Ah, Sweet Summers in the Southwest

First Sonoran Summer -- you know -- the dry, hot season of May and June, tightens its grip on more and more of April. (Second Summer begins with the monsoons, sometime in July, usually.) At first it was just the heat of high afternoon, the one-to-five-o'clock window, that felt like a convection oven. But now the heat spreads across the day,  stretching from late morning to early evening, and my bike rides to work or home have become summer sweat-fests. Wildfires have already begun to blacken the skies. Open camp fires? Forget it. Get ready for one-fifteen. This, friends, is what separates the weenies from the wusses. We wusses abandon Tucson and run north. The crazy weenies stay here and complain to those of us at higher latitudes and altitudes. Sometimes I wish I were young enough to enjoy this free sauna, but other times it's okay to have entered late mid-life, that time when horizons close in, when the not so gradual decline of tolerance of dehydration and heat exhaustion makes hiking a kind of Russian Roulette. Too bad there are no spare parts yet for all the body pieces that could use a refresh, a cold shot of hail, a taste of ozone after a bolt of lightning. Just so you know, Second Summer, I won't be offended if you arrive early and stay late.