I unload her laundry, and stack it neatly to the side, where she’ll pick it up to hang on the line. It is late August, and the sky contains scarce moisture in its evaporating horsetail clouds. Flirtatiously, the monsoon arrives on cool breezes that come from the mountain updrafts and the Sea of Cortez. They lure me to the north side of the trailer. I aim to get chores over with by mid-morning, to be inside and do absolutely nothing but sit on a chair that won’t stick to my thighs and leave behind two shining ovals on the wooden seat. The twins of those wet flat eyes on the backs of my thighs, the soft, nearly invisible hair there doing what evolution meant for it to do—provide a way to cool my limbs, the silken hairs providing an evaporative cooling apparatus that triggers upon contact with air and instantly sets off a mini ventilating scheme in each pore. One of the beautiful little miracles of the architecture called the human body.

I’ll take off my shirt when everyone else is outside working in the gardens thirsty for water, though they get a deep soak every other day and thrive under thick mulch and complimentary legumes and plentiful canopy of mesquites. We encourage the volunteer mesquites wherever we can, a way to reclaim the once healthy and herbaceous northern Sonoran ecosystem on a three-acre demonstration farm, yet the salinity and nitrates from years of chemicals, contributed by previous farmers from the post-war era through the present, challenge our most skilled organic and biodynamic methods to reclaim the soil—and the soul—of this land.

I put my gloves down on the floor next to my chair; my neck and head rest on the bony back of the thriftstore Shaker replica, with a few more months left in its rickety frame. Not a plush recliner of my fantasies, but it will do as I close my eyes by the nearest swamp cooler vent, languishing in its promise of mental transport to a cooler clime, say . . . Glacier National Park, or Anchorage . . . I’m not picky. Just one or two breath-filled moments before the kids burst through the door 
wanting lunch.

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