Winter

Winter is officially here. We had a gully-washer of a thunderstorm a few days back, and since then nightly rains. The rains are late this year, and the heat had become almost unbearable, but the regular rainfalls help keep temperatures reasonable.

It's hard for someone from the Pacific Northwest (where it is still 50 degrees and raining on June 1st) to think of El Salvador's rainy season as winter - but this is the season when travel gets difficult because of mud and floods, when you have to look at the sky before leaving the house, when the mosquitoes and flies and toads come out to play, when - a little further on - absolutely everything gets damp, mildewy, soggy. So it's reasonable enough to call it winter, the more challenging of the two seasons.

Meanwhile, we are in the transition period, which is the classic time for catching a cold in El Salvador...plenty of sniffles all around. Farmers have started their corn crop, and have been waiting anxiously for the rains to catch up with them. Now they have: primero Dios, this year's crop of corn and beans will be big and healthy, unlike those of the last two years when dry weather came at the wrong time.