Rain, gratitude and lament

Before I knew what prayers were I stood, hand in hand with my nana and prayed for rain. At the kitchen, where she taught me the Rosary and her votive candle never went out, we watched and waited for dark clouds to swallow up the Allegre Mountain. The aged wood of the screen door framed that happy mountain like a Remington painting, or an enchanted mirror we watched for signs. Nana and I tracked the cloudfall, minute by minute, to determine the future of our ranch.

When the mountain disappeared behind the downpour, she said, it was a good rain—a rain that would ensure pastures of grama grass. Grama, like grandma, I knew to be sacred, and, like my nana, the lifeforce of our ranch.

Grama was the first plant I remember learning, identified by its comical top that curved into my favorite shape, a crescent, bedazzled with the drip of tiny, verdant seeds.

I understood that a good rain meant our men would go to bed happy. I understood a good rain meant my nana would take a night off from her worries, and that was a good thing, because she was my Goddess and even a divine being deserves a night off.

I also understood the rain meant food for the cattle, and that was as important as a Goddess in a grandma disguise, because our lives depended on the happiness of our animals.

In that yellow, love-filled kitchen, I also learned that our Creator comes in the form of good mother cows, grandmothers, gentle rain, and the prayers of women who love the men that steward the land.

After a good rain, I became feral, nose to the ground, hands and feet deep in foamy silt, tracking black metallic veins down the dirt road with a magnet pilfered from the fridge. It was my greatest adventure yet, to explore how the land had changed. I relished in the cool, damp air and the way the earth and sky mingled into an otherworldly scent that tripped my curiosity.

In these wetted moments, Nana showed me to pinch small yellow flowers between my chubby fingers and inhale their lemony scent. To suck the honeyed nectar from the lavender ends of wild snap dragon blossoms. To turn the leaves of her lilacs into whistles to summon the pixies.

When no one was looking, I licked the water from pine needles before letting the bitterness of their juice suck the saliva from my tongue, removing the traces of my secret samplings. I imagined myself a bandit in the shadows of the barn, mouthing my fingers, flavored by a salt block or blackened by molasses feed, or squirreled away to the tack room choking down alfalfa flakes and nibbling the nubile stems of grama, wondering at how they catch in a human throat, at the difference in beings. In the postpartum bliss of a summer monsoon, I explored the pallet of fairies and cows.

In that watercolor blur of childhood wonderment, I also remember my mother teaching me the language of rain. On lazy summer afternoons, when the sky would purple and bloom with pregnant clouds, we would count the spaces between lightning and thunder to gauge the distance between us and the Gods.

Momma taught me about female rain, the kind that drizzles and soaks slowly into the ground, hydrating the blooms of her irises, hollyhocks and peonies. And she taught me about male rain, the kind that comes down in force, washing seeds and dirt away from home, and causing the arroyo to rage behind our cabin.

I still have dreams about the ethereal light of thunderstorms, and nightmares about the transformation of arroyos from playgrounds to predators.

With every rain that nurtured our ranch, a lesson was planted in the moist soil of my imagination. The rain taught me how to survive in a world I was born and raised so very far away from. It taught me to smell the air for moisture, to watch out for tricky ditches, and to give the wild bouquets of my life away to my children when they need a reprieve from the storm.

My daughter was born during a plague. She was born in a time when the world stopped long enough for animals to explore urban streets, undisturbed. Yet, she has never known the comfort of clouds building on a rural horizon during a suffocating summer day. She doesn’t know how rain is meant to visit in the afternoon like a lover sent to break the stifling monotony of dust and flies and the windy smell of cow shit.

The rain that raised me was a grandmother, but the rain my daughter knows is different. It is sudden and unexpected, and we never know if it is visiting us to provide, or take away. And while I’ve taught her to thank the sky for its gifts and splash in the puddles it provides, I mourn her childhood that will not hold memories of monsoons—that pattern of safety that I once depended on for stability and comfort.

After a year of floods and drought and fire and fear, I am left wondering: How does one mother on a planet rebelling against its own motherhood? How does one teach traditions on land that has forgotten its own language? How does a storyteller tell stories on soil she struggles to recognize? How does one continue to remember when the memory of water is confused by sadness?

What would the words of nana’s prayer be, now, if we were standing in the doorframe?