Longing for North

It's hot here still. Like 100 degrees everyday hot. Our A/C has been hit and miss since last week. It is over 90 in my office during the afternoon most days. I'm sick of it. Sick of the heat. Sick of the dry. Sick of the flat boringly mundane beiges, tans and sandstone colors. We had a torrential downpour and subsequent flood and apart from the destruction,it was marvelous, marvelous I say. The desert was alight with life, puuuuuurples not plain purples. And green, oh green, how I've missed your verdant liveliness. All that life. I'm am not a desert dweller. Nothing in my midwestern upbringing has prepared me to face this day in and day out, unrelenting. The mountains, they are beautiful, but are missing something, something that other mountains have, oh there it is, a tree line. yes, trees, or rather, here, no, no trees, treeless. arborial less.

A lone poor bison. Buff. Ta Tonka. Alone. in the heat of the sun. Why?! How?! I want to free him from his pen but to where, dry desert death until he becomes a bleached empty erratic skull creating question marks of their own. Better he suffer with hay and hose than dessicated in the sun.

Northern climes. I dream of northern climes. Fall creeping in to turn greens to a rainbow of autumnal beauty. Good burnt oranges, not the bright ones of Vols and Tigers, but of pumpkins jack o'lanterns. Deep bloody reds. Even jaundiced yellows still clinging boldy to summers carefree happiness and photosynthic sweetness. Glorious. Gently falling to create a soft crispy blanket muffling the hardening ground then natures murmurs crawling to a crescendo of raspy cocktail  voices windswept. Warmth giving way inch by inch to pillowy cooling rains and angry booming storms drowning out the last gasps of long days and warmer nights.

This place pales in comparison. Boring continuity. Hot with a chance of hot followed by, well, more hot. It's football season for goodness sake, where are the crisp nights of warm drinks, the scarves, the hats and knitted gloves. Where, I ask, where?!!!