I have a friend – no names, but she knows who she is – who moved to the high desert and gamely lived here for a year and a half, hating every second of it.
And it wasn’t the things the usually get under people’s skin. She could deal with the vicissitudes of a home-made electrical system. Crunchy water didn’t faze her much. The joys of life in a tin box rolled right off her back. She didn’t even mind the winter cold as much as I do. But she hated the desert. Its sharp’n’pointy nature. The scales and poison sacs of most of the wildlife. The way you can never say the word “tree” without being ironic. And the sun. The harsh, hard, pitiless sun.
And there’s no accounting for taste, because that’s all the stuff I like. But a few days of overcast can put me seriously in the dumps, and I’ve sure been getting a lot of that lately.
The sun came out like magic this morning around ten and the batteries are soaking it up gratefully. But when I grumped down the loft’s ladder and looked out again at the nonexistent horizon – the cloud cover is at 6000 feet and so am I – I thought about how this is one of the things specifically on the list of things I moved away from.
I just reluctantly looked at the forecast, and the clouds are supposed to roll right the hell back in again. Probably will. Probably we’ve had cloudy spells that went on this long before, but I sure don’t remember any.
