LAS CRUCES – This is the time of year when our thoughts turn to
rain in all its glorious forms.
It seems like everywhere I go, people are talking
about it.
Rie Palkovic, a recent artist of the week, who now in Moses
Lake, Washington, told me how much she was looking forward to some desert
monsoon thunderstorms when she returns to her former home for her August
one-woman show at Unsettled Gallery in Las Cruces.
As an erstwhile Oregonian, I
could sympathize. People have visions of lush Pacific Northwest rainforests,
but as veterans of the real deal, Rie and I shared stories about arid high
desert landscapes in both Washington and Oregon, and the demoralizing quality
of the gray skies and long drizzly seasons, with no redeeming celestial
pyrotechnics, on the coastal sides of both states.
“I do miss those Las Cruces rainstorms and the smell of the
desert after rain. I lived downtown on Court Street and I used to go out and
sit on front porch and the lightning was so spectacular,” Rie said.
Maybe we should have names for all the kinds of rain in our
lives, like that fragrant, vaguely spicy and flowery rain in the desert after a
long drought. If gratitude has an aroma, that could be it, I’ve often thought.
So let’s call it gratitude rain.
Though it was a little off this year, most of the quarter of a
century I’ve lived in New Mexico, we could count on dramatic rainstorms on the
Fourth of July, with thunder and lightning special effects that out-class the
most spectacular human fireworks displays. Let’s call that Mother Nature’s
fireworks rain.
Less dramatic, and sometimes downright irritating, is what I’ve
christened polka-dot rain, when those barely discernible droplets of moisture,
in cahoots with dust storms, leave dirty little spots all over our cars and
windows and patios.
“I call that adobe rain,” Annette Tombaugh Sitze told me
recently. We reminisced about adobe mud, which I got stuck in several times
during my first rainy summer in Santa Fe, before the rain discussions took a
cosmic turn.
Annette and I discussed the 2015 arrival of the New Horizons
probe at Pluto, carrying the ashes of the dwarf planet’s discoverer, her dad,
Clyde Tombaugh, who spent most of his remarkable life in Las Cruces.
“The New Horizons downloads show there is so much
interesting geology on Pluto … frozen nitrogen fields and high ice mountains.
Certainly, it’s helping us rethink how things behave in various types of
environments,” Annette said.
Will we discover a substance we could think of as Pluto rain?
Meanwhile, back in our corner of planet Earth, sometimes, in any
season, some just-right, refreshing showers can inspire and rejuvenate us,
showing up as a surprise blessing that seems to spring out of a clear blue sky.
Other times, the soul-quenching showers come after a long, teasing siege of
cloudy days and oppressive humidity that renders our swamp coolers ineffectual
and our tempers sticky and strained.
What such showers have in common is that they lift our spirits
and make us feel like singing and dancing. Let’s name this Nacio Herb Brown
rain, after the composer of “Singing in the Rain.”
It delighted, but did not surprise me, when I moved here and
learned that Brown was a native of nearby Deming, New Mexico.
In our high desert territory, I’ve actually seen people sing and
dance when long-awaited rains arrive. I’ve done it myself and I’ll bet most of
you have, too.
If we find ourselves in Nacio Herb Brown rain (and we know it
when we see it), may I have the pleasure of this dance?
S. Derrickson
Moore may be reached at 575-5450, dmoore@lcsun-news.com or @derricksonmoore
on Twitter.
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