OmegaMom

Small Mountain University Town is under a red flag warning.  The Big Ditch has a Big Fire going near the entrance town Tusayan.  A large fire on the outskirts of Los Angeles has come and gone on the national news scene.  The Valley of Death (Phoenix) had record low humidity readings the other day, of 2%.  It’s fire season in the southwest…which means it’s warm, dry, and windy.

Chez OmegaMom, it’s cool and moist.  I’m actually seeing some leaf buds on our trees, so expect a haze of green to be showing in a few days.  It’s about time.  We’re hoping that this weekend we’ll be able to put in the veggie garden beds.

When OmegaDad and I first met in Los Alamos, one of the things that charmed us about the highlands of northern New Mexico was the way that the moisture rising up from the Rio Grande would form into clouds that billowed up over the edge of the plateau we were on.  Here in Suburban Alaska, we have similar clouds forming over the Little Lady River, and over the Turnaround Arm of the ocean…and, of course, fog from the inlet.  We don’t often get the fog here, but as we drive down towards Suburban Downtown (hah), or towards Small Town Alaska, you can see the fog rolling up the inlet and rivers and coiling around the base of the snow-capped mountains.

So at least we don’t have to worry about fire season any more, not for ourselves.  But we have friends and family still in that area, and when the red flag warnings go up, so does our attention.

Some commenters have noted that I seem to be "settling in" and feeling better.  I think they’re right.  The question, of course, is "is this a long-term thing?"  See, the days are starting to get longer, and already we’re gaining almost 4 minutes of daylight per day.  Naturally, with more daylight, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (har!), and rather than diving into depression, I am rising, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of winter.

Very poetic.

Time for a round-up of differences between Small Suburb, Alaska, and Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods, Arizona:

• Fruits and vegetables go south very quickly here, much more quickly than in Arizona.  I don’t know if this is a function of how long it takes to get fruits and vegetables here in the first place, or a function of greater humidity.  Either way, it’s disconcerting to have parsley and cilantro start rotting on the vine within a day of purchase, or apricots and pears turning mushy in two days.  The only fruit we ever had a problem with in Arizona was strawberries.
• Speaking of fruits and vegetables, there is a sad lack of diversity in same here.  It’s not like we were surrounded with yuppie-like abundance of diversity in veggies in Small Mountain University Town, but there was certainly a better assortment to choose from.  Here we have basics, and more basics, and still more basics.  BOR-ing.
• My nighttime hot flashes have turned to night sweats.  This is definitely a function of higher humidity; in AZ, the sweat from the hot flashes would evaporate immediately, while here the sweat sits and pools and drips and is generally just gross.  TMI, I know, but there it is–something I would never have expected.
• Snow is different here.  We have yet to have a snow with the great big goobery flakes splatting against your windshield like we would have in mountainous Arizona.  Here, the snow comes in small flakes.  It also comes in small doses, unlike back in AZ.  Small Mountain University Town would have three or four Big Snows per year–typically 18 inches to 30 inches within the span of two or three days.  Here, we have lots of small snows that peak out around 4 inches.  The end result:  about the same amount of snow, total.
• One becomes accustomed to cold rather quickly.  Nowadays, when it’s above zero, it feels fairly warm.  Not short-sleeve warm, mind you, but "why bother zipping up your coat?" warm.
• I didn’t realize just how drafty our old house was.  How cold.  Our new house, though pretty much your basic box (no character, really), is nice and toasty warm.  No drafts.  None.  Crawl spaces under houses apparently are heat sinks; it’s nice to have warm floors!
• Wood laminate floors need to be cleaned.  A lot.  Dust bunnies don’t hide out, discreetly staying in corners, stuck there for eternity.  No, they go rampaging about whenever someone walks by; they leap out to grab you, shake you by your leg, and shout out, "Yoohoo!  Here I am!"  And then, when you reach down to grab it, the breeze caused by you reaching down has the dust bunnies scooting out of your reach, almost as if they’re sentient and daring you to grab them.
• Stairs = awesome calf muscles.  Even if no other part of my body is getting exercise, I have awesome calf muscles, because we’re up and down the stairs many times each day.
• We have to drive to find trails or places to cross-country ski; back in HDEW the forest was two blocks away, and we could just step off our front porch into our skis and ski over to the open woods.
• The woods are much thicker here.  I never realized just how open the piney woods were, though my life back in the midwest should have made it very obvious.  When you find national forest land, you can’t just go plunging straight into the trees and head out into unknown territory; you need an honest-to-god trail, because otherwise you’ll be bushwhacking and wear yourself out in no time at all.
• I didn’t realize just how convenient having a fenced yard was.  We need to fence part of our yard here, because otherwise our dawg, who is…um…not well-behaved, will go gallivanting off to pester other people.  So we have to walk him three times per day.  In addition, our yard is the crossroads for a wide variety of neighborhood dawgs.  Humph.
• Cloudy days.  We have lots of cloudy days here.  November and December are apparently not only the darkest days in terms of amount of sunlight, but also in terms of days of sunshine.  February through September are the sunny months (with the exception of August).

