Ribbit

Clouds built up around mid-day today, settling low over the Organ Mountains to the east. An afternoon of rain followed, as has happened several times in the last two weeks. This is the monsoon season in New Mexico, a season that last year came up completely dry. Raindrops became rivulets, and rivulets became torrents of muddy water racing to find their level, spilling and flowing and draining from a thousand directions into the arroyos.

We have a large arroyo near us, one with an earthen dam on the far side, built, so it's said, to contain a five-hundred-year flood. For more than ten months of every year, it's a bone-dry home for scrub brush, rabbits, coyotes and snakes. Today I stopped to look at a fast-moving river flowing into drainpipes and safely under Roadrunner Boulevard on its way to the Rio Grande. Tomorrow, unless it rains again, the arroyo will be nearly dry. Next time I hope to remember my camera.

Tonight, at nearly midnight, we hear the incessant white noise of countless frogs in the arroyo about a quarter mile down the street from us. Perhaps the water has brought dormant eggs to life. No predators will starve tonight.