Momma's house

It's in the desert, momma's house.

I love the starkness of the desert and the initial shock of no lush deciduous-ness, purple mountains against a vast, cloudness sky, and the scorching heat that dries your skin two steps out of the pool. We flee the airport quickly, because Momma's got a lead foot, and fly down the highway where the walls leading to the off ramps are decorated with indegenous art. We bypass vast fields of dirt and sand, squared off for future development and residential areas of white and cream and light caramel adobe with man-made lakes and fountains because there is something about man's ability to make water spring from the desert, something about man's ability to significantly change the natural environment...we call it "civilization," but I wonder.

Momma's house is cream, with gorgeous cactii and lizards in the front and a grapefruit and an orange tree in the back. It's in an "active senior" area where oft coiffed matrons zoom down the streets in their mercedes golf carts to the club and the store and each other's homes. We enter the comforting lightness, the familiarity of our old family piano, and the dining room furniture that was purchased when I was 7 or 8, and pictures of us as kids, and some of our childhood art, and elephants, the symbol of mom's sorority, and computers and iPads, tech savvy Momma, and heavy antiques gathered over a lifetime, and potions and ungents, and patios to be spray washed and boxes to be moved, and 4000 TV channels in almost every room. I loll on the leather couch, I loll on the pool side chaise lounges, I loll in Momma's car and care, I loll about on the impossibly soft bed in the guest room under the modern ceiling fan that I can control remotely. I read with the TV on until I fall asleep and Momma comes in and turns off the TV and the lights, turns down the fan.

We always go to the "Urban Tea Loft," a great little restaurant that one of Momma's friends owns, where we have hibiscus tea and salmon and impossible slices of red velvet cake and the chef looks like Ibrahim from the "Old Spice" commercials. We swim in the early mornings before the heat of the day, and eat Greek yogurt and as much fruit as we can hold, shop, go to museums or friend's houses, and talk and talk and talk.

When I return through the sky to green trees and black soil, I am browner, and calmer, touched by the familiar and the stark.