All in all, we are settling in and growing accustomed to it.

As you drive the highway between Small Alaska Suburb and Austin, AK, the sides of the highway are peppered with various signs. 

There’s the "Watch for moose" signs, and the accompanying tally of how many moose have been hit by cars on the highway since (date).  And, yes, that truly does happen; while we were stuck in the Shoebox and I was doing laundry at the laundromat, I managed to overhear a lady who was still recuperating from a broken back and leg from when she had hit a moose in March–and OmegaDad’s boss and wife hit a moose last year while driving to see their son (who lives in our neighborhood).

There are the requisite "don’t trash Alaska" signs.

Speed limit signs, of course.

Then there are the never-ending "No fireworks allowed in Hataniska-Satsuma Borough", followed by a list of borough regulatory paragraphs that cite this.

But as you enter Austin, AK, on the highway, you are greeted by HUGE signs.  Gorilla Fireworks.  Hippopotamus Fireworks.  Buy Your Fireworks Here CHEAP!  And more.  When you drive out the other side of Austin, once again the highway signs admonish you:  No fireworks allowed!

I figured that the Austin fireworks stands–which always look deserted when we drive by, but we haven’t driven by in a long time–were legal by Austin’s regulations (thus avoiding the problem with borough regulations), and were probably jumpin’ joints around Independence Day.

Um.  I need to be thinking of those daylight hours again.  Because around Independence Day, the sun doesn’t officially set until midnight.

But on New Years’ Eve…?

In the deepest, darkest depths of winter…?

The sun sets very, very early.

And the "not allowed" fireworks start at about 8 p.m.

And keep going.

And going.

And going.

Until about 1 a.m.

This is a major culture shift for us, folks.  We’re used to living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods…in the tinderbox-dry woods…where the municipal July 4 fireworks display has been canceled mere days before the date three out of the last four years.  Back there, anyone who was insane enough to fire off lots of private fireworks around July 4 were fined huge amounts, and shunned and scorned by anyone with any grain of sense.  New Years’ Eve?  Eh.  We’d have one or two neighbors who would fire off firecrackers directly at midnight, and that was that.

Last night, in our area, it was like a freakin’ war zone.  Fireworks.  Firecrackers.  Roman candles.  Streamers.  Bang!  Bang!  Bangity-bangity-pop-pop-pop-pop.  Quiet.  Bang!  Whiiiiiizzzz-Bang!  Quiet.  Pop!  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop!  Bang!  Boom!  Quiet.

I have never, ever, in my life, lived in a place that did this.

Our dog was, luckily, not frantic, but definitely perturbed, and he kept following me or OmegaDad around the house and startling when a particularly loud (read:  direct neighbors) bang sounded.  Our cats were missing in action.  The dotter was both enchanted (when she could see the fireworks from the bedroom) and terrified (when all she got was the bang-bang-bang-BOOM! effect).

