Environmental news is a downer. I know. Despite trying to balance news about climate change and energy development with a love for wild places and muddy rivers, I’ve pretty much spent a decade of my life depressing readers. Lately, I’ve even been wondering how much I’ve contributed to the helplessness people feel about the environment.

A ghost haunts the river near my house. She wears a long black dress with a high collar (think Viktor & Rolf, only dusty, tattered and blood-stained), and cries at night. Some say she cries because she misses the kids she drowned in the river. Others claim she’s heartbroken over the military dude who refused to marry her because she was a dirty tramp who’d borne illegitimate children, which was what inspired her to off them just before she stabbed herself in the chest with a pair of scissors. They call her La Llorona (The Crying Woman), and—as legend has it—if she touches you, you instantly disappear. Freaky though it sounds, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe her ghostly finger is a portal to the ocean, the Louvre, or a Reykjavik hot spring.

On May 15, Gov. Susana Martinez issued a formal drought declaration for New Mexico. According to the National Weather Service, 2011 was the second driest year on record. The entire state experienced decreased moisture levels, and 90 percent of it suffered severe drought conditions.

It’s been over a year of residencies, sublets and couch crashes, and it’s time to get my own digs. I hunt tenaciously, determined to find a place rife with sunlight, privacy, built-ins and garden space, garnished with hardwood floors, cheap rent and a month-to-month lease.

The Big Test was upon us, and during the next three weeks of testing, my special education students felt like complete failures—due to the fact that they were complete failures. They cried. They screamed and threw chairs. They stared at text that may as well have been written in Swedish and conjured up an answer. Many of them bubbled in the same letter each time, or simply rewrote the question in the “extended response” boxes, painstakingly recopying words that held no meaning for them.

I sprawl away my Sunday on the front porch of my housesit in a whisper of a sundress, soaking up the vitamin D, while reading the New York Times. Spring at last; spring at last; thank God almighty, spring at last!!!

I felt no smug satisfaction when reading of a recent federal court case involving The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company. In March, the company pled guilty to charges that it had knowingly sold poisoned birdseed.

I rapped on a wall to make sure I wasn’t on the set of Little House on the Prairie.

I wasn’t. I’d just entered the world of Waldorf education.

In a shaky, hand-shot video from 2010, Nimish Vyas of the United States Geological Survey pans across a field in Vernon, Colo. Vyas focuses on a dirt mound and then zooms in on a pale spot atop the dry, tawny grass. The spot twitches, and he zooms closer.

On Feb. 27, the Santa Fe Public Schools Board of Education summoned its courage and did the right thing: It voted (narrowly, 3-2) to buy out the contract of Superintendent Bobbie Gutierrez.