A Desert Wind Blows Through The House

Noa Mendoza

In the desert, at the beginning of summer, everyone begins to lose hope. This particular loss of hope is startling, especially for you, as you have not lived here for some time. You had forgotten the way that the mild season lulls everyone, the people, the plants, the birds, the bugs, the flowers, into a false sense of security. Even the white paint snaking along the bark of the orange groves feels ornamental until the end of spring. And then summer falls. Like a blinding slap. Abrupt, stinging. And by mid June, the tree bark is sparking underneath its white paint, and the desert birds begin to tuck into the shade for longer periods of the day, and only emerge, howling and miserable, to swoop at you when you accidentally walk too near a nest. The people of your neighborhood, similarly, emerge only to howl miserably at each other very early in the morning or very late at night, with an air conditioned ring of fat around their bellies and a guttural middle-class sense of survival. You only ever see these other people on your daily walks, at around eight p.m., when the sun is beginning to set. 

 Before this, before you moved back to the desert, days were very distinct. At school and then at work in a coastal city, your false sense of importance awoke you each day and put you to sleep also. Time was sectioned into tasks that were accomplishable and accomplished, and perhaps a few longer moments, like the morning before an important job interview or a night of good sex or a particularly boring conversation. Even larger things, familial, death, felt distanced, inevitable. Time drummed onward in a way that was understandable to you—smooth, and blind, and predictable. 

You are younger than you were then, now. Losing all of it happened like watching your first snowfall. Gradually, and then, stunningly all at once—you lost your keys, first, then your wallet, and then a couple dollars, and then some work meetings, and then your goldfish, and then a friend, and then a lover, and on, and on. Eventually, you were standing in the coastal city, still very young but getting younger, covered completely, skull to foot, in snow. The only place to go from there, of course, was here. To the desert. 

There is no real false sense of importance in the desert. There are very few things here that know they are necessary: the rain, a camel. You like to ponder these things on your daily walk. You like to think of words to keep your mind occupied. There is something very comforting in noticing things that are. For example, thinking about color. On some days you go on your daily walk and try to notice everything that is the color yellow. 

The label on a crushed can of SunVista beans 

The ugly rusted apartments on the corner of Rose Lane 

The paloverde that sheds its pollen like piss on the streets 

A hot girl in yellow biking shorts 

The peeling label on the side of a dumpster can 

The color of the sky as the sun begins to set, like a deliciously bitten sponge

The bible quote written on the ground: Jon 8:36 so if the Son sets you free you will be free indeed 

You stop and squint at this for a long time, but the sun is bright so you read Son like Sun and this mistake is what makes 
The quote yellow 

And on, and on 

You can do this exercise with almost any color, and any variation of color. The opportunities are fruitful and infinite. And the thing about the desert is that, while you take the same walk every day, and most of your neighbors do too, nothing is ever the same. This is particularly true of the vicious and torrential wildlife that is in a constant state of fighting and blossoming.

For example, one day on your usual walk, you are counting all the shades of blue this is a bit
of a challenge in the desert—underneath the sky, 
blue, like water, hides itself here, and reveals itself only dramatically and sensually—
there are the bright backs of the parakeets that flitter out of a neighbor’s African violets, a
wilting desert willow tucked into the crack of sidewalk dumpster, 
the unblinking bright eyelid of the carwash sign, 
the letters on a discarded Oreo package. 

And you find, at the end of a long residential dirt road that turns back toward Rose Lane, that your foot is hovering mid step above a carcass, illuminated faintly by the neighbor’s lawn light, rotting and incandescent. The carcass has been split open. It was once a large animal, a cow, probably. The ribs of a cow, licked white clean, spread apart like a pair of open palms with the bones gently curved upward. Perhaps because you are a vegetarian you find that it provokes in you a very strong feeling that you can’t quite place. The dead cow glows in the darkening twilight with a useless mystery. Definitely a blue feeling, you think. Contented. And then you turn back toward Rose Lane. 

Your grandmother’s name was Rose, actually. Her and your grandfather moved to this desert town sometime in the mid twentieth century from a city that was very cold and was in fact called ‘the windy city’. They dragged three daughters with them-- your mother and her two sisters. Your grandfather’s father was not an American so your grandfather had the idea of being an American very strongly in his head. He wanted to move West to start a company. So he moved to the desert and opened a shoe store that, like an unpainted orange tree, flowered prosperously in the winter and then perished in the heat. The rest of the family ended up here, resentfully. Your mother was raised here, left briefly for the Midwest, got pregnant with you, came back to Rose Lane. Your aunts were married and divorced within driving distance. You were born here. Both you and your mother (and Grandma Rose, although you do not know this) had tried and failed to leave the desert. What is left of your grandfather’s American dream is a handful of relatives scattered out West, some very uncomfortable thanksgivings of your childhood, and an incessant desert wind that has blown through and will blow through every house that you have ever lived in or will ever live in. 

