A good luck night, a rainstorm that bore on its staccato
the possibility that the ponds would fill with runoff

By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

Late in the afternoon the wind picked up, slowly at first and then with a velocity that felt deliberate and swayed one way and then another the bright green bonnets of the mesquites in the corrals and alongside the pens and the tack room. I moved about the business of emptying and refilling water pans for ducks and chickens when the first hard drops hit the brim of my cap and my arms. A low, thick sky rumbled overhead.
Cattle bellowed and calves bawled nearby on both sides of a heavy steel gate blown shut by the wind that carried the stout waft of dust, nitrogen, and manure. The welcomed temperature drop was immediately discernible, the rain delicious -- a one-hour shower that dumped three inches on much of this ranch and another inch in a slower rain through the night.
The intensity of the storm moved me quickly to the porch of my house. It was a fast-moving storm well worth watching, valuable as much for its soaking deluge as for the exciting electrical show and truenos that pounded the ranchland. The large puddles that began to form immediately in low places were my first measure for the night's rainfall. It was a good luck night, a rainstorm that bore on its staccato the possibility that the ponds would fill with runoff and transform the listless greens of the monte with the vibrancy of new growth.
I stepped out onto the porch several times that night, marveling at the water that crept up our walkway and onto the porch, listening when the rainfall softened to allow audible the cacophony of frogs liberated from the mud of a long sleep.
When the showers slowed a bit more, I walked to the chicken house to check on some recently arrived pullets that had yet to integrate themselves into the pecking order of henlandia. They had braved the storm in a feathered huddle outside the coop rather than take their chances in the hen house. One by one, I moved all eight of them under shelter, braving their alarming cackles and squawks.
I returned to our house through the rich, moist atmosphere backlit by a moon so full and bright that I didn't need a flashlight. I felt the thrill of walking on damp sand and dodging puddles, and from the porch I watched the rain start up again. Breathing in the redolence of the night air, I contemplated with some anticipation what had arrived on the gift of the rain and how by the end of the next day dried bunchgrasses would begin to green up, that our cattle would take on the sassy look of sleek and plenty.
The wind had spent itself and there was only the steady, insistent pelting of the metal roof by rains of such intensity that the gutter spout overshot the brimming rain barrel, rains that in that moment filled the vessel of my heart, the barrel and the heart both spilling into the night beyond the golden cast of the porch lights.