SmokeSound

It is raining hard enough to put out the fires of Hell. It will not put out the fires of Hell because then there would be no desert here. But we have been watching a small frog trying to climb our fence because he (or she) is convinced that there shall soon be forty days and forty nights of rain, followed by an Ark with things that eat frogs. Our backyard is sloped rather markedly. The former owner of the house made stone-lined causeways where the water was going to run, anyway, and they not only filled:  they disappeared! I painted a patio-table base, designed to hold a ceramic pot to be covered with a glass top, and the pot is half-full of water. The Sonoran Desert, not to be trifled with when the sun is shining, is one of the wettest deserts on the continent, usually getting from 3 to 16 inches of rain a year, and this is one of the years when nature is catching up. We can see the intersection of El Camino de Oeste and . . .  Whoops! A bolt of lightning ju...

I wake up fairly early, most mornings; usually before Mari, and begin to think about coffee and a couple of newspapers.  To be more honest, I begin to think about coffee and one newspaper:  the New York Times.  We also get the Tucson Daily Star, which does not have any news in it.  It does have a notice, and a sports report.  The notice is that the board responsible for creating a downtown hasn't, and the sports report is that the Arizona Wildcats have a new football coach.  Both items are reprints of articles first written right after Cochise last rode through town. Because I do not want to wake Mari, I walk quietly, close doors, try to avoid bright lights, and other actions that might wake her.  Annie, however--our cat who, sofar as we knew for years, was incapable of making a noise louder than a very polite,  "Meow", follows me around, encouraging me in a very loud and irritating, "Mrreoww" . to give her a little canned food.  We began t...

That is where we live:  on North Cerritos.  The little hills. I drove west on The Highway of the Hill, to see where the Trail End was, at the end of the highway, and on the way back, stopped at a place where I could see the little hill where our house nestles. I love the colors of the Sonoran desert, which is not a sand desert--something like a Sahara--but a gravel desert filled with plants.  And critters.  Creosote bushes, or Greasewood, if you will.  Cacti.  Ocotillo.  Saguaros, although not so many as up on The Hill, looking south.  An occasional coyote:  Creator of all of us.  Javalinas.  Bobcats.  An occasional ill-tempered rattlesnake.  Palo Verdes:  Green Stick trees.  Owls.  Mesquite trees, sending their roots down almost forever to find water, sometimes at a water pipe or a septic tank.  It is a green place. And hot, of course.  Usually around a hundred degrees, Fahrenheit, in the su...

Mitt Romney has business experience, but he needs international political experience, so to is on a most convenient trip.  Part of his experience was as the organizer of the 2002 Salt Lake City games, so Mitt is visiting London, just now entering the 2012 summer Olympics games. Mitt sniffed that there were "disconcerting" signs in the days before the games.  You know, not enough people, a supposed strike, and so on.  Maybe it would come together, he said. The Prime Minister of Great Britain, who has some experience of his own, said of Mitt's comments:   "We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course, it's easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere." "Many a man," another Englishman (William Shakespeare) once said, "hath more hair than wit." Mitt hath more money than wit, too.

With every bit of breaking news about NCAA sanctions against the Penn State football program, it becomes evident that football is a lot more important than the young boys who were raped by a football coach.  Joe Paterno's fault was that, when the facts became known, he did not rise above the level of football to deal with it.  He, and several administrators, kept it "in house" in order not to tarnish "the program".  And, at Penn State, as at lots of other universities, there was no level above the football program.  It was the most important thing. One can sympathize with the students who play football at Penn State, insofar as they did not rape those kids:  Jerry Sandusky did.  But playing at Penn State gave those students--insofar as they were students, and not just let's-pretend students, picking up credits for swimming and illiterate papers--a pretty good shot at professional football careers.  Temporarily crippling the football program, which i...

Do you really think we should have to worry about being gunned down in a movie theater?  Do you think we would be safer if lots of people in a movie theater carried guns?  Should movie theaters be required to have concrete walls so that the Gunfight at the Rialto Corral could contain the ricocheting bullets, or would it be better if they went on into the lobby or the street?  How do you feel about machine guns?  Or people with any kind of a gun in a bar, or in church?   Our Supreme Court, in 2008, ruled that you don't have to serve in a State Militia to own a gun, and that you can use it for lawful purposes.  Furthermore, State and Federal governments have a right to restrict firearm use. One of our former neighbors in Tucson used to sit on his porch and shoot a small caliber rifle at pigeons out over our property.  "No problem!", he said.  "The pellets will not carry up to those houses on the hill, over there."  They did carry up over ...

