Serious heat is here

New painting by Layla (Flora Edwards)The Anthropologist and the Indigena
posted by Layla on FaceBook last week

Friday  June 7th mid afternoon  3:02 pm

Serious heat is here

Serious heat is here. Climbing above 100 degrees is one thing. Climbing above 105 degrees is something else. Yesterday 106, today 109. 

It’s an entirely different world, a different head. The whole experience of life changes. It’s a season unto itself, the season of serious heat. It’s also what causes the monsoons to arrive next month. 

I don’t remember the explanation now, but there has to be enuf days of serious heat in a row for the monsoons to move from where they gather up in Colorado, to come to Tucson.

And  I saw the first tiny white cloud appear in our flawless blue sky today. It came from over the mountains in the northeast. The same direction the monsoons come from.

So what I saw is the start of it. For next 3 weeks a tiny white cloud will appear in the flawless blue sky floating in from the northeast. 

It appears at around 10 am and by this time 3 pm,  one tiny white cloud following another for hours,  have all merged into a bigger cloud, still off to the east (I have to crane my head eastward from my desk to see it). 

It has some mass now and may even be packing moisture. Rest of the whole huge sky is still flawless blue. 

The same thing will play out each day for next 3 weeks, until the actual conditions for the monsoon are met. Great heat day after day plus some moisture in air or on ground at dawn. Then voilà the monsoons come to Tucson.

The official date is always July 4^th but sometimes they come a few days earlier and sometimes a few days late.

Two things happen when serious heat arrives (when the afternoons climb higher than 105) that first tiny white cloud arrives, plus we start waiting for the monsoon. Our deliverance.  

It does not feel natural to have such great afternoon heat. You know in your heart of hearts things are not meant to be this way.

Which is why the explanation, that it is this intense heat which brings the monsoon, makes so much sense to me,

We have to have the monsoons, and we have to have whatever brings them to Tucson.

Hahaha what we are having now is what brings them to Tucson.

It’s ok as long as there is zero humidity which we are also having. It is bearable to be in the house with both coolers going.

Evaporative coolers are only effective when there is zero humidity.

Which is why, even tho we all long for monsoon season, except for the 2 hours when the monsoon takes place each day (from 4 pm to 6 pm) life is hell. 

The heat is never stratospheric once monsoon season begins (it is just in the high nineties) but of course there is huge humidity all day and all night. 

Coolers are ineffective when there is humidity, that is when you wish you had air conditioning too, which is impervious to humidity.

There just is no such thing as being comfortable ever during the 6 weeks of the monsoon season. But the upside of course, is all the rain makes everything grow again. 
And there is the joy of watching the desert itself, the earth and everything which grows on it, drink and bathe in the rain every day. Our world actually turns lush.

And our plant world becomes happy.

That is the real joy of monsoon season.

Watching life return to the desert, watching it bloom.

I am beginning to see positives in this 3 week period before it arrives when my mind is blitzed. 

What I mean is, there is something oddly pleasant about having a mind be blitzed. The heat completely relaxes you and totally shuts off your mind. Activity is out of the question. You flop on the bed and watch shows you never watched before. You are a happy idiot, easy to please.

O a breeze has started! One of our June breezes has started. Shaking the treetops. That’s oddly reassuring too. Wind means motion, it means the air is in motion. And when you are looking out at a world which is 108 degrees out there, you need to see some evidence of motion, you need to see motion itself, to be reassured life is still going on.

LOL the heat beat everything but it can’t beat the wind. The great heat can stop everything, bring everything to standstill, except the wind. The wind follows its own laws and blows when it wants to. 

Maybe that is why it is so reassuring to see it blow the tree tops out my open window.  I appreciate there is a sign that the heat is not supreme.  Giggle giggle of course it is blowing the hot air from outside all over me. But so what!  I am just so glad to see something in motion.  I want to remember the world is still alive.

Post script 4 hours later at 7:30 pm

I made it thru the afternoon. It is just after sunset now. The insane heat is byebye, it leaves with the sun. The yard is in shadow which is so restful after long afternoon of too bright and too hot.

It makes it look cool, that the sky has started to darken and yard is in deep shadow.