Friends Again

We arrived back from a week in the Colorado Rockies to two more days well into the triple digits, a real blow after a chilly week which included three days of snow. But yesterday there was clearly something changing with the weather. The sky looked like a meteorologist's cloud sampler. During our morning walk the dawn lit up the pebble paver clouds a bright coral against a robin's egg blue sky. By late morning there was a smorgasbord sky.
Some clouds appeared to have be scraped onto a brilliant blue canvas with a palette knife. Odd smeared lenticular clouds pocked the sky, while others could have prompted 911 calls about UFO's. Low strings of cumulus swept the far horizons.



By 9 PM when we went to bed it was 80 degrees and falling fast. We opened the house, turned off the A/C, and slept soundly, soothed by the fresh breeze and night sounds. Out walking before sunup, the temperatures were in the low 60s and it was blissfully cool. After 9 AM and the house is still open, though that will change soon as we'll hit 90 today, a near normal temperature for this time of the year. October is our big cool down month, dropping a good 10 degrees over the month.

We're getting our second "spring" as the plants rebound from the hard work of surviving a desert summer. Our Mexican sage is in full bloom and the chuparosa is starting to show its hot orange tubular flowers that will sustain our hummingbirds all winter. The Gambel's quail, parental duties over, have returned to their gender segregated coveys; I had a large group of males wander through the backyard yesterday on their eternal quest for food. We saw a straggler turkey vulture atop a telephone pole on our walk out into the desert yesterday morning, an unusual sight around here as they are almost always on the wing. He reluctantly took off, heading south, as we walked under him, possibly disturbing a brief migratory rest.

Fall changes everything for desert dwellers. For we humans, the great summer "hibernation" in the A/C is mostly over. We can emerge and rejoin our outdoor lives for the next eight months and remember exactly why it is that we continue to live here.

The Annual Great Escape

After a hot May we've had a rare cool June to date. Cool being a relative term as it has been well into the 90's just about every day -- still a great relief from the triple digits that are our June normal. We are forcast to be approaching 110 this time next week, as excessively hot as we've been deliciously moderate through mid-June. It appears we are escaping just in time.

There is a strategy to desert life for most of us. Some folks just plain LOVE the heat and stay here, uncomplainingly, year round. Then you have your snow birds, arriving in the fall from somewhere up north about the time they'd need to turn on their furnace, reveling in sending Christmas cards with photos of them in shorts and t-shirts on the golf course to their pals stuck in the deep freeze, packing up and heading home the first time it approaches 85 degrees. And then there are those of us who simply do our best to get a serious break from the heat come late June, that interminable period after the serious heat sets in with months since the last rain and before the relief of the monsoon arrives.

We head to Colorado where we have a place up at 8600 feet in the Rockies. It's family land on my husband's side, and up until seven years ago there was a cabin he'd helped his Dad build as a teenager forty years before. The Hayman fire took the cabin the first year we were together. I never got to see it, but it was clear how much the place meant to him. A few years later he took me on a Colorado road trip, the last stop being his five acres adjacent to Pike National Forest. The fire spared most of his trees -- ponderosas, spruce, Douglas firs, quaking aspens -- and the views were still spectacular. I could see he needed to be able to keep this, his favorite place on earth, active in his life. We bought a 33 foot Airstream and parked it permanently where the cabin had stood up against a wall of red decomposing granite. A 12x24 foot deck along side gives us wonderful outdoor living space. We have several choice spots to hang our hammock and read. Or nap. Thank goodness the fire didn't take the outhouse.



My husband's old Peace Corps pal comes every year from Cleveland to house and dog sit for us while we eek out the better part of three weeks in that cooler mountain pine-scented air. We bird watch different birds, keep our eyes peeled for deer and elk, do a little fishing in the stocked lake down the hill, try to identify the rampant wildflowers, and hike the surrounding wilderness. The stars are so bright and seem so low that you almost feel you need to duck your head on those middle of the night runs to the outhouse. It's a glorious time and a cool respite from the cruelest heat of the desert.

If I can "borrow" some WiFi somewhere (no Internet connection, no TV, no phone, cell or otherwise) I'll next post from the middle of nowhere, but somewhere wonderful, during our Colorado summer sojourn.

It's a Dry Heat...So Use It

There’s something so wonderfully elemental and sensible about drying laundry in the fresh air of the out of doors. Here in the desert with its bountiful sunshine and low humidity, hanging wash outside is not only intuitive, but a pleasant and satisfying task which falls somewhere between a chore and an art form on the housework continuum. For many it is reminiscent of a time when life was simpler, if only made so by the passage of time itself.

Stuffing wet laundry into a machine that is noisy, heat producing, and a squanderer of a non-renewable energy source may be quick and easy, but it hijacks an opportunity to be One with Nature in a delightfully parsimonious and practical way: peeling all those sodden pounds of damp cloth off the inside of the washing machine basket, the outside layers dimpled from the spin cycle’s effort to strain them through the tub’s drain holes; plopping them in a laundry basket and ferrying them outside to endless blue skies and searing sunlight; feeling them instantly begin to give up moisture to the bone dry air.

The clean scent of the laundry soap mingles with the sharp smell of the desert vegetation and dry gravelly soils. My skin appreciates the slight rise in humidity in the immediate vicinity as I begin hanging the laundry. It gets me outdoors for a brief time in a climate that can be a challenge in co-existence during the daylight hours for much of the year.

For many of us, our home owner associations, in their infinite wisdom, have prohibited the traditional laundry line. In this day and age to discourage the almost effortless accomplishment of an unavoidable chore through the use of a limitless and non-polluting energy source can only be regarded as a patent crime against nature. The horror of being exposed to our neighbors’ sheets and boxer shorts is deemed a hideous affront to our sensibilities, instead of some lively and temporary yard art billowing and snapping in the desert winds.

Not to be deterred, I visited our handy hardware store and picked up a collapsible wooden drying rack. Occupying a space of about three square feet of the back porch when in use and extending to chest level, I can strategically arrange a full washer of laundry on this contraption, enjoying the accomplishment of a simple challenge well met. In little more time than it takes to cram my laundry into the gaping maw of my drier, the damp laundry is efficiently hung on the rack’s dozen or so rungs. Before the last piece is draped, the first is showing the effects of our miniscule humidity, already feeling slightly dry to the touch. Depending on the contents of the load – heavy towels and jeans obviously are slower to relinquish all their moisture than pillow cases and unmentionables – the abundant breeze driven hot air does its job with amazing efficiency, quietly taking advantage of a free and inexhaustible energy source.

Then there’s the bonus of the finished product. Aside from blowing a cosmic raspberry at my HOA, I love the feel and smell of laundry dried outside. Removing the items from the rack, they have an agreeable stiffness, a gentle rigidity. Towels have a pleasurable roughness when first put to use after a shower, doing their job with astonishing effectiveness, and stimulating the skin in the bargain. Cloth napkins and dish towels dry to a pleasant smoothness and are not only satisfying to fold and store, but when retrieved from their drawers are a reminder of having gotten a nice assist from Mother Nature. Perhaps the greatest gratification comes from bed sheets hung outside, smelling of sunshine and dry sage and childhood, their solid smoothness a pleasure to slide into at night. Who could help but sleep better in sheets cloistering remnants of sunbeams shot across 93 million miles of our solar system, convincingly coloring dreams with the certainty of our oneness with the universe?