Everything is so green !
Monday, September 4th, 2006 -- J. DoeThis weekend Buzzurro and I took a 2 hour trip around North Central NM. Where there used to be brown hills with sparse vegetation, are now green hills with wildflowers. It reminded me of a commercial I saw as a child for the play ‘The Sound of Music’ with Julie Andrews. She was supposedly in the hills of Austria, although to be honest I don’t know where that commercial was actually filmed.
“Did we take a wrong turn somewhere and end up in another state?’ I asked Buzzurro.
“No’ he replied “But everything looks so different green instead of the usuual brown.”
Why do brown areas of earth become green with grass? Simple: it rains and the dead plants and live seeds come to life with rain.
It has been raining a lot.
August is known in this area as being ‘monsoon season’. Monsoon season in New Mexico means that almost everyday in the late afternoon the sky will turn gray and it will rain heavily for an hour or so. Then it will stop. Then the clouds will blow away and the hot sun will shine brightly and dry everything up. The normal monsoon rains are 3 to 4 inches a year. It usually starts in late July and ends inAugust.This year though the monsoon season started early-towards the end of june. Since June 26 there have been 11 inches of monsoon rain. Perhaps in many places of this country 11 inches of rain in a 2 and a half month timespan would be nothing to blink an eye about, but New Mexico is desert country, where the yearly average rainfall is only about 14 inches (although in the winter it does snow). It is a lot of rain and all the plants are happy for it.
I am a recent transplant to SouthEastern Arizona. I have just be amazed at the change the monsoons have brought to the countryside. The snowbirds have no idea what they are missing. Although I plan on spending only part of the year in Arizona and the other part in my wonderful Northwest, I will always remember what I have seen this summer. I am sure it will not be the last one I will spend here.
we were in new mexico last year during august, and i remember some rain. i don’t remember a LOT of green, though–but there was a little mountainous area down in southern/central new mexico (cloud something?) that was amazingly different from the rest of the area. all of the sudden it was like being among green fields and little farms and hills–something like kentucky/west virginia. it was neat to find out how much landscape diversity the state had.