Spring Turning to Summer

Triple Digits in May?

Luckily not this year. 

There were times when I was a teen (1962 - 1966) on our family farm, when we would hit at least a hundred degrees in the desert sun in mid-May. But then there was even one year when it snowed in May in the desert. I never forget the beauty of the desert, even while I am enjoying the lush greenery of central Mississippi, a hundred or so miles east of the Mississippi delta and the cotton plantations of the antebellum South. Here we sit on the confluence of two major river systems and do not want for rain.

The screenshot to the left is a picture of the still existing farmhouse, long ago bought by a nearby neighboring farmer. This shot is long-past the 1960s when I was there. I just erased the roof-mounted satellite dish to void the turn of the century date perhaps on this photo. In the foreground is a scraggly Mesquite bush, not quite leafed out, and just behind the telephone pole is a sagebrush plant, characterized by gray leaves and purple blossoms in that season. 

The Florida Mountains in the background are about 20 miles to the east. But from the farmyard, no matter which way you look, there are lone mountains, part of the fractured Rocky Mountain chain. 

To the south stand the Tres Hermanas mountains...three volcanic peaks, this picture taken in the summer when the farm fields are green. They are around 25 miles to the south of the old family farm, but from my perspective, this is how they appear. This is how the Spanish saw them, when they named them "Tres Hermanas" or maybe how settlers who were Hispanic named them when they came to southern NM to Luna County and started farming and ranching and taking advantage of the deep pure-water aquifers.

To the west is Red Mountain. And on the other side of that mountain is another bit of ranching and farming, but still in Luna county. West of Red Mountain, some 60 miles away lies that small town of Lordsburg, NM, and nearby there is where I set my Journals of Will Barnett series. The Journals are available in a single ebook (all three novels) or are individually available in paperback. It took me just one lengthy day of visiting the boot heel (near Lordsburg, NM) to envision my story of a young 14-year-old, name Will, and his life on the desert farm, with his three sisters and mother and father during the winter when his Uncle Sean came to stay after his release from a mental hospital after his stint in Viet Nam.

To the north is Cookes Peak, around 50 miles from my family farm, and near the Gila National Forest mountains, of pine trees, criss-crossed with small rivers and lakes. Year-round on the farm it was usually mild weather, except for a few freezing nights in the winter and summers so hot it burned my skin to a golden brown, as I went shirtless and irrigated our 80 acres of cotton and corn and alfalfa and grain. We raised hogs and cows, and chickens, so we always had a freezer full of beef, pork, and we killed our chickens for fresh chicken. But my mother also made butter from the cow's milk, and we gathered eggs every day. 

I don't mean to recall these as halcyon days, because there was plenty of hard times, but for my duration on this farm, from age 6 to 18—just 12 years, the years seemed to pass slowly and life seemed to last forever. And here I am thinking of it some 57 years later—all having passed in the blink of an eye and the chest expanding sigh. But my memories are as clear as the desert sky in the picture of my home farm.

I recall the desert and know that by May (usually) the Spring winds that brought dust storms from the west were mostly over and we were once again basking under crystal clear azure skies.

Truth be told, where would I rather live...the desert or the lush greenery of the Deep South? Both, I suppose. As I dwell there in both places in my heart's eye and my mind's heart.