Ryder is asleep. He was screaming for about an hour. That's better than the four he supposedly did for his daddy yesterday. But he is supposed to get his bottle now - it's 2:30 - and of course my mom told me the quote everyone knows. I love looking at Ryder though, and I don't even mind terribly much in my sort-of-distant-relative position to hear him scream and cry in that hopeless, helpless way. I love Ryder. I've never liked babies at all, though, never even known what to think about looking at one. Were they cute? I didn't really think so, not then. Slightly odd looking. All of them similar in the way that things like different baked potatoes all look similar.
I don't have a job. I'm in Tucson with everyone. The heat is oppressive. I would say I don't mind it so much since it's a dry heat, because that's what people from Arizona tend to say, but I do mind it. A humid heat, albeit, swallows you like a hot, wet mouth. The dry heat is more of a hot oven. When I step outside here I feel more like a muffin in an oven.
I do love Tucson, though. I really do. The Catalinas are so aggressively beautiful - always, right there, in your face, majestic, torrential. Mostly it's the people. Mimi understands why Adam shouldn't and won't take the job. So does and will everyone else. I want to be here because I think about these people all of the time in Colorado and it's easier to be here, in it, living the struggles and beauties of every day instead of to be there, away from it, lamenting the hardships going on in the desert. It will always feel like my second home here. I know we'll make it out eventually. It seems like everyone else in the family has. At one point, at least.
Walking home from the pool this morning two tiny lizards darted in front of me on the sidewalk. At home I guess there will be squirrels and prairie dogs. And evenings that cool off in September. We'd wait until October or so if we had moved here, that's what everyone said, and of course the winter would be wonderful instead of cruel. I've read several novels where the desert is referenced as something cruel, dry, ugly - something to loathe and describe in a mournful way. I hated those novels. One was by Jodi Picoult, who I have also grown to hate. Anyone who hates the desert hasn't smelt it after it rains. Anyone who hates the desert doesn't want to hike Blackett's Ridge in the middle of January. Anyone who hates the desert isn't looking at - or feeling it - or living in it - it in the right way.
Ryder just woke up and Mom is saying, "Ahh! You got my hair! You got my hair." And MoMo's home already?
The world is really big. There is a lot to think about even trying to do, let alone to go out and really do it. We're not ready for the big move. I'm afraid of too much anyway, right? At least I am not afraid of the desert.
About Me
- Beth
- From "Letters to a Young Poet," Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