I was able to see fireworks from the porch next to the kitchen, looking northwest.  I was able to see them from our living room, looking southwest.  I was able to see them from our bedroom, looking northeast, and looking southeast.

We decided that the borough police department must make its yearly income from all those fireworks, that they’d be able to just cruise around almost anywhere and hand out tickets left and right.

The seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on a carousel of time.
We can’t return
We can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Painted pony number one:  Five years ago Saturday, we met our dotter for the first time.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been so long already.  We’ve gone from a tiny little baby coming home for the first time:

To an almost six-year-old full of creativity and vitality:

Her first tooth to come out is just about out–it’s at that stage where it can lie almost flat.  We almost thought it was out tonight, but it looks like at least one more day, after all.

Our trip to Arizona has blindsided us with some Issues.  The dotter decided–unbeknownst to us–that it meant we were moving again.  Um.  Oops.  Then, since OmegaDad’s job is still fairly new, we had decided early on that he would stay only a few days, while the dotter and I would stay longer.  So I spent this evening in the bathroom with her in full-blown brokenhearted weeping mode–Daddy was gone, she missed him, I would be gone on Wednesday (a trip to the office) and would leave her all alone, and she first refused to believe we were actually going home on Sunday, and then declared in tears that she wanted to go home now, and then told me that Sunday would never come.

Some kid point-of-view things just blindside you, y’know?

Painted pony number two:  A person who I have posted with for years on various debate boards died of colon cancer this week.  She was in her early 40s.

Painted pony number three:  Marguerite, coming up on her 104th birthday, had a bad infection that required her to be on antibiotics.  The infection and antibiotic combo, along with heparin, had her hallucinating and sleepless for three days and nights, unsteadily wandering the halls of her assisted living center and falling often.  No broken bones, but they finally hospitalized her, got the infection under control, figured out the right antibiotic, and got her to sleep.

But the assisted living center said they couldn’t handle her anymore, and she needed a nursing home.

Sigh.

So Great Grandma (my own grandmother) is now in a nursing home, and sad and confused.  Nothing tastes good.  She can’t hear well.  Her eyesight is going, with black spots in her vision that make her think there are black bugs wandering all over her food and her clothes.  And she, like OmegaDotter, wants to go home.  Imagine going to sleep in one place and waking up in another–with the intervening days and nights just vanished from your memory–and being told, "This is your new home."

I’m so glad that we had planned a party for Great Grandma, so that there were lots of folks in town to help my mom out during this extremely stressful time.  But it’s so sad for us all–we have been spoiled…Marguerite was still bowling up until 1999, she was still out playing bridge at the assisted living center two years ago, she has always been sharp as a tack and filled with tart commentary and memories.  Having her in this state is…heartbreaking.

This evening, at bedtime, the dotter quizzed me:  "Why is Great Grandma like that?"  And I had to explain to her that Great Grandma is 104 years old, that most people don’t live that long, that she’s wanting to go home and is having a hard time realizing that she has a new home, and that she’s just tired tired tired.  So in the midst of all the upheaval, all the worries about moving again, the dotter is learning some other things that are very difficult to process.

Parenting is hard sometimes.

Life is hard sometimes.

But I’m so glad we have the dotter with us.  I’m so glad my family can pull together like this.  I’m so glad we all have each other.  Because it makes the hard stuff more bearable.

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(Isn’t that a great word?  Whinge.  Love it.  For those who don’t know, it’s the British version of whining.)

Leah has given me permission to whine.  So here goes with confession time.

I’m homesick.

There.  I said it.

I live in Alaska, land of wilderness and mountains and oceans, a place so many people dream about coming to, and I’m homesick.

I miss the sun, oh so much.  Right now, we’ve got 6 hours and 53 minutes of sunlight per day.  That’s if you call it “sunlight”.  First, we get “sunlight” maybe once every four days.  Second, the angle of the sun is so low that while the sky gets light, we don’t get the sun for about an hour after “sunrise” (it hides out behind the mountains), and similarly it hides before sunset.  Third, that low angle of sun means that the sunlight we do get is watery late afternoon sunlight all day.  But most of the days are gray with clouds.

