A fence without cattle, a road without cars.
"Red, green, and maybe a hint of yellow." Those colors wouldn't come to mind when thinking about driving through a desert. A plea could be made for red in earth or clay, yellow paint on the interstate or naturally on a resilient flower, but definitely not green, there was never enough rain for green.
"It never rains here," you said, "I think we had 12 inches in total last year."
12 inches, a foot, one-fifth of me. "We had a tropical storm hit us last weekend that gave us 12 inches of rain." Juxtaposed, though I was tens of thousands of miles from home.
It rained every day the rest of the week. We joked that my visit was exactly what they needed, but made for a lousy vacation. The dogs were afraid of the thunder; I was afraid the adobe architecture would disintegrate in the downpour like melting ice cream.
Each rain drop was substantial, some only stayed long enough to hit the window and slip away. I wondered if I could stay out west forever.
While reading this, your imagery and language throughout gave me a very dry, hot sense. The first paragraph related to the image really well, and speaking of the image-the caption you gave for it was catchy and kind of gave me a sense of exploring a long forgotten place.
ReplyDeleteThe 1st part of the second paragraph felt a little out of place only because you were throwing out numbers when in the first paragraph and throughout the rest your descriptive language was much more focused on the heat and barrenness. Even in the 2nd part of the second paragraph you continue to use the imagery "downpour like melting ice cream", that part gives me a sense of the desert.
When I reread what you have again, it seems to me like you're starting out with the hot intensity of the desert, working your way into a transition to the wet and comparing the two through the middle paragraph and then in the final paragraph you're making the final transition into the wet, but in order to fully achieve that, I think the final paragraph could have been one or two sentences longer.