Evening dog walk, 8:20pm
The sky is a beautiful shade of deep blue-orange when the dogs and I leave the house. We do our usual route, which avoids the streets with too many dogs and purposefully passes by the house where the unhinged religious lady sits on her porch with the lights off watching the street for “bad behavior.” By the time we get up the hill and to the edge of the neighborhood it is thoroughly dark. On one side of the road, the lights of the neighborhood dot the hillside in clusters; on the other, there is the vastness of the undeveloped mesquite desert which belongs to the mine, who owns everything that the rest of us don’t.
A cow lows somewhere out in the vastness. A second passes and somehow an ocotillo skeleton alights in the dark. It’s magic—the individual branches of the ocotillo are fingers of reverse lightning originating from the ground and striking into the sky. At first, my brain can’t make sense of it. I watch as the ocotillo lightning fades. And then another ocotillo bursts into light, this one with five distinct fingers. I want to remain fully in the mystery, but one piece of it falls into place: some unnamed rancher leasing the land (or maybe a trespasser) has set up solar christmas lights on a handful of ocotillos far out in the vastness.
I continue watching as each one bursts into light and then fades according to its own rhythms. I hear a song in my head choreographed with the lights. A polyrhythmic dolphin show kind of song. A moment of self-judgment passes, as I think about the magic of the lit-up ocotillos set deep into the desert valley, and me, playing a cheesy orchestral synthesizer noise in my head to the whole beautiful ordeal. I laugh to myself.
The dogs are unaffected by the scene, standing at the farthest length of their leashes, sniffing the air for cows. Eventually, I take a picture of it and the dogs pull me along the curved road again.
At home, 7:30pm
My dear friend is back in town for the summer. We’re rekindling our friendship over the NYT Cooking recipe for blueberry cobbler that so many of us received in our gmail inboxes a while back.
I’ve been enjoying having her over for dinner. Half the time she comes over for something simple (picking up a dongle for usb to usb-c, a forgotten water bottle, etc) and ends up staying for the evening. We fall into our natural cadence of chatting and eating and drinking a glass of wine (me) and smoking a cigarette or two (her).
We talk about the film she’s making here for grad school this summer. We talk about how hard it is to make a film. We talk about dreams and love and taking lion’s mane for anxiety relief. I am grateful. And the blueberry cobbler, with the butter cut into the dry ingredients while we talk about some island in Greece, is excellent.
Later, Liz joins us and we eat firsts and seconds of the cobbler while swearing at a truly fucked up puzzle that I bought at Ace Hardware. Again, I am grateful. And a little wine-drunk off that old Bota Box Liz brought along.
Farmer’s Market, 11:00am
A simple pleasure: the guy at the farmer’s market who walks around with his boston terrier draped dramatically over his shoulder like the woman in “The Nightmare” by Henri Fuseli. The dog loves it, his tongue hanging long out of his open mouth and dripping on the guy’s back.
Safeway, 2:30pm
Our favorite Safeway employee is outside collecting carts.
I’m walking my empty cart across the parking lot towards the nearest corral and watching him. He’s pushing a line of maybe 20 carts towards the front of the store and rapping or singing to himself, which is only apparent because of the hand gestures he occasionally makes, letting go of the carts momentarily. He sees me watching him and throws both hands in the air in a beckoning gesture. His carts slowly drift away from him towards a motorcycle parked in a no parking zone.
“SEND ITTTTTT!”
He yells across the lot and gestures to shove my cart his way. He turns to stop his own long line of carts creeping away from him by throwing his body over the closest ones and turns back expectantly.
I shove my cart into the expanse and another man walking his empty cart back, who must have been watching too, follows suit excitedly. Our two carts move at a fast crawl towards our favorite Safeway employee, the wheels loud on the asphalt. He crouches in wait and then gets up to collect them where they roll to a stop a few feet shy of the goal. Our favorite Safeway employee laughs and pumps the air. Caught in the moment, I give a double thumbs up to him and the other guy. We are triumphant as a single cloud casts a shadow over the lot.
Headed home on Highway 80, 4:00pm
Petrichor.
At the base of the mountain range it smells like creosote, which shifts to the scent of wet earth and rocks as we head up the mountainside. The windows are rolled down all the way and my right arm is wet as I do hand swoopy gestures out the passenger side window. It’s nice to not be the one driving. I take deep sniff after deep sniff, except when we go through the mountain tunnel at the top of the pass—then it is important that we hold our breath until we’re through to the other side. It smells like exhaust in there anyways, so we’re not missing much.
On the other side of the tunnel it is raining harder and we roll up the windows to just a crack. The windshield wipers and the rain expose and obscure the greening parts of the valley.
When we arrive home it smells like flowers that are still encased in their green buds, waiting for the sun to peek out so they can open. We wonder what color they will be.
A couple closing thoughts
I spent about ten whole minutes trying to find a perfume online that uses creosote or petrichor as a base scent with no luck. It seems odd to me that perfumers haven’t acknowledged that many of us want to smell like a desert rainstorm.
Our favorite Safeway employee will likely be a recurring character, as I’ve got a thick mental file of funny interactions with him that is getting fatter by the day.
It’s difficult to write authentically about small town life sometimes. I need to remove many details to keep some stories untraceable to the people and locations that I’m writing about, so as to protect their anonymity in certain contexts. These detail-less stories become bland and forced and so many of them have been scrapped. It’s an interesting learning about writing on a public forum.
Loved this 💚