Studio Renee

It's almost summer in the Bay, and I can't stand the fog and gloom that covers the city during this season. I'm a desert rat, through and through, drawn to the sun and heat like cactus fruit peeking out from every sidewalk break.

Summers in the desert are magical. Monsoons roll in around July, making the sky turn fiercely purple with heavy clouds and lighting and thunder.

And the smell! I wish I could bottle that smell and take it with me everywhere I go because it's different, very different from rain in other places, I promise.

It smells like fresh creosote, soaked and dripping onto the asphalt on an evening walk. It smells like sweat running down your back when you step outside to finally cool off when you see the dark clouds starting to form.

It smells like cicadas buzzing late into the night outside your bedroom window to dry off their wings and become your very own personalized white noise machine.

When summer comes, my mouth begs for watermelon, tossed in lime and chili flakes. I want slushies that turn my tongue blue and hot dogs and paletas and elote and those little popsicles in the plastic wrap you'd snap in half from Food City. 

It's a love-hate relationship with desert summers, so you have to have desert baked into your bones. 

Some days are so oppressively hot that you can barely leave your house. There was once a summer when my beat-up old Honda had a broken A/C and I spend the summer months driving with the windows down to my job at the mall, completely soaked in sweat, every day that summer. 

Another summer, when my boyfriend and I only had a busted swamp cooler, we would take cold showers in the middle of the day just so we could feel the breeze against our wet skin cooling us off. My wet hair would drape down my back like a dark blanket and droplets of water would race from my head down to my calves.

Year after year we would claim how awful and done we were with the heat, but the minute the monsoon would tumble in and the desert turned on its charm again, we'd forget all about it for a moment. Just like how newborns swirl in big eyes and hormones to make their parents forget the pain of childbirth, that's how summer nights are in the desert.

Ramen-shop dinners and movie dates were much more fun in the summer months. You'd sweat down a hot bowl of soup and step into the arctic air-conditioned theater to feel the goosebumps rise on your arms and legs before stepping back out into the hot and sticky night after the show in a short burst of relief. Hot, then cold, then hot again.

I miss those beautiful nights after the rain when you could open your window for the first time in months before having to close them back up and dry your lips out in the stale air from the air-conditioning. 

There are so many things I love about living in the Bay now, but summers leave me nostalgic for home. I'll take sweat-soaked tank tops and shoulders hot from the sun any day. 

Last week I bought some watermelon at the produce market down the street, but it wasn't quite sweet enough just yet. I'll be patient, I know there's more time it takes for it to ripen and become as bright and juicy as I like it. Maybe I'll head over 24th street this weekend and hunt down some paletas instead.





Originally written 8:13pm on 5/25/23, published 1/21/24
©2024 by Renee Salmon