A Strange Day on Planet Earth

I moved to the desert.

Or more accurately, a “dry continental climate bordering on a subtropical highland climate.”

Also known as the “high desert,” here ringed with lumbering mountains still tipped with snow. Glimpsing the mountainline is like glimpsing the moon: every time I fall still and silent.  Every time is like the first—some things refuse to become familiar, even with repeated viewing.

I have been surprised by how gentle this high desert feels.  Even when winds whip up cyclones of dust, even when rain is visiting in sheets, I sense an underlying calm.  The sheer number of sunny days seems to create a comforting regularity, an inner knowing that everything will soon return to baseline.  Everything will return to blue.

In the register of sky-blue days, I would like to name the past two as some of the bluest, goldenist, crispest, and sweetest to ever visit planet earth.  When I most needed a rest, the weekend blossomed into a cloudless bastion of warm hues and sharp shadows.  Curled in a chair outside, I remembered how much my skin likes the sun, and perhaps even the sun likes my skin.  It left a mark—and in the suddenly odd-looking light of the bathroom mirror, I find I have grown a shade darker.  Or perhaps just shed a winter skin, revealing the summer child waiting within.

Also with seeming suddenness, the evenings are not so cold.  I can remain in my favorite perch on the patio, watching the sun sink away behind the northwest wall (rudely ignoring my petitions to please stay a bit longer), until I am sitting under the authority of the constellation Cepheus.  Then the moon swims higher and higher from the east: and I fall still and silent.