Early Sunday Morning in Apache Junction: Rain in the Wash

It's been an uncharacteristically rainy weekend in the Sonoran Desert, and by 7:30 a.m. today, the wash outside our house looked like a lake.

Friday Evening in Downtown Mesa: 35th Birthday Party for Arizona Museum of Natural History

At 6:30 p.m. today we were back in beautiful downtown Mesa, walking up Macdonald past the music fans waiting online at the Nile Theatre to just north of Main Street, where the wonderful Arizona Museum of Natural History was holding its 35th birthday party, with the street in front of it blocked off for many fun activities for kids. Free admission brought scores of families inside the museum to see its many fascinating exhibits.

More coming. . .

We had a great time and learned a good deal at the Arizona Museum of Natural History this evening, and we're grateful we got to attend its 35th birthday party.

And we're sorry we didn't invite it to ours in 1986.

Wednesday Afternoon in Apache Junction: Reading Lolita in Prospector Park

It was a gorgeous afternoon -- sunny, Sonoran Desert-dry, and 87 degrees -- and after we went to the nursing home to see our mom, as we do twice a day, we drove over to Prospector Park near our house in A.J. to walk around and re-read Lolita, which we're teaching next week.

Prospector Park is our favorite local park, where we often used to bring our dogs to roam around in the early mornings.

We got there with our trusty 1995 Geo Prizm, which we bought in Mesa exactly ten years ago, in the spring of 2001, when our previous car wouldn't start half the times we tried to get to our 7:40 a.m. Monday/Wednesday/Friday class at Arizona State or our 7:30 a.m. Tuesday/Thursday class at Mesa Community College.

It was a short and pleasant drive

up Idaho Road.

At the intersection of Lost Dutchman Road, though, we momentarily felt envious of those with another mode of transport.

Prospector Park (not to be confused with Brooklyn's Prospect Park!)

is named for the old prospector of the Lost Dutchman's Mine

and Superstition Mountain, which looms majestically over all of us here every day.

At the ball fields, only three people were playing. So it isn't the Cactus League, but they were having fun.

A hit! Or maybe a foul tip! The kid actually was pretty good.

We politely declined an invitation to serve as catcher in this game and moved on to the opposite ballfield. No animals are allowed on the field, but the sign didn't say "No Nabokov"

so we climbed onto the bleachers and sat for awhile enjoying Humbert Humbert's wholesome adventures. It was a nice reading spot.

Nabokov once said, "I am as American as April in Arizona." Even in March, we know where he was coming from.

Saturday Afternoon in Northeast Mesa: Driving in the Desert

Our mom, who has Alzheimer's, is sadly deteriorating, and it's a big strain on everyone. But she still loves to take drives in the late mornings and afternoons.

We often go from our house in Apache Junction to the northeast, up to look at the expensive homes on the roads leading to the mountains in the far northeast corner of Mesa.

One mountain has the Phoenix sign, on top. Today was warm and sunny, and we sit the back seat with our parents in front, just the way we did back in Brooklyn in the early 1950s when we were close to 6 and not 60.

For someone who lived for so many years in lush, semitropical Florida, the Sonoran Desert originally seemed ugly and barren to us.

"It's all brown all the time," one of our South Florida friends, once said of Arizona.

Well, sort of. But we like to come out here. We still prefer the excitement of street life in the city or the beaches of Florida or the gorgeousness of Gainesville. But we've come to appreciate the stark beauty.

Not that the desert gives a shit what we think of it.

"The finest quality of this...desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going.

Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert." - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Besides, this is hardly the wilderness. Wildernesses don't have Walgreens.