It rained all Friday evening, which was novel.

I forget what happened the next morning, but we took off in the afternoon to drive down to a restaurant north of Santa Fe to meet my wife’s cousins. Very smart people. (One of them asks the most amazing questions.) On the way home we saw flooding in the arroyos, and later it rained all night again.

Today it didn’t rain, and we went to the Taos Pueblo powwow. There’s nothing like hearing the drumming and singing up close. For lunch I had a Navajo taco (the usual taco ingredients with beans & chile on fry bread). I had to have a Navajo taco because a), that stuff on fry bread is really, really good, and b) I’d just finished the last of Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides. The description of Kit Carson’s men driving the Navajos out of their mountain homeland and marching them off to exile at Bosque Redondo was fresh on my mind. The Army gave the refugees flour, but the wretched, hungry people had never seen wheat flour before and stuffed it in their mouths uncooked, making many of them sick. They must have learned to cook with it shortly, though the irony of the Navajos’ first learning to make fry bread at the Bosque is a powerful, fearsome thing — more than 3,000 of them died there from starvation and disease. The bread is mighty tasty, but you know there’s more than that at work, way down deep.

After we got home, I took a little nap and woke up crazy, like a panic attack, where all your options are bad. Suddenly, every endeavor was doomed. I was too old, too stupid, too fat, and too late. Where the hell had this come from? Trying to shake it off, I fired up the brushwhacker and cleared a path outside. Afterwards, my wife and I walked up the mesa and back, about a 2.3 mile roundtrip. I still wasn’t wholly reliable, though, not even after a double shot of tequila.

Then I had a brilliant insight: none of the things I’d woken up worrying about actually existed, or if they did, they hadn’t happened yet. (See, usually I miss that part, but this time I didn’t.) I tried this out on my wife, who mostly agreed, though I think she’d just as soon I take at least a few threats seriously, by way of motivation, so long as they don’t make me frown at dinner.

Sitting outside looking at the leaves shaking in the wind: suddenly, that was all that mattered.