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There and Back Again!

Troy is Mari's sister's son, and he lives here in Arizona, too.  His is a more adventurous life, he having just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan to a quiet civilian job as a police medic on a helicopter.  

 There is something wrong with Troy:  he likes cold places, having spent time in Alaska doing what he does here, In Anchorage, and halfway up Mr. Denali.  

 Marriage and Other Less Dangerous Circumstances led to his short-term move to Flagstaff.  Flagstaff can be thought of as a kind of Bait and Switch Trap.  From the perspective of Perfectly Ordinary People like me, Flagstaff lures the unwary to its 7,000 foot altitude in summer, stunning the senses with pine odor and brisk mornings, and mountains all around, all the while dulling the sensibilities until winter, when any drop of moisture east of the Pacific Ocean eventually drifts over Northern Arizona and drops as snow on Flagstaff.  Were the snow just a bit farther north, it would fill the Grand Canyon to the rim, but it doesn't.  It lands on Flagstaff.  

 "Ahhh!", Troy said, because there is something wrong with him.

 But Troy is not all sleet and snow.  He is, also, a family man, and the tangled adventures of family suggested that, at least for now, that they should move back to Tucson.  And as too many of our friends know, I have a stout pickup and a 16-foot trailer, so Mari and I got up at 5:30 one fine Friday, we put the poinsettia out on the patio, and drove up to Flagstaff:  250 Miles north of us, not far south of the Grand Canyon, which is not filled to the brim with snow, as it ought to be.  The snow is in Flagstaff.  

 At about the time we drove past Sedona, off to our left, where John McCain ought to be in cranky retirement, but who is in Washington D. C., instead, in cranky retirement, protecting us from our own United Nations Ambassador.  Senator McCain was just demonstrating how completely Alaskan Women Who Would be Queen can get under your skin, so he was just lashing out, trying to demonstrate that no other man knows anything about women, either; especially if that other man is the President who said he thought another women would be a fine Secretary of State.  As I had intended to say about the tme we drove past Sedona, at the beginning of this paragraph, we encountered snow.  The farther we drove, the more snow we saw.  

 "This must be the place!", Mari and Brigham Young said, for different reasons and in separate times and places.  

 We stuffed our trailer with things of awkward size and shape, and another trailer that Troy had rented, with boxes and things of negotiable size and shape, and on Saturday morning, after listening to weather reports until we came to the only conclusion some of us would accept, shifted into towing mode and four-wheel drive, and pointed our vehicles downhill, toward Sedona off the right, and Phoenix straight ahead, and Tucson beyond.   
It was a piece of cake:  all the way to Sedona off to our right it was a piece of frozen, slushy, slippery cake.  But by mid-afternoon, we were in Tucson at Troy and Susan's new house, not a snowflake in sight. The swimming pool, out back, had not even iced over, so Susan's Yorkshire took a flying shot at the moon, and landed in the pool, as happy as a Yorkshireman, or Yorkshirefemale, can be.  

 Mari and I drove across town, up into the driveway, dis-alarming ourselves into the house, and poured ourselves a couple of good, cold, stiff drinks, and said it was a fine adventure. 

 It was a Hobbit adventure.

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