Hot enough for you?

Yesterday a dear friend told me that her father tracks the weather around the world, and New Mexico is apparently quite hot.  Er, yes.  This is going to be a record-breaking drought year, following several drought years. Behaviors align with this fact.  People get pruny-mouthed about lawns and sidewalk watering.   They track broken public sprinklers and call 311 at the drop of a water leak. The Rio Grande is a braid of thin curving water slivers, surrounded by cottonwoods with tightly furled leaves.  Cacti are not flowering, and bears are coming out of the trees to raid hummingbird feeders.  Texas water rights are suing Albuquerque for over-consumption.  The forests are closed due to fire danger.  People go around saying, "We might as well be in Arizona."   (Arizona is the New Mexico's standard for hell.)  Customers refuse to leave the library at closing time.

But, it's not uncomfortable to me.  I have a noisy swamp cooler that kicks in at 80 degrees, and that's sufficient for me.  When I am standing at the door, unlocking it,  I feel a cool breeze coming out of the bathroom window, which is cracked just enough to allow the cooler to work.  I'm not totally sure of the principles, but apparently the fan in the ceiling draws air past the water, which removes the heat from the air, and the air is drawn into and through the house by the draft/negative pressure of the open window.  Apparently, it's also possible to have a portable swamp cooler.  If it were humid, this process would apparently not work, and the most it cools is 10 degrees, so when we reach triple digits, it can be a problem.  Still, everything cools down at night (we are in a desert after all), which gives me a chance to keep the windows open and listen to the cats fighting with the cockroaches that roam the yard by night.

Having already lived through a New Mexico June, I thought the weather held no surprises for me.  I have listened to people whinge about wind storms and dusty houses and thought to myself, meh. Until last night.  I got off work at 6.  The skies had been darkening with clouds for the last hour, so I was thinking, yay, much needed rain. However, the clouds were not filled with water, but dust. I walked out into a whirlwind that got under my shirt and blew it upwards and whipped my hair around my face.  I looked towards the western horizon, and the sun was blotted out in a surreal bronze-white haze.  I looked east towards the Sandias, and they were a shadowy, barely visible outline, seen through an opaque screen of dust.  They looked like a denser cloud within a cloud.  Dirt whirled at my feet, and the trees were tossing, Katrina-like.  All that was missing was the rain.  As I drove to my date, I felt the wind pushing the car.  I saw dirt blowing across the road like snow on the Illinois prairie.  There is something very frightening about a storm that has no water, just wind.  It's intangibly powerful.

Today, all is calm, with twittering birds, hot sun, and a light breeze.  The Sandias are again visible, a hard slate-blue line marking the hot blue-white sky.  And there's still no rain.