Today we moved from our convenient-yes, and-boring downtown motel into a charming little casita in the Catalina foothills. The woman who owns it, Irene, has made it into a tasteful and romantic getaway guest house and rents it out for pocket change. We will be here for three nights and will then be homeless again on Christmas Eve. This neighborhood is affluent and white and ostentatiously in love with Christmas and has collectively decided to invite Santa Claus to town while simultaneously fucking everyone in their eyes with a hundred million lightbulbs. Irene lives in the main house and seems to like the desert well enough to let it be its beautiful self. For this and other reasons, I like Irene. She was in the Air Force for 28 years. She left a bowl of blackberries and pineapple and a bottle of wine in our room. Everything is perfect and we are in the middle of a nice, white neighborhood in the middle of nowhere. I am wary that we are the expendable characters at the beginning of a Dexter episode. I accidentally bathed myself in "letting go" perfume this morning and perhaps this gray-spirited ingrate who lives inside me will be gone before my next encounter with a horse. Meanwhile, I am having a glorious time of it, I swear.
Just before we moved, we went to the farmers market at Rillito Park. Incredible produce, adorable, wide-eyed, healthful girls baking gluten-free everything (I got greedy and we ate a chocolate cupcake in the truck on the way to the other market down the road, but after I sat on a big fat crumb and it looked like I pooped my pants, we (I) decided to skip market no. 2 and go wash my trousers), and this guy roasting poblano chiles and jalapeños and other peppers in a giant, rotating, mesh drum with four blowtorches hooked up to throw flame as he cranks the handle that spins the drum like a spit. Brilliant. And fresh eggs. And chorizo from the very man who raised the pig.
And choi and some cousin of scallion with ridiculous onion powers to make me cry, which I realize doesn't take much... just a simple, fleeting, blood-red December sunset in a desert that smells like city rain in summertime, far from a home that no longer exists, with a man who sees into my soul like horses do, and shows me the world like I've always imagined but have never seen.