It is just one life-threatening event after the next. We almost drowned on I-10 on our way into town. Getting crispy is an ordinary, daily danger. But in Yuma, Arizona, Billy Mason almost got killed by a cactus.  It fell on him.  He was working on a leaky water main when somebody yelled, "Watch out!", and the next thing he knew a ton of saguaro cactus was lying on him. Billy can handle the iron rod running from his hip to his knee, and the extra hardware installed in his back, but the cactus spines are still working their way through Billy.  Slowly. A saguaro cactus on the ground is something like a giant crocodile with spines.  It is impossible to grip, and it weighs more than an elephant. Billy is looking for work as a weather vane.  

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Shakespeare had Puck say that, in A Midsummer Nights Dream.  He might have been anticipating Michele Bachmann, but he wasn't. Our Belle, Michele, is one of those people who is convinced that there are plots and conspiracies everywhere.  I read, yesterday, that people of altruistic impulse, have a little more gray matter at a specific place in their brains that most people.  I fully expect that someday a researcher will discover that the Joseph McCarthy, Michele Bachmann, and a generous number of Tea Baggers will be discovered to have larger than average black holes in their brains.  Or something like that. I have no doubt that exaggerated suspicions of others once served a useful purpose in our history.  People who were too trusting of strangers occasionally ended up with lumps on their heads, or empty pockets, or dead.  Surely some of the cause for that had to do with how our brains worked.  Conversely, a ce...

One of the most interesting drives in New Mexico is down I-25, following the Rio Grande as it meanders south and eventually east, to form a thin border between the U.S. and Mexico.  The River is not interested in becoming a border.  It is, rather, a contest with sand and the sun, siphoning water from mountains north, daring the desert to ignore it, or to swallow it whole. The Rio Grande nurtures a ribbon of green life; a fragile ribbon, never more than a few steps from dust. Again, Mari and I stopped at a familiar rest area, mostly just to see whether we could walk, and if we could, to walk to the restrooms.  I have never seen a rattlesnake there, but the sign is better than coffee as a way to wake up. Then, half a day later, other water--"Monsoon" water:  almost the only water available to the Sonoran Desert--thundered down with a fury the Rio Grande cannot dream of, obliterating nearly everything from sight, including the highway, the shoulders of the ro...

There are times  when loudmouthed, arrogant people  get you down. All you have to do  is wait for them to self-destruct. It never fails. (Anon.)

This is a picture of Conrad mowing a lawn for the last time.  When he finishes, he will drive the lawn tractor to a neighbor, who is still serving an indeterminate suburban sentence.  Conrad, meanwhile, will move to Tucson without a lawn mower or snow blower to his name. It might have been fun to keep the little green tractor, but one trip across the property would have prickled the delicate little lawn tires with sticky things resembling bayonets.  Better to walk away, free! Conrad is loading the caliche buster into the trailer.  If you want to come and visit Conrad in Tucson, be prepared to spend a couple of hours at the top end of a caliche buster. But it is a dry heat-stroke!

Ten years ago, we moved from Tucson to Minneapolis, in midsummer, and now we are planning to move back to the (Dry) Water at the Foot of the Black Hill.  Ten years ago, it was 99 degrees when we came into  town.  Today it will be equally hot.  Here.  It is warm in Tucson, too, of course, but as we are wont to say, here, "This isn't so bad:  it is a sweat-filled, soggy, underwater-humid heat."  And it isn't so bad:  it is Hell with humidity! Ten years ago, with a different, but similar pickup, I had built a rack under the topper to hold Mari's African Violets.  We knew that, without protection, the plants would be dead before we got to Highway I-10, so I piped air from the cab of the truck back to the Violets, and to our cats, who got first shot at the air vent. I am slow, but not unteachable, so after we had been here for half a decade, I threw away that African Violet rack:  "Not doing that, again!", I said to myself.  I did no...

                   Fiddler Jones   T HE EARTH  keeps some vibration going   There in your heart, and that is you.   And if the people find you can fiddle,   Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.   What do you see, a harvest of clover?           Or a meadow to walk through to the river?   The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands   For beeves hereafter ready for market;   Or else you hear the rustle of skirts   Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.    To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust   Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;   They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy   Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”   How could I till my forty acres    Not to speak of getting more,   With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos   Stirred in my brain by crows and robins   And the creak of a win...

About forty years ago, after my children were fascinated by "The Hobbit", I became interested in "The Lord of the Rings Trilogy".  In the course of excavating and resorting books, I have passed a number of related materials in the night.  It has been a bit like asking, "Who was that masked man, anyway?"  But that line was from The Lone Ranger, and I do not recall any masked men in the Lord of the Rings. But I dither!  The point is this:  we are having a resurgence of comic book characters, showing up now in movies.  Heroes.  Good, sometimes lonely heroes.  Good against Evil.  The Lord of the Rings has a Spider, but no Spiderman.  It has flying Ringwraiths, but no Superman.  It does have Gandalf, in white, and Sauron, in black.  It has good, simple, Hobbits, in Western Lands, and tall, epitomes of human virtue; something like cowboys without cows; taciturn, strong, a race of Anglo-Saxons, if you ever imagined one! Good aga...