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Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM

Acequia Soup, Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM, March 4, 2010
Acequia Soup, Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM, March 4, 2010

In the soup

I was going through some older pictures today and came across this shot. A month or so ago the irrigation canal along NM Route 1 in front of the Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park was put in service for the season. It had been dry all winter and suddenly started flowing vigorously. I shot this picture of winter debris bobbing on the current before it washed away. Some of those seed pods remind me of sea creatures.

Mini heat wave

It was forecast to reach 80 degrees or so here yesterday but the 89 degrees and astonishingly low 3 percent RH (with a dew point of -2 degrees!) it reached about 4:30 in the afternoon was a bit of a surprise. This area of the Rio Grande valley seems to enjoy lower lows and higher highs than its neighbors. I wonder why that is. Here's a {link} to the local National Weather Service Mesonet Observations.

Night camp

Site 16 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM

It was the Crickets

Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.

It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.

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