Phoenix, Ariz.
By: Julia Watson
From: San Jose, CA
By: Julia Watson
From: San Jose, CA
I didn’t know it until I moved away, but the best thing about Phoenix is the light – greeting you like a smile every morning. In the early fifties when I was growing up, Phoenix was a small city of 100,000. Our house, near Bethany and 27th Avenue, wasn’t inside the city limits when we moved there in 1952, but the city grew out to it and kept going. By 1960 Phoenix had quadrupled in size. By the millennium, when I had moved away to California, it was over one million. I like to think it was the light that drew people in. As a child I loved the colorful sights of Phoenix. On spring days back then we’d drive down to Baseline Road to see the flower farms with their rows of spiky purple and pink stock. We hung our heads out the window to get the full force of the intoxicating scents – first the spicy clove scent of stock, then the softer, delicate fragrance of orange blossoms as we drove on, past the citrus groves. Sometimes we visited my grandfather and uncle at their citrus packing plant. I watched, fascinated, as grapefruit rolled down a conveyor belt in front of women perched on high stools, their hair tied up in print scarves, like Lucille Ball. They smiled at me as they worked, culling blotched or spoiled fruit off the line. In summer we played in the yard until well after dark.
Our lawns were Bermuda grass - the only thing stronger than kids and Phoenix heat. If you were poor, your Bermuda lawn went dormant in winter, turning into a pale gold thatch that held the sparkles of morning frost, but in richer neighborhoods lawns were over-seeded with ryegrass that quickly grew into a soft spring-green carpet. In those yards I saw the colors of Christmas in Phoenix: chartreuse lawns and deep green orange trees studded with bright orange fruits.
When spring came again it was time to prepare the evaporative cooler. Coolers were the poor man’s air conditioning; a giant fan blew air over pads of wet excelsior, cooling it, then circulated it through the house’s ductwork. New excelsior pads were “packed” in and hosed down each year, the piney smell of wet excelsior reminding us we were ready for another summer. “It’s a dry heat,” they always say, as if this mitigates the insult. If you haven’t lived in Phoenix full time from April Fool’s Day until Halloween, you can’t understand how hot it is. Cheerfully, reliably, endlessly hot – and it wears you down. Sometimes on summer afternoons my mother would slump down on the concrete floor right where the cooler blew strongest, and sit with her arm across her eyes, resting. We knew to leave her alone then.
Maybe foreign cities on the equator are worse, but in this country no heat lasts the way Phoenix heat does. Good thing it comes with a compensation - the most beautiful sunlight you’ll ever find.
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