Rain

We had a beautiful rain on Sunday. The day was smudgy and hazy, with the white sky we sometimes get when there are nearby wildfires. (There weren't any - none closer than New Mexico.) At 5 o'clock, when I drove out to pick up a pizza for dinner, the cars had their headlights on. After dinner the lamp made a pool of yellow light and we sat reading by it. For half an hour or more we heard long rolls of thunder. The air remained humid, the breeze began to stir, we took the garbage back in. I went outside once or twice and could smell the rain up in the clouds. Finally I looked up from A School for Scandal to see the first big drops falling on the porch. Then it rained and rained and rained. We paid for it the next day, the 4th, when it was humid and sticky, but it was fun while it lasted.

If you ever want to know exactly how dry it is in Las Vegas, I can tell you. When it rains here, they put it on the news. And the news goes crazy. Flooding! Don't go in the washes! Don't drive through running water! Stay indoors because lightning can get you 10 miles away! Look, a palm tree got blown over! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

I didn't listen to the news. My son and I went out on the porch (some people have sun porches -- we have a rain porch) and watched the drops dance in the street.

I am still on my Free Stuff on Kindle binge. I have overdosed on Victorian fiction, which means I am taking every act and thought very seriously and worthy of a thousand other acts and thoughts. By the way, A School for Scandal would make an excellent YA novel. So would William Makepeace Thackery's fairy-tale The Rose and the Ring. I can't believe no one's ripped it off yet.

Happy New Year

Yesterday morning it rained. It was the best kind of rain: unexpected, creeping up over us in the middle of the night and turning the morning soft and gray. Puddles on the porch and the smell of rain in the air. Headlights on cars as I drove in to work. Thick clouds with dramatic shafts of light breaking through over the valley. I delighted in it all the more because not one single mention was made on the weather of the possibility of rain. It was like someone saying, miracles still happen.
It was like the beginning of fall, too. This is a great time of year in the desert, where we look at seasons differently. We don't say "summer is over." We say, "the heat is over." Now we begin to emerge and think of hikes and trips and 5k runs and Shakespeare in the Park and planting vegetables and re-doing the garden.
The other great thing about this time of year is that I work at a Jewish-sponsored school so I get a bunch of holidays, all in a row. It throws my routine way off, but I look forward to it. I'm finally getting my hair cut and I have a bunch of slow-cooker recipes I want to try and there'll be lots of time for writing. So if I'm not around for awhile, that's what I'm doing. See you in October.

In Which the Title of this Blog Becomes True

7/19/10 7:20 AM PDT Temp: 96 F
I know one thing: there must always be iced tea in the refrigerator. When there is an interruption in the iced-tea cycle (as occured over the weekend, when it was discovered that my husband bought a new bag of sugar but didn't bring it home from the store), hoarding breaks out.
Heatwave eating tips: good meals -- pasta salad, potato salad, hummus; best meal - leftover birthday cake.
Ordinary car air conditioners can't deal with this. They blow cold air on your arms while crystal drops of sweat roll down your temples. Ordinary home a/c blows and blows all night and makes sleep just barely possible. When I turn on the shower I have to let the water run to cool off. At the outdoor pools children swim in hot water.
Through it all clouds form and come and go, first white, then gray, but not yet stormy and black. Something is lacking. It could be as prosaic as moisture in the upper atmosphere, but I prefer to think of it as energy or will, something personal that makes the clouds stir and show their hands, to prove that they are capable of producing rain but won't do it just to please you.
Maybe next week. It will happen (won't it?) and then for each person in Las Vegas the rain will be personal and different: huge grasshopper drops leaping off the back patio; jolts of thunder and lightning that bring shoppers out of Petsmart to view the parking lot, awash; drops that fall so slowly you can count each one as it fades into the sidewalk.
Then the bonus of August nights: rattling storms in the mountains; the hope inspired by the weather service's beep-beep-beep; the backyard in the morning wet and smelling, for once, like a garden should.