Summer Storm
Preciousness of Place
Original photo by B. Littleton
The storm arrives early this morning. Winds roar across the mesa, thunder rolls close, and lightning searches the ground for where to land. Sheets of rain fall heavy, and the smell of petrichor rises, earthy and thick. Darkness rests low across the sky, and I feel both reverent and alive inside it.
I step out between the olive trees, naked. My body remembers how to move this way, how to dance with weather, how to roll on wet earth until olive leaves cling to my skin. I want the petrichor to seep into my veins, to become part of me. Mother Coyote watches from the edges, silent and approving. Later, I take a hot, steamy shower outside, and it feels very Kobe-temple-ish, the ordinary turned holy. I fix a bowl of miso with nori, play the crystal bowls, and open every window and French door. My hair is wild. My witch is fully here, present and waiting.
But the storm also carries yesterday with it. Richard, my neighbor, walked into the desert wash and did not return. His dog ran home alone. I’ve seen him and his dog so many mornings before seven, steady on his path, and we always waved and nodded, smiled. Those small gestures made a circle of belonging. When the helicopter circled overhead, I followed the back trail to the wash, the place where everything transforms. Coyotes give birth there. Bobcats find their meals. Footsteps pressed in prayer disappear into sand. And now Richard’s breath has joined that terroir, his final gift to this high desert mesa.
Terroir is more than soil and rain; it is the way place shapes life and death alike. It is the flavor of earth carried into the body, the influence of weather on spirit, the way human breath, animal track, and desert silence all belong to one living fabric. Richard is now part of that fabric. His final breath is as much a part of the mesa as the scent of petrichor, as much a note in the desert’s song as thunder itself.
And I know I belong to it too. When I dance in the olive grove, when I roll on the wet bed of leaves, when I eat miso under a dark sky or play bowls to the storm, I am also absorbing this place. The terroir of the mesa seeps into me, shaping my body’s memory, my rituals, even the way my heart responds to sudden change. Life here demands it. The sudden turns of weather, the flash floods and heat waves, the thunder that arrives without warning, all of it trains me to read patterns, to be alert to shifts both outside and inside, to sense when emotional weather is turning just as surely as storm clouds gather.
William Stafford once wrote, “The earth says have a place, be what that place requires.” Richard kept his place, walking his dog, meeting the morning. Mary Oliver says, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” He loved his desert walks, loved being faithful to them, even at the end.
So this morning, as the storm moves over the mesa, I lie on a bed of wet olive leaves and say goodbye. Rain is the requiem. Thunder is the announcement. The terroir of this place holds it all, storm and silence, life and death, wildness and farewell, and I too am being shaped by it.
And perhaps that is its lesson: to live here is to practice resilience, to let the desert teach me how to bend with sudden change, to rise again after being washed clean, and to keep listening for what the land asks of me next.
written by Bren Littleton
Original photo by B. Littleton
Tin Flea Press c 2025