The northwest wind smells of dust and snow.

I can taste their intermingling, cold and gritty on my tongue and in my throat as I pad along the ditchbank into this last cold sigh of winter. But hell, it's good to be outside, it's good to be running, running ever so slowly along the acequia under this sky that is every windswept gray imaginable. Gray, gray, gray and gray, pearl, silver, misty, charcoal, dirty, light and dark.

I once worked with radiologists who could look at the 256 grays of a magnetic resonance image and see more than half of them, more shades of gray than we have names for. Their eyes were hope and despair. They'd look at the film and murmur quietly to themselves, gently moving fingers across the image a bare no-smudge hairsbreadth from its surface. They would pause at this shadow, at that expanse of muted gray, and then step away. A manicured doctor's finger pointed, there, a few keystrokes and knob-twists from a technician, and what was hidden on the film stood naked and foreboding on the screen. Or a shake of the head, nothing, and we relaxed ever so slightly, to wait while the next film sheet was prepared.

I wonder what one of them would see in this sky? But this is no static image above me, the clouds are hurtling across the valley in barely-ordered ranks, whipping mare's tails of snow across the earth, kicking up plumes of dirt from the surrounding fields. Feathers of arid snow mixed with clay dust curl and drift around my feet, catching in the slender green shoots at the edge of the trail. Yet another pair of mallards on the watercourse tucked in tight to the bank. They eye me sideways, spooky and skittish, I eye them. They'd normally fly when I look at them straight on, but this evening they only gabble in soft panic for a moment, then tuck back into the ditchbank's shelter.

The wind stops and starts, I hunch and unhunch my shoulders accordingly. Only a week ago, I could not climb the short flight of stairs to my office without stopping to hack my lungs out. I'd look down in surprise at my hand for a moment there at the top of the stairs, expecting to see a soft pink lung in my grasp. But no, they are still inside my chest where they belong. The wind's sandpaper rasp down my throat, rough into my not-yet healed lungs is proof enough of that. I stick out my tongue to catch a snowflake, and swallowing it the wrong way sets off a spasm of coughing. Or maybe it was the laughing that did it, laughing because I am the only one out here on the last hot-chocolate evening of a winter that never quite arrived.

Around the end of the loop, suddenly, it is still. I trot on down along the trail by the big ditch, Clear Ditch, twenty-odd feet across of cold dark water. The final pair of ducks of the ten or so I've seen so far, wood ducks instead of the ubiquitous mallards, their crested heads gleaming slightly in the last cold light of the day. I stop to watch them for just a moment before the edge in the air knifes through my pants. Through the strip of bosque, onto the gravel road past the horse farm where my brother lives. In the little corral almost to the end, a new foal, all legs and knees huddled in at his mother's flank, only a day or two to his name.

One last pounding squall of snow, one last curl of dust, and it's home there across the field, warm and welcoming bath and bed.

In the morning, there will be a cover of snow on the fruit blossoms as dry and delicate as the flowers themselves.

In a few weeks, there will be wind, and it will smell only of dust.

Mary Z. Fuka