I miss the stars, oh so much.  When we were moving here, I just assumed that, being in the northern wilderness, we’d have glorious stars.  Not so.  We’re near enough to the coast to have high humidity, which washes out the stars…when it’s not totally overcast (those gray days extend to gray nights, too).  I miss seeing the Milky Way almost every night, arching across the sky.  And so far we haven’t had any northern lights to take the place of my glorious, shimmering, take-your-breath-away stars.

I miss the smell of pine trees in the sunshine.

I miss the openness of the piney woods.

I miss our ratty old log home, smelly and poorly designed and cold and drafty as it was.  It had character.  Our new house is nice enough, but it’s a basic box and lacks character.

I miss my buddies back in Arizona.  I miss having the Society of Geeky Gals meeting up for dinner and a play on a regular basis.  I miss my Northern Arizona FCC buds.

I miss my mom and my grandma.  Oh, lordy, do I miss them.  I miss being able to say to myself on a lazy Sunday, “Hunh!  Wonder what Mom’s up to…I think I’ll drive down and hang out for a while!”

I miss our old neighbors.  We had some cool neighbors back there.

I feel so guilty to be feeling so homesick.  Here I am, on the adventure of a lifetime.  For cryin’ out loud, the feds paid for us to come here. 

I know that I need to give it all some time, that I will make new friends, that in about six weeks’ time the days will start getting longer, that we’ll find new places to hang out, that I’ll be able to visit my old hangouts every now and then to get a jolt of piney woods and stark desert and stars and vivid sunlight.

I know all that.

But right now, I’m homesick and I just want to cry.

A lot of the cool kids are doing bullet-style posts recently.  Since most of them are doing NaBloPoMo, they get a pass from me because the daily posting drains the creative well dry very quickly.

I, on the other hand, am doing a bullet-style post because I’m just plain lazy.  No NaBloPoMo excuse from me, as I’m not participating.

• It’s 4:00.  The sun is setting in a few minutes.  The sun rose today at 9:10 or thereabouts.  According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, we’re supposed to have 7 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight today.  Well, yeah, I suppose we did.  There were no clouds, so we saw the sun today.  That was nice.  But the maximum altitude of the sun hereabouts was 10 degrees.  Ten.  Sort of like having sunset all day.
• I don’t care that Hilary Clinton had someone planted in her audience lob her a planted question meant to point out some of her stands on certain issues.
• I equally don’t care that FEMA had a plant in their audience at a press conference to ask questions guaranteeing that a few things got mentioned.
• I further don’t care that John McCain didn’t lambast one of his supporters when she asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” when talking about Hilary Clinton.  I thought “Can someone translate that for me?” was a perfectly good way of saying, “Yo!  That’s not nice!”
• I’m afraid to open our gas bill.  I don’t want to know what a month’s worth of heating costs, especially given that it will be much higher in the next few months.
• Context is important to me.  If a person writes an article in which she makes a comment to her adopted daughter that could indicate she has a savior complex and thinks China is a land of indentured orphans, I’d like to know what kind of relationship she has with her daughter.  If it’s one kind of relationship, it’s an in-joke about what some people say about adoption; if it’s a different kind of relationship, it’s snide and insensitive and denigrating.  Given the remainder of the article, I lean towards the former…but a helluva lot of folks in the blog world are leaning towards the latter and a kerfuffle has ensued.
• On the other hand, if angry comments on the article coming from adult adoptees were censored, that sucks.  In my read of the article yesterday, though, it looked like many of the originally censored comments were in.  ?  I don’t know.
• Thanksgiving is next week.  How the hell did that happen?!  It’s far too soon.
• And that means Christmas isn’t far behind.
• My carefully crafted code to dive into the “raw data” from a downloaded web report was foiled–foiled!–when the people who created the report went and changed the column names on the raw data tab of that report.  Grrr.  Now I have to do some figuring on how to check those column names beforehand, and have to stash them in a table so that the next time they decide to get fancy with column names, we’ll be able to catch it right away, instead of wondering for a few weeks why no new data was being imported.  Let me just say:  Duh, OmegaMom.  On the other hand, why the hell did the folks change those column names?  Raw data=stuff that gets used somewhere.  Not raw data=stuff that you can fiddle with all you want.  Or at least let people know with a popup the next time they cruise your web reports.
• Boots, snowpants, and snowgloves arrived yesterday from LandsEnd.  OmegaDotter is happy.  Winter parka is back-ordered.
• Will discuss way-kewl interfaces tomorrow.  And way-kewl prosthetic devices the day after.  Or maybe combine the two.

