the one-legged macaw, I was surprised by a fresh light scent. Sandino had shredded a big red apple that smelled of spring flowers, not apple.