Phoenix

July 18:

It has only been a week since I moved fourteen-hundred miles from home. To this not home place, this place with not home things: the heat, the huge cactus out front, the fumes on Grand, the brown. The temperature has not been below one hundred since day one. My husband says it’s a “dry heat” but all I know is it’s an unbreathable heat. The sign reads “Welcome to the Grand Canyon State.” More like Hell’s Backdoor if you ask me. This is the desert, we live in the desert. Who could possibly want to live in such a barren, scraggly place?

July 22:

The Appliance Store is delivering our new refrigerator today. I can finally put that stupid orange cooler, with all its leaky, moldy smells, in the garage now. My husband has been living here six weeks without a refrigerator or phone. That doesn’t surprise me at all; it’s just like him, a roof, a bed, the dog, what else do you need? He had the cable hooked up as soon as he got here though. The perfect set up, no phone calls to interrupt Andy Griffith -- Mayberry might get a new Sheriff, Barney might use his bullet. The phone is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. I never thought I would be this homesick, feel so separated, so isolated.

Aug. 17:

The doctor said I was pregnant - six weeks. Poor kid, having me for a Mom, but I already love him (or her) so that’s good, right? The morning sickness was bad today; I didn’t even make coffee. This is going to be hard, I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself into. I saw on the news where the temperature reached 106 degrees yesterday. Everyone keeps telling me it’s a “dry heat” like that’s suppose to make me feel cooler or better or something I haven’t figured out yet. I turned the air conditioner up as high as it would go. What I wouldn’t give to be skiing on Center Hill Lake right now, a wet heat.

March 23:

I had that dream again last night, the one where we had this baby in the car. I hope my husband feels more sure about this than I do, it’s only two weeks away. The hospital is 17 miles away, on the other side of town. I don’t think I planned this whole thing out that well; this is a baby, a real, breathing little person counting on me to know all this. I read the books, all the ones my doctor suggested. But I don’t know how to be a mother -- I was just a kid in high school four years ago, worried about my prom date. My mother called and said she can’t be here for the birth. Why did we have to move to the other side of the world, to the desert, to nowhere, to Phoenix?