Women.  We glide and slide and bump and birth.  We’re petals of pink easily torn apart, yet when torn, we turn strong as iron.  We fight to keep what little we have only to give it all away.  We drive like maniacs and love like crazy.  Once we love you, you’ll be loved forever — even when we make you go away — although we’ll hold you until our arms break from the weight of your nonsense.

These are truths, solid as the earth, rolling liquid like the sea.

My friend and I talked about the strange mettle of women this past week.  We’ve known each other for years and in spite of now and then lengthy absences, we never miss a beat.  We pick up our sentences in the very spot where we last left off.  This time I was visiting.  She was my gracious hostess.  We live now in separate states, but only an hour an a half away by plane … or a nanosecond apart by email or phone.

As always, our conversations over the four and a half days of my visit sparked like flint on stone, every word, each progressive thought, igniting a new and bright fire by which to light our way across this thing called womanhood.  We talked husbands and children and politics and religion — deeply exploring each subject and how we’ve been shaped by every topic that came to mind.  For the oddities of life that we so dearly share, we laughed until our hearts split open; we know so well the regions of each other’s lives.  For those things that baffle us, we simply shook our heads and clicked our tongues behind our teeth.  This is what women do.  We laugh and heave and click and dream.

When it was time for me to leave, it was like I was only running to the store.  I’ll be right back, my gesture of a wave said.  Maybe she’ll come here next.  Or perhaps we’ll only follow each other’s thoughts and movements on FaceBook … or by email or phone.  It makes no difference.

She is as much a part of me as is my arm.

We’ll find each other again … we’ll pick up our conversation where it last left off … not a beat will be missed. We’ll find each other again — for this is how women are.

It’s monsoon time in the desert.  We’ve actually been in “monsoon season” for a few weeks, but last evening was the first evidence of it in my area.  Fundamentally, monsoon is linked more to a shift in winds than precipitation, as evidenced by shrieking dust storms followed by three fat drops of rain.  In fact, the name “monsoon” is derived from the Arabic word “mausim” which means “season” or “wind-shift”.

The Arizona Monsoon is a well-defined meteorological event (technically called a meteorological “singularity”) that occurs during the summer throughout the southwest portion of North America. During the winter time, the primary wind flow in Arizona is from the west or northwest—from California and Nevada. As we move into the summer, the winds shift to a southerly or southeasterly direction. Moisture streams northward from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. This shift produces a radical change in moisture conditions statewide.

Such a change, together with daytime heating, is the key to the Arizona monsoon. This wind shift is the result of two meteorological changes:

• The movement northward from winter to summer of the huge upper air subtropical high pressure cells, specifically the so-called Bermuda High (H).
• In addition, the intense heating of the desert creates rising air and surface low pressure (called a thermal low) in the Mohave (L).

These two features combine to create strong southerly flow over Arizona. The southerly winds push moisture north-ward from Mexico, although the exact source region for the moisture of the Arizona monsoon is unknown.

Now that you’ve had your meteorological lesson for the day, let me just tell you that a monsoon storm blows like crazy — usually in the evening just after you’ve lit the barbeque for those two-inch thick steaks that have been marinating all day, a lovely wine is waiting to be poured, the salad is high and healthy with good salady things and you’ve just set the patio table.  Yep.  That’s the moment when a wall of dust slams through your back yard, upending table and chairs and tipping your beautiful salad and wine all over the place.

Yep.

That’s what monsoon is all about.

Which is exactly why I’m taking a morning flight tomorrow, rather than the more convenient evening flight.  Those pesky monsoon storms normally come in the late afternoon or evening.  Flying in and out of Phoenix is bumpy at best with its thermals and updrafts or downdrafts or sidedrafts or whichever way those drafts come.  It’s always bumpy over Phoenix.  But flying through a storm would force me to drink heavily while strapped into a tiny seat in an upright and locked position.  To avoid that whole messy scene altogether, I just fly in the calm of the morning.  It’s nice.  No nervous laughter in the cabin.  People calmly sipping their morning coffee.  Business people with laptops, readying themselves for their business stuff.  People reading serenely, picking out items from the Sky Mall.  Kids playing nicely in their seats.

I’ll be gone just a few days.  Out Friday and back on Tuesday.  I’m traveling light, so I’ll most likely not take my laptop — unless I decide there’s room and I don’t mind the extra weight — I never know what I’ll do until the last moment.  In the meantime, be well and stay safe.

When I return, our next lesson will be about crickets and why my kitchen is covered in butcher paper and blue painter’s tape.

