Snow in the Organs

Thursday night the wind howled like scores of frenzied spirits trying to get in and tear us limb from limb.  At least, that's what the cat seemed to think.  He hid.  I couldn't blame him.  At one point we heard a thumping or clattering above the morning room, where we'd had to replace the lattice work that helps shade that room a little in the summers, and when I went out to have a look I watched the two 4x8 lattices fly up into the air and head West, fortunately landing flat on the desert without decapitating any young trees or ocotillo.  The next morning a friend who's lived here for the past 15 years said it had blown like that once in her memory, in 1998.  And her house is in town, not out where we are, just west of the mountains, where it was worst Thursday night.  We spent a lot of time Friday nursing brutalized plants.  The wind sucks out all the moisture from ground and plants, and some in pots were drooping like depressed nonogenarians.  A couple of others were just gone, headed somewhere out toward Deming, accompanied by the chile ristra that used to hang near our front door.
Friday night it was quiet.  There was a steady rain, soft at times and quite heavy at times, but without howling winds or elves bowling in the sky or lightning.  Just rain, almost a half-inch of it.   But just a little higher, of course, it wasn't rain at all:

The Organ Mountains and Las Cuevas

Naturally towards late afternoon we wandered out toward a nearby windmill, in hopes that the clouds would clear a path for the setting sunlight to the windmill and the peaks.

It did.  For quite awhile I walked around while the sun dipped toward the horizon, shooting the windmill and mountain peaks from various angles, freezing my ass off.   Snow in the Organs still appeals to me.  Time was, years ago, when you could go two or three winters without seeing snow up here. 
I'm still sorting through the images, and playing around with some of them, but feel like tossing a few up here on the blog before I forget.

The next mountain range North got some too.



a closer shot of the windmill

Here are two variations on the first windmill shot in this post:


Rendered somewhat like a color-pencil drawing . . .



. . . and moved to some other planet.



A slightly more abstract version of a similar image



G'night!