Without pausing to bring us our essential yearly quota of rainfall, summer at the ranch has come and gone, and we've slid into fall with a landscape that is already sere and yellowed. I don't have any official figures, but the artificial reservoirs surrounding San Miguel appear to be shrinking, instead of bursting and even flooding …
Continue reading Then summer left us, without even saying adiós
I've always believed in the power of the written word but I had no idea. Since posting my yearly epistle a week ago about the lack of rain, we've had an inch of precipitation over two nights.Late Tuesday afternoon the southeast skies had darkened—auspiciously or ominously depending on one's point of view—and lightning sliced the …
Continue reading Let it rain. Let it . . . Hey, it's raining!
It is ungrateful for anyone in San Miguel to complain about the weather here, which is about as mild and even as you can pray for. No Chicago-like deep freezes or Houston-like saunas. Particularly in the past couple of years, when there have been floods, tornados, blizzards and other disasters in the U.S., our weather, with …
February in Chicago is cold, damp and most of all dreary. Daylight hours have shrunk; it's dark outside going to work and likely the same when coming home. Wistfully scanning seed catalogs doesn't seem to help. At Starbucks, sales of the Sumatran Vente Molto Loco blend have increased dramatically, which makes people bug-eyed but hardly …
El Rancho Santa Clara 