We take the kids to nearby Villanueva yesterday.

Picture a crumbling adobe village with verdant green fields sloping down to a frigid running river in the middle of the high desert. Water doesn't smell better anywhere else than here. It's so good you can almost taste it. Sweet water telegraphing its signal from your nostrils to the tip of your tongue right down to your toes.

We had funnel clouds out this way earlier this week, and hail, and nary a basement or storm cellar in sight. This has me contemplating the solid-looking stone tunnels beneath the train tracks. Dated back to the late 1800s, in the back of my mind, I hold them as the place we could hedge our bets against that force of nature.

The Pecos is swollen with the winter runoff from the mountain lakes and streams high in the Pecos mountains where we'll be riding our horses later this summer.

The kids and I wade in freezing cold water up to our thighs along the shore. As the brown water swirls around me, I remember riding my buckskin quarterhorse bareback to the neighbor's creek in Ohio when I was growing up, bucket in one hand, reins in the other, ocasionally with my little sister on the back, and plunging into the water for a bath we all enjoyed.

The cottonwood trees bend their heads down over us, whispering and murmuring. Brushing aside the willow branches and the rushes spilling over into the rushing water, as my kids round the curve ahead of me, I am struck by an old Sunday School story I haven't thought of in years--

Moses' mother fashioning a basket of reeds into a tiny boat and floating the baby downstream to save his life from those who wanted to kill the first born. I can still see the picture of her in my Sunday School lesson book, remember the anguish on her lovely, sunlit face, as, with outstretched hands, she sets the tiny vessel afloat and bids her child adieu.

He floats right past me in a boat bobbing like a cork in the current, swirling in the eddies, so I have a fleeting glimpse of pink, pudgy outstretched fingers and toes, can hear a little one crying. And then he disappears just like that--sluicing way down the canyon where shadows deepen, maybe being carried to the Rio Grande, all the way to Mexico.

I catch sight of my kids again, their legs carry them faster and farther than mine. Cole is splashing his sister with the recently melted snow, and she is laughing.

I'm glad there are no gators in the Pecos.