It's raining at the ranch -- wholesale
and in widespread sheets of moisture

By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

It's raining at the ranch -- not the soft mata polvos mi Dios sends over and over again to test my faith as nearby counties are drenched.
It's raining at the ranch, wholesale and in widespread sheets of moisture that soaked into the soil all night and run now in the striations of cow paths on the pastures and into the arroyos and to the ponds.
Ask me how much I mind being rained out of the day's chores that included building a third wooden walk gate and beginning the rehab work on a flatbed trailer that needs to be re-painted and re-planked.
I had driven through this significant moisture system the night before, leaving Laredo near dark and pulling behind me the old flatbed with its new planks from the lumberyard. As always, the puddles dissipated about half way to San Ygnacio and I believed that once again the rain would miss us. As I un-hitched the trailer at the barn, I was proven wrong when the rains began in an earnest din on the high metal roof above us.
It continued through the night in a comforting roar of variable speeds and intensities. I awakened to the new sound of the trill and croak of estivating frogs coming out of hibernation on the banks of the nearby pond. I regret once more not having gotten around to putting up the guttering on the house for the rainwater collection system that works so well at the barn.
Our pastures have had good tall grasses throughout the summer, but it's sun toasted and the color of wheat except for a little green at the crowns. These good soaks will change that almost overnight. And what the rain does for the soil and the grass, it does for us, too, those of us who live on this big landscape and have learned the humility of praying into the vast blue sky filled with the promise of billowing clouds.
Beyond the generosity of much-needed moisture, this rain marks an ever so slight change in season as summer dissipates into more tolerable temperatures and improved chances of rainfall.
The fall, though laden with memories of other times and other places, is my favorite season, a contemplative learning time, a productive time. Griefs and sorrows, new ones and all the old ones you accumulate over a lifetime, weigh in once again in the fall and then find speedy dispatch, some of them diminished and never to return, others with the half life of radium.
This is where the world makes most sense to me and where I witness the earth's desire for natural balance in the simplest and most profound terms. Rain falls; grass grows; water runs clean and filtered through soils and grasses; river fills; cattle, wildlife, and humans content.
On all counts, I'm a lucky girl, albeit a creaky-kneed girl.

I cringe to think of the rain water cycle in the city. Rain falls and percolates through lawns that have been chemically fertilized and sprayed for pests with substances that are not harmless as the consumer has been assured. Now laden with chemicals, the runoff moves down the oily streets of Laredo and across an oil-slicked HEB parking lot or the one at Wal-Mart and picks up more oil and transmission fluids before heading in a torrent to Zacate or Chacon creeks, where illegal dumpers have left cans of paint and solvents, creeks where pesticide applicators have backed up and taken a dump on the water supply of millions of residents on both sides of the Río Grande. Not a pretty picture on the diverse and beautiful landscape of South Texas.