So tell me, have you had your welcome-back-summer moment, yet?
Toasted hands on the steering wheel. Stepping outside for a 7 a.m. walk only to feel the Big Heat creeping over the valley. Crawling on the roof to turn on the old swamp cooler - or fix the pump.
I ask because I just had my welcome-back-summer moment this past Saturday biking up Mt. Lemmon. This seemed like a good idea Friday night. Roll out of bed for a dash up to evergreen heaven. But then I dawdled in the morning - over the paper and tea - and got a late start.
When I finally rolled up to the fee station we were already knee-deep into a 96-degree day. It was 10 a.m., and pretty much everyone else on a bike was heading the opposite direction, which is to say down and into air conditioned bliss. Instant envy.
Neither the sun nor the mountain showed much mercy as I rode upward. It might be cool at the top of Mount Lemmon, but you still have to get there. And the getting there was hot. Actually, it was reallyreallyreallyreally hot. I thought about ice cream. I thought about shade. And I thought about summer in Tucson. It's my favorite time of year here.
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Fall brings long nights and a respite from triple digits. Winter is crisp and clear with wide-open skies and mild snow surprises.
Spring brings wildflowers and palo verde blooms. But I'll take summer in Tucson with its slow pace, long days and hopeful monsoons.
What do I love about summer here? The list is long: The smell of swamp coolers. Bike rides at 5 a.m. Lightning storms that crack open the sky. Strawberry raspados in Barrio Hollywood and Menlo Park. Stepping off a plane somewhere else and feeling a cool breeze. Coming back home and hearing groans fill the plane after the pilot announces the current temperature in Tucson.
The freedom of long days. The early morning chatter of birds through open windows. The gift of rain.
Sunset poolside.
When does summer begin in Tucson?
Who knows, really. Certainly not on June 21. Some might say it's the ice breaking on the Santa Cruz River, when that first hundred-degree day bounces off the asphalt and rolls over the city in waves.
But I say it starts now, when the students and snowbirds clear out, leaving the rest of us to wrestle with the Big Heat. True Tucsonans stick around for summer - except when we take vacations in San Diego, which is what true Tucsonans do.
It's all an illusion, of course, this heat tolerance we claim to develop. This acclimation we make. The matinées and water parks. The moving from one air conditioned place to another. The things we do to get through the heat and carve out a little space. We're not really experiencing the desert at its most brutal time - when deaths spike and wildfires rage - but instead have mastered avoiding it.
"To really experience the desert you have to march right into its white bowl of sky and shape-contorting heat with your mind on your canteen as if it were your last gallon of gas and you were being chased by a carload of escaped murderers," wrote Marc Reisner in his classic "Cadillac Desert."
"You have to imagine what it would be like to drink blood from a lizard or, in the grip of dementia, claw barehanded through sand and rock for the vestigial moisture beneath a dry wash."
The desert is rough and unforgiving, fragile and uncompromising. But here in the city, things go down a little easier.
The summer months remind me to appreciate both.
Josh Brodesky thought he would keep today's column like the weather, which is to say light and breezy. He'll be back with the hard stuff on Sunday. Track him down at 573-4242 or jbrodesky@azstarnet.com
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