Sad news regarding one of my favorite living authors.  I’ve never done this before, but today I reprint an article from the Belfast Telegraph, in full, because I don’t know how to either add to or take away from the amazing life and work of Frank McCourt:

Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt ‘may have weeks to live’

By Grainne Cunningham
Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Author of the bestseller Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt, who is battling the deadly skin cancer melanoma, is gravely ill and may have only weeks to live.

The Pulitzer Prize winner, who is due to celebrate his 79th birthday next month, was transferred to a hospice at the weekend.

According to the writer’s brother Malachy McCourt, who spoke publicly about his brother’s illness in May, the cancer was then in remission following a course of chemotherapy.

Describing his brother as “a hearty fellow” who had survived worse, Mr McCourt, an actor and author, denied several media reports that his brother was on his deathbed.

After receiving treatment at the world-famous Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York, the writer was declared well enough to return home to Connecticut.

However, a friend said yesterday that Mr McCourt’s condition has deteriorated dramatically since then and that he is seriously ill.

It is understood he became unwell while on a cruise in the Pacific and was transferred to a hospital in Tahiti.

The Brooklyn-born former schoolteacher shot to fame relatively late in life with the publication of ‘Angela’s Ashes’ in 1996, when he was 56 years of age.

The memoir tells the tale of his impoverished childhood in Limerick after his alcoholic father Malachy and his mother Angela moved back there when he was just four years old. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997.

His second book, ‘’Tis’, picked up the story of his life where Angela’s Ashes left off, with his arrival in America at age 19.

His 2005 memoir, ‘Teacher Man’, chronicled his 27-year career in the New York City school system.

Both books were instant bestsellers.

For 30 years, Mr McCourt taught in New York City high schools, having earned a degree at New York University.

He recently made his first venture into children’s books with “Angela and the Baby Jesus,” based on an incident from the childhood of his mother Angela.  In an interview at the end of 2007 he said that he was in the middle of writing his first novel, and was also planning a book for teenagers.

Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead; a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Blaise Cendrars (Swiss/French)

For several months of the year, Phoenix resembles the origins of its name.  Days burst into flames, only to leave people panting in a heap of their ashes by nightfall.  I’m mostly a puddle, rather than dry ashes.  By the end of October, the desert comes to its senses and rises to present its inhabitants with temperatures more realistic and less flammable.

If you’re wondering, this mention of the Phoenix desert has absolutely nothing to do with the quote at the top, except that the cool air of a mine would be welcome relief today.  Yesterday, we topped out at 115F and maintained triple digits until late into the night.  We didn’t need lamps on our foreheads; we merely glowed with heat, the skin of our fingers were seared when we touched the handles of our cars.  The brightness was neither dubious nor false in its illumination.  Even sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats didn’t turn down the light.

Still, in the middle of the hottest day yet this summer — a record setting day — people were out on bicycles or hiking the many desert mountain trails near my house.  They were JOGGING!  Crazy people, no doubt.  People who’ve had one too many knocks on the head, I imagine.  People who haven’t the good sense God gave a duck.

Me?  I exercised in my house.  In the center of our downstairs area is a staircase walled on three sides.  It makes a perfect square to walk around.  And around.  And around.  The dogs stand off to the side and watch their mistress “walk the square” as I call it.  Around and around.  They look at me as if I’m crazy.

In fact, I mutter to myself while I walk the square — only for the sake of the dogs, of course, who consider craziness just another form of fun.  My muttering, circling, forays around the square only serve to complete the picture of a woman, dazed by the Arizona heat in July, who just wants to move a bit without having to drive to the mall.  The mall isn’t really that great for walking unless you get there before all the texting teenagers who don’t look where they’re going.  Still, other than the square in my house, it’s the only cool place in all of Phoenix.

Except maybe the movie theater, which if you close your eyes and plug your ears, for just a moment it might resemble the cool, dark depths of a mine.

So here’s how it went:  I told on my husband.  I gave away his nighttime secret — to the doctor, no less.  There we were, two happy little people sitting in the doctor’s office, following up on some teensy-weensy little medicine change, when I blurted out a statement that shall forever change the way Dan and I conduct our nighttime business.

“I think Dan has apnea,” I said, my throat filling with the pleasure of a do-gooding wife who reads way too information on the internet.  But there I was telling on my husband … asking about sleep apnea and if it really can cause sudden death.  We don’t do sudden death in our house.  It’s not allowed, like drinking from the toilet bowl or licking clean the bottoms of our shoes would be frowned-upon behavior.  The thought of tragic rainclouds smudging our still-vibrant loveliness is unthinkable and forbidden.  The horror of even a moment’s notion of my beloved’s sudden death is simply not acceptable.