OmegaDad was out in the field for a few days, and the dotter and I were able to leave the house later than normal (due to not having to drive him to work).  So, this morning, when we left the house at 7:10 a.m., and it was dark, I was surprised.

It darkened my whole day, actually.

It was chilly and gray and windy, and it started out dark.

I’m afraid that my 11 years in Arizona, plus my years in sunny San Francisco (really!) (well, okay, the sunny East Bay), plus my 3 years in Arizona prior to that, have caused my body to think that sunlight is the natural state of things, and grey, cloudy, chilly, and windy is not.

So I spent the day in a major funk.

Hells bells, what is it going to be like for me in the middle of winter if I feel this way now?!

In addition, my underbrain keeps telling me that it’s too early in the year for heavy-duty jackets, that the sun will shine and things will warm up.  This is okay for me–I’ve got a Polartec fuzzy that I wear which covers quite a range of temperatures, and I know enough to put my hands in my pockets when they get cold.

But for the dotter, hmmm.  We’re used to wearing mainly fuzzies and light jackets, with the heavy stuff broken out only on severe days, and immediately consigned back to the coat hooks to wait for another batch of severe days.  In other words, we don’t have any suitable jacketry for the dotter.  Who, by the way, does not know enough to put her hands in her pockets when they get cold.  So we need to order the child a decent jacket/coat combo that will keep her warm down to, say, -15F.  And boots.  And snow pants.  So we have to measure her.  But we haven’t found my sewing stuff, which is where our soft measuring tape is.  (Don’t worry:  I’m going to use string instead, and things will get ordered this weekend.)  (Yes, we can buy stuff here, it’s just that I’m tired of asking the dotter if she likes this one or that one, and having her go “Eh”.  I’m ordering some stuff from Lands End, and if she doesn’t like it, tough.)

I go outside in the morning, and my underbrain says, “Hey!  What’s with this chilly stuff, dammit?!  It’s not supposed to be chilly yet!  Where’s the sun?!”

In Arizona right now, the sun is rising at 6:15 a.m.  The sun sets at 6:30 p.m., whereas here it’s setting around 7:30.  But I’ve got the feeling that it’s not the total amount of daylight that counts, but the timing of that daylight–same amount of daytime in Arizona as here right now, it’s just shifted.  And, after 11 to 15 years of my body seeing late morning sunrise as the equivalent of deep winter, my underbrain is flummoxed by a late morning sunrise meaning the end of September.

As a result of all this, my body has kicked into winter mode.  The main evidence of this is that my body desires sleep all the time.

Wah.  Wah, wah, wah.  I’m down and grumpy.  Call the wahmbulance.

When we first moved to Arizona, we lived in the area of Former State Capital.  OmegaDad would drive up to Small Mountain University Town on Monday mornings, and return on Friday evenings or when his field trip was over (at first, this was ten days out in the field, six days off).  I would drive down to the Valley of Death on Monday mornings, stay with Great-Grandma in Sun City, and then drive back on Friday evenings.

Then OmegaDad’s job switched from term-temp (a two-year stint) to permanent.  This is a Big Thing in fed work, and a Good Thing.

We knew that we could now depend on being in SMUT for quite a while, so it was time to look for a home.

