We are in Santa Fe, New Mexico scanning the horizons for dark clouds.  We've been promised scattered thunderstorms and lower temperatures.  A cool breeze has swept over the Sangre de Cristos and onto the high dessert valley, but there is no rain.  When we first bought a home here, drought was rampant.  Dead juniper and pinon dotted the countryside—all victims of beetles that had feasted upon them in their weakened state.  Local lawsuits erupted over water usage.  People began to wonder whether rain would ever fall again or if we'd somehow been ushered into a permanent dry as dirt era.
    I am reminded of 1969, when we lived in San Angelo during similar dust bowl years.  For our birthdays, my sister and I had received two plastic, polka-dotted umbrellas from our grandparents.  Unfortunately, as the year dragged on we'd had no occasion to use them.  Although it was the Age of Aquarius, the Edward's Plateau was dry as a bone.  Pray for Rain billboards sprang up all over town.  No outdoor watering was allowed.  When folks finished their evening baths, buckets were filled from dirty tubs and dumped onto fledgling flowerbeds.  Our scraggly lawn turned brown prematurely and receded.  Dirt puffs billowed from our sneakers whenever we played kickball in the front yard.  Chalky footprints decorated everyone's hardwood floors.  Dirt collected on the insides of windowsills, and heat radiated off asphalt and concrete like ghostly vapors and haints.
    Lake Nasworthy, (home to the local boat club) shrank into a mosquito infested, stinking pond.  It was renamed Lake Nasty Water by the locals.  San Angelo even received notice from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, when it received the Fickle Finger Award for having three dams and absolutely no water.  Near panic swept through the city and surrounding farm and ranch land.  As children, we began to fear that rain would never come and that we would eventually turn into dried up stick men like the ones teachers used in the classroom.
    One afternoon, the four of us kids were indoors and were most assuredly driving our parents crazy.  My father suggested that we go outdoors and do a rain dance.  We had no idea of what this was but had seen Navajo Indians perform in Santa Fe.  We soon threw our bodies into what we thought must be exactly what a rain dance looked like.  In the afternoons, we danced after coming home from school and then again after our homework was done.  By nightfall, we were human dirt clods—frosted with sweat, soil and fatigue.  After a few days of this, we began to lose hope.  Was no one up there paying attention to our efforts?  Shouldn't clouds just naturally be attracted to our homage?
    Just as our despair was getting the best of us, cumulonimbus appeared in the west.  We sat on the back steps, mesmerized by them.  Like grade school weathermen, we'd run inside the house, reporting late-breaking cloud updates to our parents.   Then a miracle happened.  Raindrops began to fall upon the dirt and dotted our arms and faces.  We dashed inside for our plastic, pastel umbrellas and then danced gleefully in the rain.  Our backyard soon turned into mud soup.  Like children stirring chocolate batter, we'd felt as if we'd had a hand in it somehow.  It was as if our rain dance recipe had somehow contributed to a savory outcome.   Later, when lightening drove us indoors we watched it from our beds.  Savoring the musty smell of rain and the sweetness of victory, we eventually quieted down and fell into a relieved sleep.  We had joyfully arrived at the Age of Aquarius.