This wind has been present since you were very young. When you think about it now, the first time you ever really noticed it was when you were fourteen years old, which was also the first time you ever really noticed your mother. Your mother was a very emotional woman, and she had a particularly emotional relationship with the sun. The summer that your father left, she became obsessed with the sun entering through the large glass windows that were central light-bringers to every room in the house. She would stare at these windows with a fever that intensified as summer steeped the house deeper and deeper into the heat of every approaching day. She bought shades, first, to cover every window, even had the handyman come in and install expensive ones. But still, the sun got through. She bought fabric curtains to place underneath the shades. But still, the sun got through. She bought an opaque plastic ‘anti-sun guard’ to go underneath the fabric curtains which were underneath the shades. But still, the sun got through. She complained, incessantly, prodigiously, of the impenetrable heat that she felt creeping through the windows, despite the air conditioning being on so high that you had to wear sweaters in the house. One day, at dawn, you crept downstairs to turn down the air conditioning (it had gotten so cold that you woke yourself up with a dry cough), and found her covering all of the windows in the house in silver tinfoil. 

That summer that you lived in the dark, in the mouth of the tinfoil cave, was the summer that you recognized the maddening power of the desert wind, the hot breath that entered and did not enter through the cracks of the window panes.The house was unscarred, as it was built necessarily and solidly into the desert, like the back of a sunlit boulder. Your mother was not. Here there is a space for her name. 

You begin your days, now, in the house on Rose Lane, with an eye toward the color of the sky. It is the first thing that you see in the morning when you open your eyes and your gaze lands outside of your childhood window. The color of the desert sky has been said to be a gorgeous, godly blue. Mohave deities of this same desert carried arrows tipped with turquoise and lived in houses the color of the sky. This bright sky is expected, demanded, of the imaginary of the desert. But you know that this is not always the case. The blue of greatest depth comes just before sunrise, before it tips into a light purple at dawn. Today, for example, there is a small amount of time after the sun comes up that the blue is deep, holy, dark. But then the sun breaks through the sky, it brings with it a range of intonations, blue-tinged rose, the lost shell of purple, ascending clouds of soft bodied pink, eventually settling on the bright shade of the desirous midday. This clear, direct blue lasts for a few hours. The red tones of the sky set in right around the time of your walk, before sunset, the sky shifts to oranges and reds, a gentle blaze over the camelback mountains. It calms to a pink or an orange and then descends back into a darkening shade at twilight, the hour of the cow’s bones. 

You observe these colors every day. You begin, even, to keep logs of the color of the sky, which you think of as an explorer’s logs, that grow in detail as the days progress. But the shifts in color of the sky have no reason to them. No purpose. There is no constancy in their change. There are thousands of different variations of color, so many you could never catalogue them all. The longer you watch the sky, as the months pass and summer begins her full ascent, the more you wish for a specific pattern to offer you certainty. For all your childhood, when you did not watch the sky so closely, you could have answered that of course, there is a simple pattern that correlates to the light of the day. But then you did not take into account the shifts in heat, in wind, in clouds, in dust particles, the way that light refracts differently every hour. Now that you have noticed this, it bothers you. 

You begin to match the colors of your walks to the color of the sky as you leave the house. If the sky is a dusty orange when you first wake up, you look for this exact dusty orange, everywhere you go. This particular one leads you to 

A dirty tangerine peel 

If the object can be picked up, then you pick it up. In this way, you begin to make a small collection, both in your head and in the empty rooms of the house, of objects that are colors that mean something. And on, and on. This activity is calming, for you, when your breath comes quickly /and is suspended in time/as sometimes happens/and your head becomes very light/like a baby that may float away/you are moored back down by a reality/that these colors demand/red, orange, blue, and on/and on. 

As the summer goes on and the desert turns into a drowning force of heat, like the bottom of an arid ocean, and you can no longer leave your house except for perhaps twenty minutes, at most, at sunrise or sunset, the colors of your walk bleed into the rest of your day. There is no other way, as is becoming increasingly clear to you, to make reality out of time and time a reality than to attach all of time to a color. So from your sky log of the previous day, you choose a pattern for the next day. Deep blue, lavender, pink, bright blue, gray, blue, white, darkening, blue, burnt sienna, gold, yellow, red, orange, purple, blue, dark blue, black 

You wake before dawn (deep blue) 
You use your grandmother’s soap (lavender) 
You eat a grapefruit (pink) 
A new desire (bright blue) 
Shrouded in (gray) 
The light of midday (blue) 
You eat an egg (white) 
Burnt at the bottom (darkening) 
Touch yourself (blue) 
Think of money (burnt sienna) 
Open a new page (gold) 
Go to the fire hydrant (yellow) 
Stand at a red light (red)
Turn back (orange) 
As the day ends (purple)
What is made very simple (blue)
What is unseen (dark blue)
And again (black)