The bankers we contacted pre-approved us for what was, to us, an ungodly amount of money.  We shook our heads at each other and decided we’d look for something more in our range–which was, alas, quite cheap for SMUT.  (Even then, housing prices in SMUT were outrageous.)

One place our realtor suggested we look when we gave her our price range was Mountainaire.  We wanted Kachina Village.  Or Munds Park.  Anyplace away from the train noise.  (I can live with train noise; I grew up in Chicago and almost always lived near the El.  OmegaDad, however, thought that train noise would always intrude–he didn’t realize that the noise fades into the background when you live with it.)

Mountainaire was a small enclave in the forest, with about five hundred houses, half of which were used only in the summertime weekends by vacationing families.  Once upon a time, it had been a logging camp.  Then it became a vacation home area.  At the time we were looking, it was becoming a place for first-time homebuyers, young couples just starting out.

As we drove through there, our immediate reaction was:  “We can’t live here.  It’s way too hippy-dippy for us.  We could have lived here ten years ago, when we were young, but not now.”

The roads were dirt roads.  The houses were mostly teeny tiny.  There was a plethora of trailers-in-blankets–small trailers and mobile homes that had been covered over and expanded upon. 

There were oodles of cute little A-frames that were (maybe) one bedroom. 

There were a slew of houses that had simply accreted over the years, as owners had added on and added on as they got more money. 

And scattered throughout, there were newer homes, especially at the back, up on the hill. 

Rumor had it that one house, somewhere in Mountainaire, had a septic tank that was made of an old Volkswagen bus that had been set into a hole in the ground…

But we simply couldn’t live there.  No way.  We wanted Kachina Village, a slightly more upscale enclave across the highway.  They had paved roads!  And natural gas!  Woot!  Up-town style, dudes!

But I found this house on the internet.  It was a log home (we had always wanted to live in a log home–we had spent a few evenings rhapsodizing about log homes when we first met).  It was cute.  It was up on the hill, so it wasn’t as dusty (the houses at the bottom of the hill, where the one road entering the enclave came in, were subjected to large amounts of traffic and dust).  So I sent OmegaDad off to look at it.

He says he walked in the front doors, and said, “This is it.”

So we ended up living in Hippy Dippy Enclave in the Woods after all, for nine years.  And we loved it.  We loved our neighbors.  We loved the little store at the foot of the hill, owned by J and S and S’s parents.  We loved the feeling of community.  We loved that we could walk a few minutes and be out in the middle of the forest.  We loved that, on snowy days, we could pop on our cross-country skis and ski down the street into the forest.  We loved the pizzas and steaks from the Mountainaire Tavern.  We loved that we knew the guy who walked his ancient old dawg every day, making sure he went slowly enough so that his arthritic companion could keep up.  We loved that, by the time we left, we knew almost everyone who lived there, and most of the vacationers who returned year after year.  Scruffy and down-at-the-heels as it looks, it has character and community.

OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump moved to Arizona in 1981.  I was 22.  Everyone in the family was amazed.

OmegaGranny had lived in Arizona, on and off, as a child, and remembered the Arizona mountains fondly.  Her mother lived in Sun City, near Phoenix.  She had aunts and uncles who lived there, also.  So as she and Uncle Grump were nearing “retirement age”, she kept propagandizing Arizona as a place to move.  She and Uncle Grump subscribed to a real estate catalog for Arizona, and began daydreaming.

One day, out of the blue, the family got the word:  Uncle Grump, who had hardly ever left Chicago since he returned from Japan after World War II, had not only gotten on an airplane to fly to Arizona–spur of the moment!–but had signed for a piece of property in the central Arizona mountains in a nowhere spot on the map called “Wilhoit”.  OmegaGranny and Uncle Grump were moving!

