Waiting for Rain

It has been a long hot summer. That phrase sounds more dire than I feel, but weeks and weeks with little or no rain do tend to unnerve me. (So why the hell do I live in New Mexico?) It has been near 100 degrees most days for the past month or more, and the relief of the monsoons, due in early July, just never came. Like waiting for a check and eating beans and thinking, it won't be much longer, will it, and getting up the next morning and thinking, okay, what do we do with beans today.

The southwest is a dry place, but it gets blessed by rain every year just as the summer heat becomes almost unbearable. Most summers, that is. This year it's a month late, and counting, and the several-years-long drought just becomes more dire. I drove down to the Rio Grande around Socorro last week and found it to be bone-dry... no river there, and definitely not a big one. Irrigation does take it down in spots, but to see a completely dry riverbed there was a bit unnerving. But it did rain today. Not long, but enough to damp down rather than rile up all the dust here. I've managed to keep my vegetables alive -- in fact, I had the first real tomato today for lunch -- but I've given up on a flowery front yard. Most of our yard is dust, and will remain so until the drought breaks and I feel okay about watering more or I collect enough bark to cover it all up. I'm working hard on a positive, solution-finding attitude, and most days I do pretty well. I can live without pretty flowers if I have a view of the mountains and plenty of time with my son and myself.

We are running out of money, though. I haven't gotten nearly enough work lately to cover our bills, so I had to put our whole tax return towards those instead of toward store renovations. The money from selling our California house is just about gone, the money Antonio's dad gave us last year is totally gone, and I have no new work coming in till September or so, unless something shows up soon. I'm trying not to panic, like I always have about money, because things have worked out so well in the past 18 months -- since I got laid off at 5 months' pregnant -- that I need to keep the faith that they'll continue to do so.

We'll make this work, somehow. I'm cooking a lot more, both because I'm finally in my element and because it's healthier and cheaper than eating processed stuff or going out. I'm even going to make bread tomorrow, to save the $2 or so per loaf we've been paying, and once the chicks we just got start laying eggs, there's another piece of the self-sufficiency pie. My favorite TV guy, Christopher Lowell, loves to celebrate the innovation that arises from scarcity. "When you don't have lots of money to throw at a challenge, that's when you get really creative." He may be focusing on home decorating but he's really talking about letting the human spirit rise to the occasion rather than just accepting defeat. I believe that Antonio and I made the right decision to check out of the rat race for good and try to make it in a small town on income derived by working for ourselves rather than being cogs in someone else's gear wheels. We had the unbelievable privilege of having a big chip -- a house in a good market -- to cash in, and now that we've planted that stake it's time to really start believing in what we are doing, and believing that we can do it.