Hootin’ Anni’s

This week’s prompt is “A Summer Memory”

- – -

One summer memory, huh?

Okay. This will be a bit different I bet. It’s not gonna be about a trip, or what I did during the summer when I was a kid and making my own money babysitting, summer camp, or anything like that. It’s gonna be about the first summer Bud and I lived in the Arizona desert; our ‘maiden’ summer there, after retiring.

We relocated in Tucson in late January to get acclimated to the weather before the summer months. Our initial summer, June wasn’t bad. In fact we really enjoyed it. We loved the heat as compared to the long winters in Colorado [in fact when we left to follow the moving van to Arizona --it had snowed!!! And we drove south through snow and ice until we were over Raton Pass going into New Mexico]. We loved the blue sky. We loved the Catalina Mountain Range, we loved going down to Old Mexico, Tombstone, the zoo, the wildlife desert museum, the film studios, the wildflowers….experiencing the landscaping of our yard in the infamous desert style -xeriscape. We put in a pond with a fountain…we built a deck. We built a bridge across our dry ‘gulch’ flower bed. We fell in love with the Palo Verde Trees. The way our roses bloomed so profusely, the two gigantic Saguaro cacti that had arms in our own back yard. You name it we loved the whole concept of no work scheduled and the dry heat!

Our home was cooled with an evaporative cooler system. All was lovely.

Until the Monsoon Season began in late July!!! There isn’t such a thing as dry heat then! Believe you, me!! It’s deathly hot –normally 100 and above. And humidity daily anywhere from 70% to 100%!! We lasted two weeks back then with a swamp cooler ['nother name for an evaporative cooler]. You see, when it’s that hot and that humid, the swamp cooler just doesn’t do diddly squat in cooling! All it does at that part of the summer is throw off MORE humidity, and doesn’t cool the interior enough to make it less than miserable. It’s great when the desert has the dry heat…but during the rainy season [from anywhere beginning late June through about September at the latest!].

Two weeks of that miserable cooling system and I had the cooling truck and workers out at our home installing a whole new unit…called air conditioning!!

Oh ya, and that summer first we resided there, we learned to park our car in the shade of a tree —no matter HOW FAR we had to walk in the heat to get into the malls/stores/theaters!!! Why, if you didn’t leave a window open while you were in the store for 1/2 hour or more…if you left your car all closed up….windows break out from combustion of the heat collected inside!!

After the air conditioning unit was installed and the machine cooled the house down to a comfortable 70 degrees, I tolerated the Monsoon Seasons okay for nearly 12 years. Until one day about mid-July I went out just after sunrise and the sky was white hot, and the temp was in the 90′s already…I got home from my walk in the desert and said to Bud…”let’s go where there is water and sea breezes”!!! At first he thought I was talking ‘vacation’….well, no — permanently my dear sweet cheeks. Permanently.