Late Rain

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The rains are late, by over a month. Our friend Rosaura’s mother is visiting from the Sierra Juarez; there, she says, with the threadbare sadness of someone who no longer bothers to hope that things will go well, all the rain-fed milpas have died for lack of water, all the work of tilling and planting gone to waste.

Here in the valley, the water table is high and the cornfields are irrigated green for now, but the fallow fields are the grey-brown of long-dead grass. Last year this time, when we came here to live, the grass was hip-high.

One day in Tlacochahuaya, we see the elderly woman who sells cheese in the market, walking down the street with her arms full of white lilies. She tells us she’s on her way to a special rosary, to pray for rain. Later that day the clouds gather promisingly, but expel only a few drops before disappearing.

When Gil teases the woman at his favorite panaderia, she tells him, halfway between annoyed and laughing, ‘It’s because of bad people like you that it hasn’t rained!’

I’m intrigued and unsettled by the idea that the arrival of the rain is dependent on our being good people. More so when Gil arrives home one afternoon tired and irritable, and I’m tired and irritable, and we’re snippy with each other. It’s raining, clearly, behind us, in Lachigolo, and in front of us, out on the highway, but not a drop falls on our land—until we apologize and hug and kiss as Baby Isaias watches with interest. Then the rain begins patting down.

We throw open the doors and breathe in the scent of water on earth: “Qué rico, ¿no?” “Sí, tú. Riquísimo.”