Good night, dear readers.

Tonight's good night is Desert Rain God by Louisa McElwain, a New Hampshire modernist who moved to New Mexico in 1985 and never left — because once the Southwest gets into you, there is no leaving it.

McElwain, known for her thick paint and big, bold strokes, painted from her truck. She would drive toward storms like a woman possessed, rig a canvas to the back of the vehicle, and stand there in the wind and paint what was coming. The heavy marks, she said, express forces of nature both internal and external. She spent her career trying to find the place where one ended and the other began.

This rain god dances.

That massive microburst cloud is twisting, twirling, throwing its white shawls wide at the crown while its dark skirt hem drags rain across the mountains below. There is the full-bodied, unhurried movement of something so enormous it answers to nothing. And in the foreground the desert holds still — gold, patient, sage-green and waiting — the way a congregation holds still. The way devotion holds still.

The monsoons are coming to New Mexico soon. We'vehad some storms already. I live for what the air does in the hour before the drops come. The way the smell of wet creosote arrives ahead of the rain, the low and distant rumble an announcement that the god is on its way.

Some forces of nature you step outside to receive, your face tilted up, grateful to be alive in a place where such things still happen.

Sleep well. ⛈️

— Alisa