rumbling in the sky, as it's rainy season. it may be, we're having more rain than usual, though apparently, every july and august are like this to some degree. this rumbling seems to be from the east, though most of the rain seems to come up from the southwest, down by oaxaca state in mexico, where the hurricanes roll in from the pacific. then they dissipate, to some degree, and float around up here around the desert dropping what little moisture the desert gets for the whole twelve months. the mountains i'm in, which stick up out of a wide desert, seem to attract a lot of these clouds, and we in the mountains sometimes get as much as thirty or forty inches in a rainy season. and this appears to be one of them.

so i hear this rumbling, and i gather up the garbage to take it out to the truck. i've been simply putting the garbage in the back of the truck because there's no room in the tiny house, and, because the back of the truck shuts up ok, it's relatively safe from animals around here. don't feed the bears, they say, and it is quite tragic when somebody feeds them, because, wanting to or not, making bears dependent makes them dangerous. the bears come to town, the bears get in the dumpsters, the bears feed off of hummingbird feeders or food that people leave out for other animals. don't feed the bears, they say.

so i latch the back of the truck, and i notice two things outside, besides the constant rumbling. first is that there's a glorious sunset. now the sunset is off in the west, while the rumbling and all the nasty clouds are in the east, but it's a glorious sunset nonetheless. i read somewhere on facebook that all these families are down in las cruces waiting for the first football game of the season - a big one - but they're all waiting in their cars, because, though cruces has maybe two rainstorms a year, tonight appears to be one of them. it could be that they too are having an unusual amount of rain. that, for them, might be about eight inches as opposed to maybe two. people just don't have yards there - don't have grass, don't plant things that need water - they just accept that it's desert and live with it. that's something i would never be able to do.

second thing i noticed was this enormous rabbit. we have a kind of desert rabbit out here. the desert rabbits are enormous. now ours, an especially big fella, is probably bigger than at least two of our puppies. he's huge. but he's not exactly in the desert. on the contrary, he has a wild patch of overgrown grasses that seem to be taking over the place with all this rain. in other words, he's in paradise, and he knows it.

now in town, there's a crisis of feral cats. they had about a dozen, and the lady at allsup's was feeding them, and someone pitched in to make sure they were all spayed, and she loved them, and they came around to the allsup's parking lot every night all winter. but now, apparently someone has dropped off another dozen - they've come from all over - and now it's a big problem, and somebody's moving in to do them in. what we need is a no-kill shelter. but i don't see any volunteers, and i'm not about to volunteer our farm. my wife can't handle the two we have already.

the place has steady traffic of all kinds of other wildlife. there are deer, elk, and the rabbits that don't even bother hiding themselves. i suspect we have bears and lions too, but we don't see them much. the bears, i'm pretty sure, found the honey we left lying around when we cut this old oak that appeared to have thousands of bees. but i believe we have more. i know there are rattlers around, so i encourage our pets to stay close by on the porch. there are lots of hummingbirds, millions of flies, and other kinds of creatures all over the place.

no, cats would upset the balance, i'd be the first to admit that. it's the rabbits, in fact, that i like the most. the puppies sometimes seem able to live with that big one, and he's real comfortable, just making short hops around his blessed garden of overgrown green stuff that we have all over the place. i'd call it grass, but it's really more than that: it has wildflowers, weeds, all kinds of stuff. to him, it's paradise on earth, and to me, well, i at least get to watch him.