The ocean visited us one morning during our first winter in Las Cruces, New Mexico. My step-daughter and I walked outside to retrieve the newspaper and were enveloped in a dripping mist redolent of seaweed and saltwater.

"It smells like Puget Sound!" exclaimed Molly, drawing in great lungs full of soft, pungent air, her words exhaling silvery wisps of mist. She was right: the damp air smelled salty, with a faint tang of crabs and tide-rows of algae drying in the sun, like the sea air of our old home near the Pacific Ocean.

Except that this air blanketed the parched Chihuahuan desert, 500 miles from the nearest sea.

Water is worthy of note here: deserts are by nature dry. Our part of the Chihuahuan desert, once an arid grassland, now dominated by creosote bush, mesquites, and other shrubs, boasts an annual average precipitation of less than ten inches.

That scanty moisture comes in two very different forms, each characteristic of its season. More than half of the year's rain comes from July through September, during our jokingly-titled "monsoon season," often in violent arroyo-flooding thunderstorms which can dump four inches in an hour. For several weeks, perhaps longer if enough rain falls, the Rio Grande, normally shrunk to a wading stream by irrigation and groundwater withdrawals, relives the reason for its name.

Then fro

m November to March comes winter, bringing gentle monthly tides from the faraway saltwater of the nearest ocean.

There is a distinct rhythm to these winter rains, a predictable pattern which over several days briefly transforms the sere desert air to something soft and dithering with mist. The first day, high, diaphanous cirrus clouds approach from the west, drawing a translucent shade of ice over the brilliant blue sky.

The next day, the cloud layer is thicker and lower - composed of liquid, not crystalline water - completely obscuring sun and sky. The air is perceptibly damp, and often smells foreign, like sea animals and tidal surges, evoking mornings on the ocean. That night is unusually warm, the desert insulated by the thick cloud blanket.

Before dawn the next morning the soft, whispering rain begins. It often continues through the day, varying between mist and drizzle.

Not much falls - a tenth of an inch or so - but that suffices. Once both soil and plants are moist, the smells of the distant ocean are gradually erased by those of our own fragrant desert, a distinct perfume dominated by the camphory smell of creosote bush.

The next day the front passes, taking with it the ocean: dawn brings a cloudless gold-and-turquoise sky. We are back in the pore-puckering, wrinkle-forming desert again.

For the next several weeks, perhaps a month, the dry, sunny days rule, until another visit from the ocean brings gentle, fragrant winter rain.