The other four seasons of New Mexico.

We both end and begin the year with Snow Season and if we are lucky, it's a good one. While other parts of the country are cursing the snow, we see each foot as insurance against the Fire Season that is coming. Admittedly, snows here aren't what they are in the north and east. Our snows come and go in a regular cycle during a good year...a foot or two today, then warming and gone within a week. I may hate the snow just after it has fallen and I try to drag the feed cart through two or more feet of softness, but in my heart I am blessing it for another day I won't be scanning the horizon for fires.

While so much of the rest of the country is starting Spring, we are at the beginning of Wind Season. It seems as though just as you turn the calendar page to March, the winds begin. They have been howling around the yurt for days now and as I was driving home yesterday, I noticed sections of roof peeled back on several buildings as well as downed trees. With 35 mph sustained winds considered to be 'breezy', the wind can seem relentless and abrasive, leaving your skin feeling bruised and your eyes too dry to blink.

And then comes Fire Season, the one we all dread. If the snows haven't been heavy enough, and the winds have dried things out even more, then we all spend our days watching for and dreading fires. Three winters ago we barely had three feet of snow all winter. You can go back through my blog entries then and it seems like every other one is a plea for snow, or a hope that it still wasn't too late to get a storm. The Fire Season that followed that winter was devastating with fires all over the state and one just north of us that took weeks to contain. I saw its plume as I was driving home from Santa Fe and my heart pounded until I was close enough to home to know it wasn't there. That was the one that caused me to put into place evacuation plans for us, the animals and essential belongings.

If we survive Fire Season and we are lucky once again, we are blessed with Monsoon Season. In a normal Monsoon Season, just as the heat of early summer has become a bit oppressive, the rains begin. There is a beautiful cycle and rhythm to them...we get up to glorious blue sky sunrises and the air is sweet and cool. Then around 1:00 in the afternoon, the storm clouds roll in over the peaks with a great show of lightning and thunder and the rains begin. More often than not, by evening they are gone, having dropped temperatures by twenty degrees and leaving the land wet with arroyos running full. If it has been a hard Fire Season, towards the end of June we begin to scan the horizon for storm clouds with the same intensity that we watched for fire smoke. And then after an often perfect fall, we bring it full circle again with the return of Snow Season.

There are other sub-seasons here as well, Motorcycle and Bicycle Season when people take advantage of our beautiful winding mountain roads and we dodge large groups of two wheeled riders, Farmer's Market Season when every wide spot in the road sports a homemade vegetable stand, Snow Bird Season when the roads are filled with enormous RVs and their retired residents and we wonder how they will ever maneuver through the sharp bends of a narrow farm road that we know lie just ahead. And always lately, it seems to be Texas Tourist Season. I was born in Texas and spent most of my life there so I can say these things...if you have been cut off, passed rudely in a dangerously narrow section of road, had someone enter the clearly marked wrong way in our small post office parking lot only to dodge in front of you to take the space you were about to pull into, you can almost bet they will be sporting a Texas plate.