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At 105 degrees in the shade — By Victoria Paulsen Email: words4fun at gmail dot com (above email address formatted to reduce spam) April 10, 2008 How hot is it? Hot enough to debate whether or not to make a trip to Mom's. Mom's is our porta potty. We're renting it while building our house, from Mom, a big burly guy with a deep voice, who comes every Friday morning to "service" it. I don't want to think what that entails, but when he leaves, the little room drips with clean water and has a fresh, clean smell. All day Friday, it's almost a pleasure to use it. In winter, this feeling lasts till Thursday; however, cooked in summer heat, it's gone in a day. Please don't visit on Tuesday in summer.The smell isn't the only problem in summer. The little blue house bakes in the heat, cooking the black plastic seat enough to almost raise blisters on your bum. As much as I am embarrassed by Mom's, in my heart I have a soft spot for it. After years of cleaning multiple bathrooms, it's nice not to have to flush, or plunge, or clean. In springtime, when the weather was mild, I wrote a haiku for Mom's. I assume everyone understands about having to get up in the middle of the night for this sort of thing — Unexpected joy — multitudinous stars on midnight trips to Mom's. I know now that not all bright objects are Venus; two of the best are planets Jupiter and Saturn. Orion, often the only visible constellation besides the Big Dipper in cities, has so much competition in the Milky Way that it is almost ordinary. Surely ancient astronomers, living in deserts, took long hot naps each afternoon so they could enjoy cool nights deciphering the innumerable secrets of the heavens. UPDATE, Saturday: Today Thrim finished installing in the garage a state-of-the-art toilet with a powerful whoosh of a flush! Now people can visit even on Tuesdays. No more Mom's. Years ago, when I was only about 10, my mother took my sister and me to visit her friend AlvaLois who lived in the desert. What a shock for Sally and me! Both of us still recall a barren landscape, rocky hills, a path leading up to something like a cave (but it was probably a house) on the side of a mountain and a large heavy woman with fly-away straw hair coming out to greet us. Sally and I both stared, even though at 10 and 9 we knew better. How did our elegant, professional singer mother know AlvaLois, living like a hermit hours from civilization? Sally thinks that AlvaLois had been a singer, too, and there may have been a Mister AlvaLois. She showed us bottles of glass that had been buried in the desert sand for a year, taking on an amber hue that worried me. It seemed the desert was full of evil magic if it could change something as permanent as glass. I was afraid, thinking that AlvaLois must have once been civilized, like clear glass. Buried in the desert sand, she had tanned darker than the glass, with hair a mess of dry twigs. I longed for our grassy lawn and shady trees. The desert was alien, harsh, scary. I wanted out! Sally felt the same. I am now AlvaLois, baking in the desert, flyaway hair, building a house with my own Mister AlvaLois. Dry stiff-standing frizz — I'm dealing with desert hair. Laugh at it! I do! In life you learn that the better you know something or someone, the better you love them, and so it has been for me and the desert. My son, his wife, and my two-year old grandson moved here two years ago. Almost every Friday, I drove an hour and forty-five minutes to pluck Jon from daycare and play with him all afternoon. Gradually, the tall pines of our mountain home seemed to knot a web around me, blocking the views until I was suffocating. My eyes longed for vistas. I found that on Fridays, the farther away I got from those encapsulating hills, the more freely, more deeply I breathed and taller I stood. Now, to my delight, Jon and his little sister visit almost every day to play with me. Tracks in desert sand — Beetles, lizards, jackrabbits, And our five-toed feet. One January in Boulder, Colorado, there were a few weeks when the temperature stayed below zero night and day. We gave up reading the weather reports, knowing what they would say. There came a day, however, when the Denver Post's banner headline yelled, "It's No Heatwave, but Zero is in Sight!" I don't know how long our desert daytime temperature has been above 100, but I'm pretty sure it's at least three weeks. It may be three months before there's a reason to shout, "It's No Coldwave, but 90 is in Sight!" At least it drops to 70 at night, and with a fan going, that's not bad. Oh, air conditioning? Not in our old fifth-wheel rv. The equipment we have tries hard to bring coolness to us, but it struggles, helpless against cosmic heat/sunlight slashing straight through ozone-free blue sky onto our roof and reflecting from the sand onto skimipily insulated walls. Out here, atoms dance faster because of their heat. People move slower for the same reason. Flies don't care if it's hot or not, as long as there is something to pique their curiosity. I amaze myself by not having complained to anyone yet. It's life, I tell myself, accepting the reality of desert living. Empty? Bleached and dry? Relentless wind? Baking heat? Or my laughing place! The reward comes every morning and every evening when I open the door of the rv and walk straight out into the desert, going a round trip of about three miles without meeting a single other person. I am the only one who sees each promising sunrise and each brilliant sunset. One memorable night, the sun was setting in the west just as a full moon rose in the east. My joy was complete. AlvaLois would have understood this feeling. The desert's appeal is mysterious, unfathomable, but when it happens, and you become like old ambered glass, one with hot sand and a sky full of stars, life quiets down and peace is a natural state of mind. About the author: I'm retired, living in the desert, surviving building a house with my husband. This story was written last year before we had anything but a small rv. I hauled water from the well, and we sweated day and night. I love it here! | | | |
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