Summer, Pow!
Summer doesn’t slowly sneak up on you in the Sonoran desert. It lands on you, like something falling from the sky, leaving Spring a sweet, cool, memory.
This mention of a sweet cool memory might, wrongly, suggest that Spring is cool, following some eastern model, but that would be misleading. Spring is often quite warm, with temperatures in the mid-eighties, but the heat is moderated by a tinge of fresh dampness in the air, so that although your body feels the sun’s radiation your face as you ride feels cool.
If the road you’re on dips down into a dry wash the air there smells faintly wet, as if you were riding through the ghost of a river.
Today Summer arrived. The air was dry, the last moisture burned out of it. Outside my study window it was 96 in the shade and for the first time this year we closed the house in the morning to save last night’s cool down-slope breezes off the Catalinas.
We did not have to turn on the air conditioner, but that will come. The house is open now and the cats are prowling from screen to screen sniffing out the arrival of our local herd of javalinas.
The desert is good.
