Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Moisture not usually a good thing

Here on the high desert, water is both precious and rare. The smell of moisture is more fine than a flower in bloom and possibly even the scent of spoon-floating coffee in the air — though I’m not inclined to put anything above caffeine, personally.

We celebrate when it rains, smile when it snows, and even find the damp lining in sleeting, windy, blizzardy storms that are honestly hard to not find unpleasant.

But where it is not often an occurrence, a thing is bound to be looked upon with an eyebrow raised and salt ready to be shaken. Despite all the hope for good moisture that we hold, the presence of water is more often than not, an indication of something that has gone wrong.

Water in the road, running down the ruts and under your tires. Slipping and sliding and doing 180s like the residents of Hazard is fun, but the sad truth is that you’ve probably got a pipeline busted and better slide your way over to the backhoe and get to digging.

I hope you have a backhoe. Otherwise, I guess you better break out the shovel.

The sprinkler pivot sometimes looks like a water fountain, shooting artful sprays in every direction and ensuring that you are gonna walk to the control box on a pool of water being conductive. If you don’t get fried, you’ll still get wet. It’s one of those situations that’s just gonna be unpleasant no matter how lucky you are.

When the corrals are a green, smelly waterpark of slip ’n’ sliding cows, you can put on your muck boots to keep most of it off your socks, but don’t be surprised when you’re more green than not and it’s practically physics-defying where that slop will get.

But the time when you should be concerned is on a windy, uncloudy day. You feel that drop of moisture and its friends on your face. Everything is brown, the wind is blowing, after all. But even though you can’t see it, you know that yellow is the color that hit your skin.

I guess you can be glad that it’s too breezy to smell. There’s nothing to do about it but complain when a cow is upwind.

Audra Brown can try to get downwind, but too often, she’s just surrounded. Contact her at: [email protected]

 
 
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