The desert averages 3-15 inches of rain a year. The average woman cries three times a month. After my son died, I, an average woman, a cheerful woman, a resilient woman, became an outlier. I cried three times a day, sometimes an hour. A weatherman could have measured my tears in inches.

Tears are emotional and so are monsoon rains. We spent the summer and fall waiting for the monsoons. Wispy clouds at noon morphed into gray clouds by mid-afternoon. Full of anticipation, we pulled out kettles, barrels, buckets, anything that could collect rainwater. But while our backs were turned, the clouds dissipated, the air stilled, and the sun still shone.

We prayed for moisture, danced for rain. Mother Nature was not listening. Until last night when clouds built, wind whipped, birds swirled, and rain fell. We stood in the carport listening to raindrops turn to rainballs that pummeled the tin roof like a drum. A Timpani drum. Not the boots ’n cats of a boy’s snare drum, but the dun-dun-dun of an old man’s drum. We left the carport and lifted our faces to the sky and danced in the rain. The desert was still alive.

Michele Morris

is a former magazine editor and travel writer. She has a BA degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona and an MS in journalism from Columbia University. She’s the author of hundreds of magazine articles and two non-fiction books, one on Chinese cookery and the other on cowboys. Born and raised on a ranch in Montana, Michele raised her children in New York City. She’s lived and worked in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and presently lives in Park City, Utah where she skis, hikes and bikes, and has the stories and injuries to prove it.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Here’s to Life, ekphrastic prose poem by Michele Morris after a painting by Frida Kahlo, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ Serenity Now, ekphrastic prose poem by Ms. Morris after a painting by Benjamin Chee Chee, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 10, October 2021)

⚡ Remembering the Home Front on Pearl Harbor Day, article by Ms. Morris in Ms. magazine (7 December 2012), in which she describes some of her research for her novel, Paper Girls