The rainy season

The rains have arrived. They've been looming over us for a couple of weeks, big masses of dark rainclouds passing overhead each afternoon, but they blew away with the wind day after day. Until yesterday. Yesterday we had work with 8 busloads of middleschoolers - Nikis brings school groups out of Mexico City on cultural education trips to the pyramids. They come to the Dreaming House for workshops on traditional crafts like clay, obsidian, and natural paints. Then they go to the pyramids for a tour and return to the house in the afternoon for comida and a presentation by the Aztec dancers. Serving up a meal to 350 snotnosed adolescents is always a challenge - they pass cafeteria style, pushing and shoving and joking, as we hurriedly slop spaghetti, french fries, breaded chicken breast on each plate. My hands are flying as I grab 2 tortillas and wrap them around the spoon and napkin and fling them on plate after plate, shooshing the kids along. Well, yesterday of all days, as we're about a quarter of the way through the line, our fave god Tlaloc, the water god, decided it would be an appropriate time to begin the rainy season. The clouds had massed up like usual, but we didn't pay them much mind since it had become the daily norm, but without result - a constipated sky, so to speak.

But during the course of the afternoon yesterday, the sky kept getting darker and blacker, without the usual wind blowing up to chase the clouds away. Someone had the intuitive idea to bust out the big sun umbrellas and post them over the merchandise tablesto protect the little souvenirs and pyramids tschotchkes that my mother in-law, her comadre, sister and mother sell, just in case the clouds opened up. About as soon as we did that, the first drops began to drip out of the black cloud mass. They began to fall faster and bigger until we had a fullblown knock down dragout rainstorm on our hands. As I said, right as we're about a quarter of the way through serving lunch. The kids all started crowding up under the roof in front of the kitchen. Veronica ran around frantically handing out umbrellas to the helpers. But there was only so much roof to go around for the 350 kids - the rooves over the two terrace and in a little strip in front of the kitchen. But with a breeze kicking up and blowing the rain around, the dry space was a hot commodity.

At first the kids thought it was all fun and games, chasing each other across the lawn, trying to dodge raindrops. But Tlaloc really started to unleash his fury, the water pouring down harder and harder, a series of giant lakes starting to pool up all over the yard. The kids all retreated back under the little spaces under the roof, scrunching up closer, slinging down their lunch as fast as they could. Those who had stayed dry thus far turned out to be the smart ones, whereas the cool ones, those who had gleefully splashed around in the rain, turned out to be so uncool now, shivering in their soggy thin tshirts. The Aztec dancers had showed up and just huddled in their car, instead of embarking on their usual process of inserting their long pheasant feathers into their headdress. Show cancelled! Just to be sure, almost as a joke, we asked the teachers if they didn't want to see the Aztec dancers after all. The vision of 350 kids out in the downpour in the middle of the flooded muddy yard was too much, so the teachers said load 'em on the buses and let's go home!

It was a grandiose opening to the rainy season. Now, if Tlaloc grants it, we'll have green land till October. The desert morphs itself into a wonderland of verdant pastoral landscapes, wildflowers bursting out from every patch of dirt, along the shoulders of the highways, in every plaza of the pyramids. Just don't leave home without an umbrella!