At the crack of dawn my eyes are ratcheted wide open at the crack of thunder rattling the windowpanes in a fury. What’s everyone so mad about? I’m wondering, and I'm not even awake yet. I’ve been dreaming about a sleek black dog with a square blockhead and glittering topaz eyes. I was worried he was going to bite me.

It’s an understatement to say that an early morning thunderstorm in the Pecos valley is an anomaly. Kind of like a tsunami in Oklahoma. Although I spent more than my fair share of my childhood there in tornado cellars, part of growing up on the Great Plains, I guess.

We are at a dinner party recently, a thank you party, basically, for the men and women with whom my Stetson-wearing husband a.k.a. Jack Bauer works. I hear the words plutonium and atom and all kinds of scientific terminology bandied about. It’s the kind of stuff I have a hard time keeping up with, but I can go there with ya if you keep it at the 5-mile-up kind of level. My part of that conversation is generally just listening, like a good soldier, and asking for a few points of clarification so you know I’m at least trying. And interested. Which I am. I am struck by all of the brain cells and the synapses firing in that drafty room in that old log lodge on the mesa's edge in what they used to call The Secret City. More than anything, though, I am struck by the patriotism of the men and women assembled there.

One fellow party goer, a wife--of one of the eggheads, she says--with pretty red hair and an engaging smile, and on whom I easily have fifteen years, is telling me a story about the duck and cover drills they used to do in high school, as if that would save you, you know?

I know, I am nodding.

Now the only emergency drills we ever engaged in that involved any ducking and covering when I was in grade school in the sixties were of the tornado variety, when they lined us up and down the hallways against the steel lockers with our skinny arms around our heads, but I don’t say anything. I think that nice young woman has imbibed a little too much of the fine boxed wine, which can lead to exaggeration. I let her have her story.

Sounds like the gods are angry. My husband is shaving, smiling and speaking to me from the well-lit bathroom mirror, while I rub my eyes in wonder at the freight train rolls of thunder, wondering how anyone can be so wide awake or so annoyingly cheerful at this ungodly hour, especially with the house shaking all around us.

I don’t know about the gods, but I sure know about his Arabian mare, Miss Morningstar, who follows me closely all the way to the hay barn, in a big hurry for me to feed her ASAP, with her teacup muzzle tucked to her chest, except for when she’s waving it up and down and up and down at the freezing cold rivulets of water running over her forehead and dripping off of her eyelashes. I can feel her hot breathe steaming at me through the curtains of rain, although she knows better than to nudge me, at least most of the time, and I can only think about Thor, the POA pony we had when the kids were little bitty. My husband, who gets to name just about everything around here, it seems, named that old rascal after the God of Thunder himself. The diminutive horse’s two front legs were white, you see, with lots of feathers, making for an impressive thundering gallop with a child on his back.

On the way to school, the Post Office Dog, who growled at me once because I was silly enough to try and pet the unsocialized creature when we first moved here, has taken up her post near the front door. Her yellow fur is sopping wet and nearly curling right before our eyes in the unexpected damp. As my ten-year-old son Cole opens the car door and steps out, with the mail in hand—bills to be paid, NetFlix movies, a birthday card—the Post Office Dog waddles over. And I don’t like the attitude of her wooly shoulders. Or the look in her coffee-colored eyes. If you mixed a little cream in there, they’d damn near be amber.

Topaz, maybe.

I step out of the car, and walk around, strategically placing myself in between Post Office Dog and boy. Cole skedaddles it to the drop box.

Jaws cracked open in a yawn, the Post Office Dog sits back on her haunches, and we have ourselves an old-fashioned stare down.

The thunder roars.