I brought the garden hose to the pots of water. The bees didn’t like the disturbance but the water was so low it would have been gone before morning. I dumped the water buckets and rinsed them clean before I refilled them; not one of the bees gave even the slightest hint of anger. They are accustomed to my commotion with the hose and buckets.
Ah the wind off the thunderstorm on the other side of the mountains is cool and sweet with the smell of rain!
The first rain of summer. The air smells magical, the rain on the trees and shrubs releases leaf resins and rare balsams — invigorating scents of bark splashed with rain, all these subtle perfumes loosed and carried by the wind.
The raindrops were so few and far between they left the dirt speckled and dotted, “pinto” with darker damp spots.
The one-legged macaw, Sandino, is very fond of Tigger, the old pit bull dog who cleans up the parrot food he scatters with such glee. Seeds and parrot formula are nothing for Tigger. The dog once ate fresh rattlesnake dung as I looked on in revulsion and disbelief.
This is Sandino’s first summer indoors in the room where I work. He gets around on one leg very nicely in the big cage. He uses his beak and flaps his wings for extra lift if he wants to move quickly. Sometimes he shrieks in alarm if shadows of large flying birds cross the sky outside his windows. Luckily music soothes him. He enjoys all the Carlos Santana albums I listen to while I write.
Sandino plays tug of war with his rubber ball with the bell inside, and he rings the copper sheep bell I hung in his cage. I never really got to know him before the owls killed his mate, Bolee. She was fiercely possessive of him and flew at me to drive me away from their outdoor cage.
Now the one-legged macaw is possessive of me and sometimes he reminds me of a bad boyfriend. Parrots are notorious for their jealousy. He demands a great deal of attention from me; otherwise he hangs by his beak upside down from the top of his cage and flaps his wings and screams. I wear headphones while I write so his screams don’t deafen me more than I already am.
Yesterday raindrops and thunder. Again today there are rain clouds and thunder. On a green paper in white chalk I drew the horizon line which is the spine bone of the black mountains and towering high above, mountainous white and gray clouds.
Later, as the huge white rain fell minute after minute, it occurred to me that I might have inadvertently written down the Nahuatl words to a rain cloud spell.
Ca! Caca! Aye! Frog!
Cacalachitli! Clay rattle!
Cacalotl! Raven!
Cacapaca! Clapping!
My poor garden in clay and plastic pots is a disaster. The summer was cooler and wetter than usual so my plants in pots should have thrived. Instead, they died of overwatering for two reasons. First, I was not counting on there being so much rain in the afternoons. I always watered in the morning when the sky was clear, but later in the day, the rain came and the result was too much water.
Second, all my anxieties (about the manuscript, finances etc.) seemed to surface while I watered. On hot days it is healthy and natural for plants to wilt temporarily, not from lack of water but to protect themselves from the heat.
After the air cools, the wilt disappears and the plants are fine. I knew this, but whenever I saw a wilted plant, against all common sense and reason I had to give it water; this was a compulsion, although I knew overwatering during the heat kills the plants at once.
The alyssum is drought-resistant but I overwatered all the pots of alyssum and killed them; ditto for the datura, even my rare blue single hybrid that I killed when it was at its prettiest. For three years I coddled three large brugmansia plants, a pink, a double yellow and a double white. I put their pots on rollers and moved them indoors in the cold months and out to the shade on the hottest days. The yellow and the pink brugmansias bloomed in the winter months, but the white never did. This summer I managed to overwater all three and that was the end of them. Only the rain lilies were able to survive my anxious overwatering during the heat.
I tried to grow gourds but the squirrel or Ratty the pack rat ate them almost as soon as the seeds sprouted. One or two gourd sprouts grew a few inches and got my hopes up for them before they were eaten that night.
The cacti managed to escape overwatering. But I perched one of them in a clay pot atop another overturned clay pot that sat on a steel table. The steel table becomes a solar grill by day. By the time I noticed, the cactus had baked.
Once again the rolls of robust blue cumulus clouds hug the black mountain peak as they did yesterday about this time in the afternoon. Now a cool wind, the sky a deep solid blue behind the peak, and then a high bank of blue blue storm clouds. At first they were tall and resembled canyons, mesas and mountains; then they transformed themselves into great blue temples of stone at Cholula and the massive stone towers of Teotihuacan and Tikal. But later when I looked for the clouds they had vanished without a trace I thought until this morning at dawn when I inhaled them as the rain scent in the cool air.
This lovely late June day the air is calm down here but overhead the wind must be racing, because the nimbus and cumulus clouds are stampeding across the blue sky, the fast winds driving them to the mountain peaks of Utah and New Mexico. Some of the clouds are shaped like sea mammals — dolphins and small whales; one has the shape of a pelican. But cloud-shapes are human whimsy. The clouds have a language but it’s not one of shapes.
One rain cloud broke into two rain clouds.
I was only gone inside long enough to wash some dog dishes. I heard thunder in the distance while I was putting the dishes away. I came back outside on the porch and all the big silver blue fluffy clouds had transformed into pale purple violet tendrils of rain that reached down to the black mountain peak but evaporated before they reached the ground.
A sudden shift in the wind blocked the sun with thick masses of clouds that cooled the air even faster. In the old days they used to say that San Juan Day, June 28, was the beginning of the rainy season in the Southwest. The villages had big fiestas for San Juan probably because John the Baptist sprinkled water on people. Long before San Juan, traditional Pueblo and Nahua people used to attract the rain by sprinkling precious water on everyone who turned out for the summer gathering.
Although the blue violet clouds and their raindrops don’t reach us, still we Earth creatures find cool comfort in the damp breeze that blows steadily off the peak. The wild bees are still out so that means they think we won’t get wet.
The white wing and the mourning doves drink water from the pots in my front yard. I had to adjust the safety grill on the blue plastic water dish out back because another baby quail drowned. I no sooner filled the two water pots full to overflowing than a redheaded house finch and his plain gray mate came for a drink.
The following day the clouds that fly past are large and in the shapes of flying birds. A great cloud is Lord Macaw with long tail feathers streaming behind him, rain that reaches the earth. I can make out eagles and woodpeckers, all flying in the opposite direction of the wind.
Now the clouds amass thickly; a giant frog face snake of silvery blue cumulus. Raging rivers, great ocean waves crested in silver foam — the layers of cumulus swell out of the sky in large masses that resemble nude humans at an orgy.
Later on the evening news the weatherman reported the clouds brought dry storms full of lightning that sparked wildfires in the Rincon Mountains southeast of Tucson.
I have two Nahuatl-English dictionaries. One is compact, palm-sized but thick, and is modern and practical. The other is Bierhorst’s old dictionary that grew out of the translations of Cantares Mexicanos, the epic poem of the Nahua people written in glyphs and paintings on folios of folded amate paper the color of white clay.