Monsoon morning diary notes

There are a million things I love about living in this enchanted desert. Monsoon mornings are one of them.

Days are once again sultry, sweaty and buzzy with bugs.

Clouds form, big and puffy rumbling with thundery promise. Though some nearby places have been devasted by roiling floods, in this little piece of northern Chihauhauan desert the clouds seldom deliver more than a spatter of raindrops. There’s been maybe as much as a tenth of an inch a scant three times so far. Every drop is worth recording and celebrating, though.

Evenings might even end with a light show.

The garden is in a summer overgrown and unkempt funk. It’s too hot and buggy to spend much time with it these days. Because of the serious drought we have municipal water restrictions which limit garden watering to three days a week, allocated by street number, before 10:30 in the morning or after 6 pm at night.

On the days when I’m not watering, I take long neighborhood walks in the cool predawn, leaning into the magic, scattering bouncy hoppity cottontail rabbits as the light comes up.

Some mornings I luck out and there’s been a rain shower the night before, releasing the metallic petrichor- the creosote bush (Larria tridentate) smell unique to this area.

After one of these rare rains, the desert flora glistens and sparkles with monsoon moisture. That said, the drought is serious. Even the native opuntia cactus are showing heat and drought stress, but oh! the resilience, the determination: they are still producing magical orbs of jewel colored tuna. I’ve just started harvesting prickly pear cactus fruit. I use these precious gifts from the desert mostly for juice . I find the seeds quite gritty with a tendency to stick in my not-so-young-anymore teeth. After straining the fruit pulp for juice, I dehydrate the seeds. They can be ground into a high protein flour to add to pancakes and muffins.

One morning I encountered this partial skull bleaching in the desert alongside the path I was walking.

on monsoon mornings, I walk myself to peace, under quietly magnificent dawn skies.

Occasionally I meet other early risers. This curious sentinel, incidentally, seems to live at (want to escape from) the campaign headquarters of a local politician. The jokes write themselves these days.

Just up the street from the shala, a fantastical flock of crowing cockerels bears witness to comings and goings of the neighbourhood.

Me too. Though I don’t do it with a loaded gun as the metal cocks do. The pen will always be mightier.

Thus said the turkey.

Recommended Reading:

A Flower Travelled In My Blood: - Haley Cohen Gilliland, 2026. The blurb on the front of this Pulitzer finalist tells us this is “the incredible story of the grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of children”. They had me at “grandmothers”. I had no idea what I was taking on.

While for the past six or seven years my doctor at the local rural community health clinic was from Argentina, a country I could vaguely place on a map of South America (thanks mostly to my lovel of travel writing and Bruce Chatwin) and they played a great game of soccer (football to some), I confess I didn’t know much about Argentina’s history.

Sadly my Argentinian doctor retired (I now have a Brazilian nurse practitioner as a primary care practitioner) but thanks to this amazing feat of research and storytelling, I

now have a slightly better knowledge of the recent history of the country. I know, for example, that during some recent authoritarian regimes, protesters disappeared. History records the horrific methods. “We do not kidnap children” translated into “we sell babies”. Through persistence and advances in genetic research, a small group of grandmothers, searching for their disappeared children and grandchildren, unraveled mysteries, exposed secrets, lies and terrible acts of torture and death and found some of the missing family members living under different names often adopted into families supportive of the regime. So we celebrate victories for humanity and science as we read this really difficult history book even as the truly horrible history is exposed.

…When will we ever learn…