Summertime And The Living Is Hot

There is nothing as sweet as the sound of rain on the roof after 80 consecutive days of dry, summer, desert heat.  Looking out of my window in the middle of the night, I dub the welcoming drops as “Angel Sweat,” as the large rocks in my yard begin to glisten in the light of the full moon. Monsoon Season has begun in Arizona. Arroyos will fill with water, and a few fools, who ignore the warnings, will have to be rescued or drown in the desert. 

Visitors to my neck of the woods invariably ask, “Doesn’t it get hot here in the summer?” I am so tempted to respond, “Of course it gets hot. It’s the desert stupid,” but I don’t.  Instead I say, “Yes, it’s unbearable. I think you should move to Florida.” I suffer from the same malady that many people do after moving here. We want to pull up the drawbridge and keep the beautiful mountains and desert all to ourselves. Winter in Arizona is a delicious season, but summer is close behind, and it arrives every year without fail. I call it my “Blizzard Season,” because I know when to venture out and when to hunker down, but I don’t have to shovel it. 

I, for one, enjoy summer in the desert. The evenings cool down, and I don’t mind getting up before 5 a.m. in order to hike my 2 miles in the mountains. By 7:30 it is quite hot, but I have enjoyed the birds, the deer, lizards and other creatures that venture out early in the morning. I have also quaffed a bottle of water. One day, after the rainfall, I found a puddle in the middle of a sandy path. In it, tiny tadpoles were paddling about. Yes, the desert is a wondrous and extremely weird place. By 1 p.m. I have already been up for 8 hours and find that a short siesta is a most civilized activity. 

After it rains, the air is redolent with the smell of the creosote bush, a smell that no one can describe. Whenever you ask old-timers about creosote, the answer is: “They put it on railroad ties.” I assume they are talking about something extracted from the bushes---not the bushes themselves, because a bunch of bushes on the tracks would probably slow down our already sluggish trains. I have never put my head on a railroad track to smell the creosote. The woodsy smell is pungent, but not worth losing my head over. So, rain brings out the “heavenly essence of the desert.” Forgot to mention that the Spanish word for creosote is hediondilla, which means “little stinker.” I just saw a streak of lightening over the mountains. Can the rain be far behind? 

Esther Blumenfeld (A desert rat and proud of it)