Abuela. The Rio Grande cottonwood tree Dennis and the kids gave me for mother’s day years ago. She’s well over 30 foot tall now. I lay my hand lightly on her trunk. To let her know I’m here.

The cottonwood’s bare branches scrape the sky. They rattle in the wind. The ever present wind. The wind that comes from who knows where and that won't go away. In the spring her heart shaped leaves will billow in the wind like the sails on a ship, and some days she will nearly sail away, but she won't, which is what I love about her most. This afternoon, the soil is pried loose from the buffalo grass’s fingers by dirt devil wind gusts. The gritty stuff sticks to my lips, my eyes, my hair, and I am reminded once again how much I hate the wind blown winters in New Mexico.

I was at the Santa Fe Opera once, at a pre-opera party. Some newbies from Oklahoma were in attendance. When the wind kicked up and the August sky turned black and blue, they packed up their gourmet tail gate dinner and their fine wine and high tailed it for home, muttering about tornado weather. Well, I grew up on the plains too, so I understood completely. Those folks hadn’t been in New Mexico long enough to know that tornadoes don’t just come barreling down upon us from the Sangre de Cristos, no matter how ugly the sky gets.

Although they do in my dreams, let me tell you.

I think of it as my legacy from spending a few evenings in tornado shelters as a kid. I can still hear my three-year-old sister’s shouts of “don’t shut the lid!” from where she huddled on my grandma’s lap in the corner, her face tear-stained in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, terrified at the prospect of being shut into a hole. And from those tornado drills in school, with the siren keening, clanging, hunched up against a metal locker with my arms wrapped around my head, as if that would do any good. That time the storm was upon us so fast my mom put me and my sister in the hallway of our little house with our bed pillows and told us to stay put while she tried to get a hold of my dad on the telephone before we all got blown to Kingdom Come.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, here in the relative safety of the Pecos mountains, I find myself standing on the front porch of the old farmhouse I grew up in, and here they come, right on cue. Three or four tornadoes churning churning churning across the neighbor’s field, cows and crows and barn timbers flying, the bubbling black mess roaring like a pride of lions. And I’m sure I’m a goner, until suddenly the funnel clouds freeze in place, poised above me in the eeriest silence imaginable—transformed into what I am always surprised to see are giant wooden Indians, of the dime store variety, from antique shops, I suppose. I think they have something to do with cigars, as they wield their tomahawks high up in the clouds. Just as though they were about to whack me or take my scalp.

But they don’t. Because I wake up. Thankfully.

I sit down on the ground, my back against Abuela to feel the sun warming my face. Her name means grandmother. She is the first tree we planted here on the ranch. Her bark is rough. Her trunk sways in the wild January wind, and she rocks me, rocks me, nearly lulls me to sleep. The earth is warm. Warm and cool and a little damp at the same time. I hug my knees to my chest, enjoying her company, determined not to be windswept.

The roots of the Rio Grande cottonwood and the roots of her sister trees—we’ve planted something like 65 on the ranch, Dennis and the kids and I, and our Percheron horse Toby has eaten the top out of one, so that makes it something more like 64 1/2—reach down deep underground. Deeper than you or I or anyone can imagine. And their bare branches hold up the sky.

Across the top of the fence, I see my husband strolling up and down the rows of his fruit orchard, garden hose in hand, giving the trees a drink of water under the watchful eye of an ever curious appaloosa.