The Smell of...Fall Break

S went on a walk with Terence this morning, and when she came home, her whole face was alight with excitement. "It smells like October!"

What does October smell like in the desert?

Campfire smoke. Or at least it's one of the smells. See, people around here don't have campfires or hang out around a fire pit during the summer. It's too dang HOT to do that. But as soon as the nights or mornings cool down into the 80's, suddenly our street becomes fire pit utopia.

 It's lovely, other than the mosquitos. Apparently the mosquitos are rejoicing in our weather as well, possibly because we got more rain last week than the entire rest of our supposed monsoon season put together. Eh. I can't complain too much. We barely saw any all summer, one of the few blessings of being dry as the Sahara for months. We needed the rain, desperately. Some of our reservoirs completely ran out of the water our farmers depend on.

When the rain came, it was with a fury. Globe got hit particularly hard with back-to-back days of flooding, and we got the call from our church to help out. Apparently, the call was really loud 😅. K went with a work crew last Monday to help with clean up and there were thousands of people that showed up. So many that they had to broadcast to people to *stop* coming to help because there was nowhere left to park in the whole city. K said their particular assignment was to find a lawnmower trailer that got washed away, but they found no sign of it at all. Either it got washed all the way down to Superior or it was pulverized into unrecognizable bits. So after shoveling some mud off some sidewalks they made their way home early. It was still a good experience for him. I'm glad he was able to get out and make a difference, even if it was a small one.

That particular storm was brutal for Terence, who had to sit on a freeway closure all night, with people who were understandably frustrated and sometimes obnoxious, arguing with him when he wouldn't let them through. It's been a difficult past month with not enough sleep. He's had a lot of bad accidents lately. Can I take a moment just to say that if you are local (or visiting the valley) and you decide to go up Highway 88 to Canyon Lake or beyond, please, please, drive SLOWLY? It is so dangerous up there. I wish I could go put a sign up in Apache Junction that updated with the number of people who have died on that stretch of road. Perhaps it would convince people to be more cautious.

Or perhaps that is just wishful thinking. *sigh*

Image by John Spicer from Pixabay

(This is Canyon Lake. Yes, it's pretty. Yes, the roads are winding, and people--usually young men--love to test their driving ability. But for the love of Pete, those signs that say 15mph are not joking!!)

On a more positive note it is the first day of General Conference today! Even though our kids are older we still had everyone here for the Saturday morning session, which was awesome. It's a lot quieter now that there are no little kids in the family. I'm enjoying that part of this stage of life, and looking forward to the other four sessions.

Happy October, everyone!