After they moved, I spent all my vacations out there with them.  I’d fly out, drive up to the spot on the highway called Wilhoit (miles away from anything resembling a real town), and we would spend a week or two driving the backroads of central Arizona, exploring canyons and forests and Indian ruins.  They were in the (lower) mountains, and the view from their house went on forever–rolling foothills, dark canyon slashes across the hills, mountains in the distance.  As the days progressed, the light from the sun would shift angles, and every moment, the old view would morph into something new and beautiful.

Now, if you speak to people about “Arizona”, the immediate stereotypical image they get is of saguaro cacti, deserts, coyotes, and the Grand Canyon.  (In the typical tourist’s mind, the Grand Canyon is somehow smack in the middle of the desert.)  And Phoenix and Scottsdale.  So the generic view is that Arizona is all desert, all flat, all dry, and always 110+F in the summer.  It was my view, too, as all I had to really define the state was my visits to grandma in Sun City–which is definitely not the way to experience Arizona.

This wasn’t the Arizona my parents introduced me to.  The one my parents showed me was, in my mind, heart-rendingly beautiful.

So after a few years of visiting them on my vacations, and realizing that I was crying on the way back to Chicago, missing the mountains and the wide open spaces and (of course) my mom and dad, prompted by my dad having back surgery, I decided to move out there.

It was great.  There was only one problem:  money.  Where mom and dad lived (they had moved into the city that was 18 miles away from their spot on the road, because they were spending all their time there anyway) was a cute town, and very pretty and piney, but there was a distinct lack of good jobs.

So I moved out to the Bay Area, got a good job, paid off a whole slew of debt, decided to go back to college and finish off that damned degree, met Mr. OmegaMom-to-Be, and moved to (ugh) Lubbock to be with him (trust me, this is a sign of True Love).

As Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be finished off his Master’s degree in soil science, he started looking for jobs.

At the same time, he was currying favor with the in-laws by sucking up to OmegaGranny.  To do this, he regularly shared gardening tips, cool info he could come up with related to his degree subject, and anything more.  He knew that there was a government agency that had–free for anyone who wanted the information–surveys of various areas.  He called up the state soil scientist of Arizona so that he could get the survey for OmegaGranny’s area.

They started talking.

It turned out that there was going to be a survey of the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead starting that summer.

It just so happened that Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be was due to graduate with his master’s degree that summer.

State soil scientist told Mr. OmegaMom-To-Be to keep in touch.  MOMTB did.  And that summer, as mentioned, the surveys were opening up and being staffed.  MOMTB applied, was accepted, and there we were…

…moving to Arizona.

But not the Arizona of the stereotypes–the Arizona of my experience.

Once, when OmegaGranny and I took the shuttle down from Former State Capital to the Valley of Death to visit elderly relatives, we were stuck with a young man from the East Coast.  Philadelphia?  Baltimore?  Boston?  I can’t remember.  But what I do remember is that he spent the entire trip complaining about how BROWN and DRY and UGLY and HORRIBLE Arizona was, and how he couldn’t wait to get somewhere where it was green again.

OmegaGranny and I just raised our eyebrows at each other…because, to us, Arizona is beautiful.  We see the high chaparral, with its junipers and pinyon pines dotting the scrubby grasslands, as glorious.  We love the stark beauty of the geology that is revealed by highway roadcuts.  We love the way the dun and brown grasslands turn vivid emerald green when the rainy season starts.  Walking in the piney woods when the sun has been baking the bark of the trees so that the vanilla scent makes your head spin…or smelling the sharp, metallic aroma of rain hitting the rocks somewhere within a 30-mile radius…clambering through the riparian tangles that line creekbeds as we look for a particularly good area of petroglyphs…The shshhhh of snow falling in the wintertime (yes.  You can hear the snow fall.) or the shshhhh of snow melting in the sunlight…the constant yammer of the ravens and the jays…the vivid flash of mountain bluebirds flying by…the splash of color from pink penstemon or vivid red Indian paintbrush or the crumped-kleenex look of prickly poppy flowers…

There’s no way to describe just how much I love the real Arizona, the one that so many people will never encounter.  I will miss it.  I hope to return “home” someday.