Summer Nights
One of the best parts of Colorado in the summer is the weather. Today was one of those picture-perfect days: it was not too hot, puffy clouds that kids see pictures in, a slight breeze, but warm sun on your shoulders. Then, on the drive home, dark gray clouds that promise rain. Rinse, repeat for tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. This is the first year I heard Coloradoans refer to this as “monsoon season.” It’s so dry here, even when it rains, that calling this “monsoon” would never occur to me.
I first experienced monsoon in Arizona. Every year I was there it amazed me–the almost unbearable heat of the day, then, depending on the day, the sky turned dark, almost green, and one of two things started: either the thunder rolled in, and the lightning show started, or the rain would start in silence, and thunder would follow. The rain always came in huge drops, and came in a tumult. The temperature dropped into the 90’s, and combined with the wet, felt almost cool. I remember the best lightning storm I’ve ever seen–I think I’d gone to a poetry slam, the summer before I started graduate school, and I was standing outside waiting for it to start. I talked to a young man (even at the time I think he was younger than me) about poetry and about the folks who were there and regulars. He had a stud in his tongue. I was distracted not only by the stud (in his tongue) but by the lightning storm happening in the thunderhead above us. There was no rain, and barely any thunder, but the lightning lit up this cloud like a subatomic reaction, or what I imagine a subatomic reaction to look like. I remember wondering if maybe he wasn’t in a risky situation with that stud and a lightning storm in monsoon. I also remember being fixated on that stud, but this is a family show, and I was young(er).
Every year after that, though, monsoon was my favorite part of the year in Arizona. It was a shift in the world, a way for people to change the way they look at things, and the way they feel about the world. It was an open door. It could wash the world to be a cleaner slate, or it could give you just the excuse to stay indoors. I’m still attracted to monsoon for just these reasons, and am happy to have found that in another dry desert. Change is something that is sometimes a simple, small thing, but we make it out to be this huge mountain, like all of a sudden I need to be called Fred and live a crazy life and go sailing on a boat. Change can be like that, but typically isn’t. So we need a little nudge sometimes–like monsoon season–to give us an excuse to make one positive change, or see something a little differently in the world. So now the two robins hopping in my backyard under the trampoline are different. I may be a little more patient when Claire wants to eat her Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup before finishing her dinner. I may find another way to tell Marc love.
And some monsoon days, I may disappear into my room, and hide under the covers, as far away from the world as I can get.
And, in the immortal words of Olivia and John, “Summer days, driftin’ away to oh-oh, those summer nights…”