I’m going to be frank with all of you. Its fucking hot here in Arizona. I mean, this is the place Satan goes to for vacation when he wants to get a nice tan. Now, I hear you people on the east coast going, “Hot? You don’t know what hot is. Come here in the summer and see what hot is.” Well, I’ll challenge you in saying that my place is hotter than yours. Where the east coast has the type of hot that leaves your clothes sticking to your skin and enough water dripping off of you that you can actually take a bath in your own sweat, here, its different.
Want to know what it feels like to live in Arizona during the summer? Here’s how. Go to your oven and turn it to 475 degrees fahrenheit. Wait about 20 minutes. Now open the oven door, stick your head in and take in one deep breath. That, my friends, is how it feels to live in Arizona in the summer. Instead of ‘sauna’ heat that the east coast experiences, we get what is fondly called a ‘dry heat’. This basically means that instead of stewing in our own juices we shrivel up like pieces of meat that slowly becomes jerky. In fact, you walk around here and see some of the old-timers and you’ll be convinced that their skin has been jerky-rized.
So, why on Earth would someone living in this rotisserie oven ever want to knit? Well, even in the middle of a desert a cactus can still get the chills. Though its home to the fifth largest growing city in the US, Arizona is still a desert and just like any true desert we get the cold frosty nights and the desert monsoons.
But besides the occasional cool weather, there is another reason we desert rats pick up needles and hooks. We enjoy any activity that doesn’t require us to leave our air-conditioned homes. As the temperatures go up, we start going inside. Like our neighbors on the east coast do in the winter, we bunker down for the long hot days ahead. To avoid getting cabin fever, we’ve taken a cue from the early settlers here and we get crafty. Spinning, weaving, knitting, crochet and quilting. If it can be done indoors, we Arizonians are experts at it.
While the tempureture is 115 degrees outside, we’re happy to say that all is cozy and cool as we knit our woolen mittens, wishing blissfully for a freak snow storm to pass our way.