Emma fits in
To fit in around here, you really have to be a character. For one thing, you need to help keep the other denizens of the madhouse entertained.
Emma continues to show she belongs in the Milán Pack. Just now, with the street full of youths, not all the most reliable-looking, and with bass thumping from the speakers of a truck across the street, what roused Emma to bark fiercely?
What but her nemesis, a young mother with a pram?
To be fair to Emma, the mother was walking a somewhat stout little dog. That’s got to up the threat factor.
•••
To further support Emma’s pack-appropriate eccentricity, on our walk today we got rained on. At home Emma doesn’t like to be out in any kind of weather. By which I of course mean weather, as in, the weather doing something, not just sort of being there. Today, though, she happily ignored the fact that it was raining. As long as the rain stayed light.
To my surprise she didn’t even react to fairly loud thunder. Usually if any kind of boom is even audible when she’s outside, she’s shrieking and thumping at the back door to come in. Out on the ditch this afternoon, she didn’t even blink. Apparently she figures Daddy will protect her.
(This might be ill-advised. Daddy is tall, hence liable to attract lightning.)
I enjoyed the rain myself. Mostly. It’s a rare treat to see New Mexico on a cloudy, rainy day. And light rain falling on me actually feels pleasant. Certainly knocks down the heat.
But then as we approached the point where I intended to turn around the rain began coming down for true. Then Emma was, like, “Daddy, can we seek shelter now? Don’t you know enough to come in out of the rain?” Fortunately there were trees with thick enough foliage to offer some respite.
Even then I was more concerned by the lightning. If I’d expected that, or if I’d heard thunder before we set out, I would have kept us home. Naturally it waited until we were on our way up the ditch.
Mostly it seemed to stay fairly far away. Although supposedly, I gather, lightning can smack you from over-the-horizon out of a clear sky. Which mainly fosters in me a sense of fatalism: hey, if lightning can hit me from a blue sky, why should I sweat a little I can actually see and hear?
Although there was one flash-crack near enough to make both of us jump. I didn’t feel quite so damn blasé then.
As I anticipated the hard rain didn’t last long. After just a few minutes it stopped raining altogether.
With summer actually well underway there aren’t many birds in evidence except at dusk and dawn (I’m taking that latter on faith, believe me). There were the usual pheasants screeching in the fields, although I didn’t see any, and a scrubby molting mallard (I hope it was molting.) As we walked back toward the exit from the ditch I saw half a dozen or so swallows flying in spirals just above the trees ahead.
Terrestrial wildlife was a bit more active. Early on we heard a bullfrog groaning. Despite the fact it sounded, as they always do, like something suffering acute intestinal distress, it also sounded happy, somehow.
Coming back I saw round ripples emanating from a point near the ditchbank, from which I deduced a frog had just hopped in. If so there must’ve been a pair, since as we got closer one launched itself from the bank right where the ripples were coming from.
A little farther along I saw hopping across the trail into the weeds to the side that noble creature, the toad. This was a particularly fat and splendid specimen. I’ve always really liked toads, for some reason. They do eat a lot of bugs, which is certainly to the good.
By this time it had started raining again. Not hard, but not lightly, either. Since I’d put the most vulnerable item of the sundry electronalia that I load myself down without before setting foot out the front door (my Palm) in my water-bottle carrier I wasn’t worried about being soaked. It would’ve felt much better, though, if the wind hadn’t decided to start blowing kind of briskly.
The final quarter to half mile of ditch is lined both sides with nice, tall trees. That brought us relief from the wind, if not so much the rain, which commenced to fall straight down. I heard something stirring in the brush to my right, the west side, and looked to see a cottontail bunny dart off into the tall grass of the Nature Center field.
All in all, it was much more pleasant than walking in hammerhead heat. And any walk where you don’t get fried by lightning is a good walk, yes?