Yesterday morning Punxutawney Phil, the weather-prognosticating groundhog wizard, came out from wherever he hides in Pennsylvania, looked around, and saw his shadow, which means six more weeks of winter. That's bad news for the people in in the Northeast and Midwest U.S., already buried under several inches of snow. At our ranch, we've received mixed signals …
Tag: spring
Spring makes a welcome surprise appearance
Contrary to the wistful notions we brought down with us, San Miguel de Allende does have a winter cold, gray and windy enough, to send us rummaging through the coat closet for one of those heavier jackets we'd thought we'd never need again.And for three days last week, winter really stretched it claws here.Sparrows and …
An early symphony of rain
The rainy season began last night. Maybe. The sis-bam-boom of thunder and lightning, and the crescendo of fat raindrops pounding the skylights, was a welcome spectacle last night, assuming it was the overture to this year's rainy season.The all-night rain ranged from furious to gentle and back again but it never seemed to quit. Our cheapo …
San Miguel's Fake Spring
While our compatriots back home suffer through daily charges and countercharges of "fake news," in San Miguel we're in the middle of our fake spring, a teaser season that comes about three months before the rains and the real spring arrives. Fake spring brings warmer temperatures, mid seventies at midday and mid forties at midnight, and …
Spring Interruptus
April and May don't bring showers or flowers around here but mostly winds and dust, frequently spiced with brush fires, all of it to remind us of our a semiarid climate and terrain.It's a season of both high expectations and frustrations, much like February and March in the upper latitudes of the United States: You …
Tiny miracles
As I trudged through fresh mud this morning to photograph the nearby dry creek, which is finally gurgling and gushing downhill, I ran into another gift left by the heavy rains we've had during the past three days: hundreds, make that thousands, of wildflowers.Flowers popping up in the spring shouldn't be a revelation anywhere, except …
Hot Springs
It was admittedly a false hope, a burst of groundless enthusiasm that was bound to crash. Following the unusually heavy rains during the two weeks straddling January and February, when we received approximately 10 inches--or approximately half of what we normally receive in an entire year--the ground was covered with a bright-green five o'clock shadow …
El Rancho Santa Clara 