What a Summer

This, our 8th summer in New Mexico, has been different from all the preceding summers. It has been wet and stormy.

Summer is monsoon season from July to October, and for the past seven years we've had summer seasons with occasional afternoon storms, some devastating downpours, mostly dry disappointments, and variable localized weather that usually does not deliver the promised relief from billowing clouds.

This year every single day for months now, we have been blessed with glorious, sunny, bluebird mornings, cool and refreshing, followed by hot sunny afternoons and then at five o'clock wine time billowing marshmallow thunderheads form. Like this:

Every single afternoon, for months now. By the second glass of wine the clouds turn dark. 

Sometimes there is thunder from afar, sometimes not. Our house is in a basin between two mountain ranges, the Sangre de Cristos to the east and the Jemez to the west. Both directions darken ominously and it's clear it is raining over the mountains. Every single afternoon. 

I bring the porch furniture cushions inside, the sky gets even darker, and the threat escalates. 

Every afternoon it sprinkles a bit, some evenings after dark it rains a bit and some nights it pours. It has made for an unusually wet summer this year and for lots of schlepping cushions in and out of the house.

The weedy field next to our garage is green. My irrigation system is so much more effective when it rains all over, not just in small drips below the mulch. 

What a summer this has been.