So, I told on him.

I blathered on about his snoring … and how in the midst of the cacophony that sings from his nightly throat, he often becomes quiet and still — and eerily silent — before loudly gasping in a sonorous boom that causes the dogs to shift position and hold their paws over their ears.  I told how it happens over and over all night long.  And how his sudden, loud, nearly violent, inhalations wake me.  How I curve myself to match the shape of his sleeping body, listening to the ebb and flow of his breath.  How I wonder how long I should listen to those moments of growing silence before I should drag him feet first off the bed to breathe life back into his suddenly quiet mouth.  How I’ve memorized the cadence of CPR counting, should it be needed.   Poor Dan.  What could he say?

“Nuh huh.  No way.”

“Yuh huh.  Way.”

So, my desperately shy guy spent last night in a sleep study facility, in his jammies, hooked to wires and probes — without his evening glass of wine, without the familiarity of his home, or the comfort of his own bed, or his habit of falling asleep in the middle of a David Letterman punchline.  Nevertheless, he bravely endured “The Study.”  This morning he came home with a diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea and an order for a full CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine that he will need to wear over his mouth and nose every night.  Poor Dan.

But me?  I’m crowing!

I told on my husband.  Yes, our nighttime is soon to be punctuated with the hiss of an air machine.  Yes, Dan will forever need to be strapped to a machine whenever he sleeps.  Yes, our bedroom will be newly-decorated with the likes of medical equipment, complete with its hoses and buttons and what-nots.  Yes, he is mortified.  Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Still, I’m contenting myself this morning with the thought that some information gathered from that series of tubes known as The Internets and The Google may have — SAVED.  HIS.  LIFE.

So, I’ll continue to tell on him like a kid telling on a naughty friend — again and again and again — until we are so old we’ve lost all good sense and the notion of slipping off into the night only wake up dead doesn’t sound like such a bad idea after all.

In the meantime, take a breath, dear.

My parents claimed often and vociferously that I was born with my grandfather’s white-hot Irish temper.  They swore there wasn’t a diaper change, a feeding, a bath … a moment …  that wasn’t accompanied by needle sharp shrieks that melted every microscopic cochlear hair deep inside the whorls of their ears.  They claimed that the sounds from my tiny body could peel wallpaper and liquefy the floor.

At two, my mother kept a leash around my waist because I followed strangers.  Down the street.  Out of sight.  Not even a glance back.  Buh bye, gone.  I vividly recall as a four-year old, kicking a hole in my bedroom door because I didn’t want to change out of my princess dress and into play clothes suitable for digging in the sandbox.  In the end, I changed clothes … but a child’s size 4 shoe hole seemed evidence enough to me that I had won that battle.

I was also that charming child who could wheedle and whine her way to candy before dinner and a third popsicle right before bed.  If something made me cry, I threw my whole body into it — holding my breath until I turned blue and fainted.  Literally.  I held my breath until I fainted.

Thank goodness I grew out of those shrieking, kicking, tantrum-giving, fainting episodes.  My days as a wild Irish heathen (as my mother referred to me), ended at around six.  From that time on, I was, ah-hem, a model child.  I was perfect.  The Irish family curse was broken.

Now it’s back.

Well, not the screaming tantrum part, but rather the other family curse part.  It seems I’ve got the bad … I mean really, really bad … cholesterol level that has bedeviled (and killed) many of my family members.  Yes, I have the oh-my-god, I could have a heart attack or stroke any second now because of these cholesterol numbers thing.  Apparently, the arteries of this sweet-natured, formerly-bad-Irish-girl-gone-good have quietly been clogging up.

This just makes me want to hold my breath until I turn blue.

Instead, I’ll take my medicine and hope to goodness that the sludge that’s been silently building will have the good sense to reverse course.

Not a lick of gravy is henceforth allowed to touch these lips.  I’m off the double cheeseburger wagon for good, and you know those french fries? gone like a two-year-old without her leash.  I’m off the sauce and … gulp! … on the treadmill.  Yeah, baby … it’s the old diet and exercise routine for me.

Either that or I hold my breath permanently … and I’m just too cursed with that family streak of stubborn Irish to let that happen yet.  So if you need me, I’ll be the squatty gym babe on the StairMaster, third from the end.  You know, the limping woman with the chronic sinus condition.  Yeah, that one — the one trying to keep her really bad Senator Levin comb over in place while sweating out all those bad cholesterolies — all the while fondly daydreaming of sweet by-gone days of steak and mashed potatoes drowning in butter.

Wish me luck.