El Nino es Muy Bueno

I carried this text around like a cross to bear.

For most of my life I have been tormented by an inability to speak, read, write, memorize vocab words, and order food in Spanish.  It started in high school when I made the absurd choice to use "Cristobal" as my Spanish name in class.  You can imagine all the crystal ball and Christ ball jokes tossed my way.  I spent way too much time trying to think of witty comebacks and much too little time actually listening to Senorita Whateverhernamewas teach.

My torment continued in college where I continued to lag behind once I got beyond the ease of learning the alphabet and how to count to a hundred in Spanish 101.  I dropped out of Spanish 101 several times before I finally completed it.  By the third or fourth time around I was quite fluent and could sing the ABCs and tell how old I was just like any two-year-old can.

A small part of the problem was that Spanish classes started at the unseemly hour of 9:00 a.m.  Maybe mine was the only college to do this, but each discipline seemed to have their own time of day for classes.  Science, math, Spanish, and history were in the morning.  English, Philosophy, Volleyball (my kind of classes) were in the afternoon or, even better, at night. So waking up for a 9:00 class just wasn't in the cards for a night owl like me; not on a regular basis anyway.  I know, I know, "es no bueno" to have treated my education with such flippancy.

Those poor choices and inability to comprehend the more elementary aspects of learning a foreign language (and I do mean elementary school level) led to summer school and taking Spanish for 3 hours a day five days a week starting at 8:00 a.m. before my chosen institution of higher learning would allow me to move forward in life with a few extra initials on my resume.  It was only through sheer willpower that I finally passed Spanish 102 with a resounding D+ and by God I earned my bachelor of arts degree in English.  The irony of excelling in the study of one language and drowning in the study of another was not lost on me or my advisor.  My advisor posited one afternoon (because that's when we English types were awake) that perhaps it was the love of my native language that created a mental barrier to learning a different language.  I wore that comment like a badge of honor.

Before I had graduated, I briefly toyed with the idea of applying to an MFA program in Creative Writing as a next step.  I say "briefly" because, for reasons unknown to me, every MFA program I looked into required fluency in at least one foreign language.  I just Googled how to express my reaction in Spanish to that discovery: "Lo Siento".  That means "I'm sorry".  I'm sorry, it just wasn't going to happen unless I was willing to lie on my application.  But what if they greeted me on the first day in Spanish?  [Hola, Cristobal!] What if they taught Early Shakespeare in Spanish?  What if all my papers had to be translated?  I'd be found out and then turned out!  No, it was time to enter the world and forge my own way.  Which is scary.

And so, because of Spanish, I was forced to embark upon an odyssey of existential wandering.  What does an English major that's petrified of public speaking do for a living if they can't teach and if they know they can't make a living writing?  

So, you see, me and Spanish have had our differences and I'm not quite ready to forget all that history.  But this new year, this blessed New Year, is starting to soften my stance a teensy bit.  And I owe the metaphorical olive branch to that kind Latino kid they call El Nino.  Which, in English means "The Nine" or "the Nest" I think.  Something like that anyway.

After several years of drought and strictly enforced water restrictions pitting neighbor against neighbor, there has been very little motivation to add anything to my garden.  Every plant I can imagine planting requires consistent watering in order to become established in my region and most plants need continued irrigation at least semi-regularly because we simply don't get rain for months on end in our hot summers.  So when you're only allowed to irrigate on a Saturday before 6:00 a.m. (please see earlier when I mention not being awake before 9:00 a.m.) it's unlikely that new plants will be happy.

But El Nino!  El Nino might change some of that.  See, an average January in Sacramento has 3.97 inches of rain.  It is the rainiest month of the year.  However, when you look at recent rain fall totals, you can start to see how it might create a problem for a region when your rainiest month is this dry for this long:

	January Rain Fall
2015	0.00
2014	0.12
2013	0.90
2012	1.22
2011	1.55
2010	4.82

What's left of Shasta Lake in Northern California
Photo credit: National Geographic  

At some point yesterday, January 7th, we crossed the 2 inch level for the month thanks to a series of El Nino inspired storms.  It's not enough to fill the reservoirs, to water all the crops, to replenish the ground water supply that's depleted to the point of causing the earth to cave in (oh mi Cielos, right?), and it's not enough to get Governor Jerry Brown to lift water restrictions.  It's a mere drop in an empty bucket really.  But it is enough for me to smile, for a change, when someone talks to me about the weather in Spanish.

And for the first time in a long time, I find myself pausing at the window to daydream about what could come next.  I just might get to plant something this spring when El Nino is finished making it all up to me.