No malaria. No TB. Everything’s OK.

It’s April! The ditches are running and trees are blossoming. Squirrels are scampering, and the birds and the bees are frolicking. It’s an April thing.

You just can’t help but get out to scamper and frolic. No? Yes? Maybe?

Consider: I was driving down the street and saw some kids taking advantage of the spring winds playing with a curious diamond-shaped object flying around in the sky attached to a piece of string they held in their hands.

What a sight to behold in our modern era of our WiFi-Xbox-Bluetooth-digitized A.I. craziness and convenience. There’s a singular gratification connected with holding onto a simple piece of string that beats all to heck shooting bad guys on a computer screen. Granted, it’s not rocket science, but it’s a challenge all the same. It takes skill. You have a simple framework of flimsy paper that wants to go this way or that way, and up or down, and the only thing that keeps it in the air is what you do with your end of the string.

I’m thinking probably someone’s made a computer game that simulates flying a kite.

Now I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone who likes to play a game on their computer - I do it myself occasionally - because it does have benefits, much like therapy. You just tune everything out for a while.

Speaking of my computer habit, while checking my email the other night, I saw that someone was trying to sell me some Smithsonite. I mean, you never know when a reference to Magdalena will pop up, so I couldn’t help but click on it, and there was a picture of a thumbnail-size chunk, described as “pristine Smithsonite from the famous Kelly Mine in Socorro Co., New Mexico!”

My, that sounds exotic. And you can have it, along with its own small Lucite stand, for only $760. Yes, seven hundred sixty bucks.

With that in mind, I couldn’t venture a guess how much has been collected by local folk and is sitting in a drawer or along a porch railing as decoration, not to mention in the Mineral Museum at New Mexico Tech.

Another email that cropped up on my Google Alerts was from someone selling another collectible: a gram of Trinitite mounted in a 1.5-inch lucite membrane case for $37. Display stand not included.

One. Gram.

Although the US government made it illegal to remove it in 1952, up until then people were sneaking out there and picking up that radioactive stuff as a collector’s item.

Case in point: Several weeks after the Trinity test - before it was fenced in and the military had better things to do - the late Evelyn Fite and her husband Dean, who ran a nearby cattle ranch, rode their horses looking for the bomb site.

“All the boys around the ranch who rode horseback went over there to see what it looked like,” she said in a 2006 interview.

They found a shallow crater several hundred yards across, covered with a cap of green glass.

“The kids all gathered that green glass, you know, that melted, and had it in their pockets, and took it home, put it on the mantle,” she said. “We had a piece at the ranch that Dean brought home.”

Anyway, before that digression, I wanted to make the point that this little corner of the world is quite unique. Rich in history and cultures, and just a downright good place to live.

I read an article in Sunset Magazine that had as its cover story, “The West’s Best Places to Live.” I’m not giving away any spoilers here, but I was shocked, shocked, I tell you, that Socorro or Magdalena was not on that list. I’m thinking you have everything you need right here. All of life’s necessities. Socorro County is just a comfortable place to live and people are nice to each other.

Take it from an 1888 editorial in The Chieftain: All authorities agree that the climate of New Mexico is the finest on the continent, while that of Socorro and the surrounding country is the finest in New Mexico. The altitude of Socorro is 4,053 feet, the air being dry, pure and invigorating. Malarial and tubercular disease are unknown. The mean temperature is about 64 degrees, excessive heat being unknown, while the mercury has never been known to fall as low as zero, in fact scarcely ever falling as low as 20 degrees. The cloudy days will not average eight a year, the Rio Grande Valley being a land of perpetual sunshine. Numerous points of interest surround the city, and tourists can profitably spend many days in their examination.

So there. Enough of this “best places to move to” nonsense. We not only have blue Smithsonite and green Trinitite but also no malaria or TB.