Here in October

From Bryan White

Greetings! Summer has ended here in Phoenix, and I have to say, the weather has been beautiful. It’s been cool and pleasant enough to open the windows — and it’s always the sweetest air that comes through open windows. We had a genuine rainy day (a couple of them actually) last week, which is rare enough to be a novelty, but not so rare as to be unusual. And better still, this weather should continue in this same general vein well into April or May of next year.

The change in the seasons is more subtle here, though. That’s one thing. In the spring you had to look closely to see a flower or two here and there. You might catch a passing whiff of orange blossoms when you walked by a certain tree. That was about it. You don’t get the “pageantry” of fall or spring or winter; it’s more like minimalist underscorings. Nature provides just a few grudging strokes, just the barest hints that things have changed.

Consequently, the efforts to maintain holiday traditions here in the off season have always seemed strange and even a little goofy to me, like people who have brought these traditions with them to a whole new planet where they feel out of place, but they’re reluctant to let them go, and so they gradually try incorporating some of them into the alien landscape as a failed gesture towards bridging the gap. Back in Ohio they had corn mazes and haunted hay rides in October. Here someone tells me about a closed-down grocery store that’s been converted into a haunted house for the season by a company that sets up a chain of haunted houses around the country. There’s no river to cross or woods to pass through to get to Grandma’s house. Here Grandma lives in a condo development landscaped with palm trees.

Of course, the last time I went on a haunted hayride it was years ago, and even then it was mostly for the benefit of my daughter and my nieces and nephew. So what do I care, really? It’s my imagination that mostly takes issue with this, I suppose. My imagination is always the last hold out, always skeptical that life here is a thing that can actually be done. And I knew that before I came here. I knew it from experience.

The summers are hot here (although it’s a wonderful kind of heat), and people do complain about them, but all same time, summer feels like the time when this place really comes into its own, when the landscape you see around you seems to fit and make sense. Summer was probably my least favorite season in Ohio. It didn’t exactly feel out of place there, but there was something rank and fleeting about it. It seemed like everyone had crawled out of their damp holes with their coolers and their fishing rods for one desperate grab at the sun before everything dropped back into the darkness and the cold. It felt like this was your last opportunity to get away, go somewhere else.

You wake up in the summer here, and you think, “How nice! How convenient! I’m already here in the middle of a resort. Guess I’ll go downstairs to the pool.”

Note: Although it sounds like I’m yearning for a more orthodox setting for holiday traditions, in all fairness, there’s a town called Prescott that’s hardly more than a hour away, which bears a resemblance to a small Ohio town to a degree that’s almost uncanny given its proximity to this desert oasis. They have century-old homes and a town square. It even snows there, from what I understand. If I really wanted to that badly, I’m sure I could run up there and find all the hot-cider-sipping, hay-wagon-riding joy that my heart could possibly desire.