Trade Offs
However, it is starting to heat up again, consistently into low 90s F / 33 C by day and 60s F / 16-19 C by night. Air conditioners and swimming pools are already becoming part of daily life over these past couple of weeks. The air conditioning does not keep up with our upstairs bedroom very well, but the stone floors and thick adobe walls keep the downstairs fairly tolerable. Thank you, God, that we are blessed with the luxury of conditioned air!!!
At night we are still able to sleep with windows open this time of year., so we are taking advantage of these last few weeks while we can. We wake up and immediately shut up the entire house, pulling blinds and shading everything, in hopes of trapping as much nighttime coolness in the house as possible. I often wonder how Phoenix ever even got established, since pioneers did not have electricity! Rick had solar panels installed on our roof at Christmas to help with this summer's eclectic bill (so if anyone is considering solar, please reach out and I'll gladly share our Tesla referral code with you).
Locals are proud that it is a "dry heat" here, but having spent the past 2+ decades in a very dry high desert setting, I can tell you that it is comparatively rather humid here! Granted, I've lived in many parts of the Midwest United States, as well as the semi-topics of Asia, so I know humidity, and compared to those places, yes, this low desert is quite dry. In real humidity, a towel never air dries, just mildews. :( If properly spread out, fabric does not tend to mildew here, but it takes overnight to air dry a towel, compared to an hour or two in Reno, so this region feels like sticky "damp heat" to us! This will be my third summer down here (our daughter and I lived here temporally over the summer of 2019, before our entire family made the move that fall) so I'm hoping I will adapt better this summer.
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| I have a love/hate relationship with this heat and all that comes with it. I am awed by the unique plants that flourish year-round in this climate, something always in bloom. |
I don't love being on constant look out for scorpions and snakes (that, thankfully, I have yet to personally encounter either, though my neighbors have, many times). I'm OKish with the lizards, at least the little guys, as long as I can see that they have legs. Here, we have fewer mosquitos and hardly any spiders at our house. The pair of huge Javelinas (Arizona's version of "wild pigs") who nested in my front yard last month terrified me, as my walker would awaken these nocturnal creatures and they would stand and bristle their backs in challenge whenever I needed to rattle by on the sidewalk - not being capable of running if they actually charged, as their aggressive behavior is known for, made me feel extremely vulnerable!
The way the severe heat zaps my energy is tough. That it gets hot enough to need air conditioning, night and day, for three straight months of no fresh air in the house, is disheartening. While we do get a bit of the desert "evening cool down" effect that we were used to in Reno (where our high desert days would get somewhere between high 80s to near or just over 100, and summer night would drop into the low 60s, 50s, or even 40s), that means the nighttime low here might drop below 100! (If the high of the day is 120, a 30 degree drop is still 90!) Since we could always count on a dramatic Reno cool down as soon as the sun set (always needed a sweater for evening outings), no matter how hot the day had gotten, it is an adjustment here to have a 112 afternoon and still only be around 100 at 11pm!
I can totally see why we have a high population of "snow birds," retirees who spend the summers in cooler climates while avoiding the physical pain of freezing winters by moving her from late autumn through early spring. While I personally would not enjoy that much moving or living a duel life and never feeling fully settled in either place, I can appreciate the benefits of that lifestyle choice!
There were many trade offs, but at the end of the day, our move here was indeed so incredibly worth it. Thank you for your continued prayers for our entire family. Respecting my commitment to family members, I will not publicly go into specifics for anyone but me, concerning any issues that prompted this move, but for those who lived the backstory with us, I will say that the altitude change has been astoundingly beneficial, yielding substantial relief that surpassed our greatest hopes. Praise God!
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