"A salsa fest!", Mari said. "There is a salsa fest in Safford!"
Safford is just a couple of hundred miles east of Tucson. "Perfect," Mari said. "Just the kind of thing we had in mind, getting the Casita!"

We two--you may know that there are three of us now, but Michael offered at the last minute to take care of Cooper; our Min-Pin/Chihuahua, and he is no great fan of salsa, anyway--so the two of us drove to Safford.

Safford is not far away from Tucson, but once in Safford, it is evident that everything is quite a ways away from there. It is a County Seat town with incredibly wide streets and a population of ten thousand people, and they have a Salsa Fest. If you live in Graham County, you go to Safford for things, or you go a long ways.


In town, during the Salsa Fest, samples of everybody's famous salsa was being cooked under tents, being
tasted by heat-seeking tourists, and wolfed down by competitive masochists.

The Beer Garden was a Beer Tent on a Beer Lawn, but we remembered that we had an ice chest with us, at the campground, so we retreated under the watchful eye of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope to our home away from an adequate shower, hoping that Tank might stop by, but Tank remembered how far it was to the site next door, so we just toasted him.
A nomadic tribe of boy scouts, or future motor home owners, set up camp across the way, behaving much better than any of us can remember our own children having done. When I was a boy scout, the tents did not look like that: they looked like khaki-colored, armored canvas bunkers, and they weighed more than Tank. Not those tanks: Tank next door.

Sixty at night, and ninety during the day. The ice chest hovered just above 32 degrees. I read half a book by Jo Nesbø: Thirst, all the while satisfying mine.

Mari contemplated Roper Lake, created by the natural runoff from the Pinalenos. Water in the Sonora Desert, when there is some, is magical. On a point just across the near end of the lake, families picnicked and swam, grilled and paddled inflatable canoes, making family noises.
We have been in less pleasant places.

One the other hand, just selling Saguaro Jam, or leveling mountains for the copper and gold in them, does not make for greatness, either, so we bought a few bottles just in case we needed something to make us forget something. Or remember it.
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