Monsoon toons

The dog days of summer are rolling over and begging for rain and a scan of some of my old favorites. It’s monsoon season and I smell rain in those clouds that haunt and taunt.

It’s the brief time of year when that umbrella you bought in 1972 is actually useful. The saguaros have blossomed and done their part.

The monsoons are a big deal for we desert rats. We prepare ourselves.

And we can never be certain of how rainy each rainy season will be. We can be certain of two things. One: Lightning shows. And two: At least one lugnut will attempt to drive into a flooded wash.

Some of us can’t wait for those downpours so that we can escape our casitas and dance and sing like Gene Kelly in our own beautiful rain.

The rains restore a sense of balance to the order of things. The season of drought ends and a second mini—spring springs forth on the hillsides.

When the rains came to my 27th street it was transformed into this seven-year old’s mini-muddy-Mississippi. The arroyos surrounding Mayfair Terrace turned into estuaries for toads and dragonflies and the sorts of astonishing marvels this desert boy rarely saw. Tarantulas arrived on our porch to greet us and lizards took to lounging on the streets. I played “D-Day” with my toy soldiers in the chocolate trickle in front of our home that passed for the beaches of Normandy. We invited folks driving by in their Pontiac land yachts to splash us, happy to become katsina mudmen to the horror of our mothers. We rode our bikes into the puddles and culverts with joy. We stomped in circles in the tiny puddles until by midday the streets, arroyos were as dry as they’d always been. And then home to our flustered fathers happy to hose us down with their garden hoses as we stripped down to our skivvies. Soon the sun would set and our fate would be popsicles outside among the cicadas and beneath the day’s glorious finale of lightning.