I’m learning to think of a Sonoran summer as a Mid-Atlantic winter. It’s the season when activities become scarce and more confined, health dangers loom, and the cost of living goes up.  Giving water to anyone who asks is a compulsory act inscribed in the Arizona law books.  Charity campaigns are ratcheting up; energy costs can more than double in the summer, putting many of those who were living on the edge right over it.  There are food bank boxes and clothing drives everywhere, as well as public service encouragements to carry water in our cars for the homeless. It all has the flavor of mid-October in DC or Baltimore, when churches sign up to provide emergency shelter and the salvation army asks for socks,gloves, hats, and blankets. As in Octobers past, I’m reminded this May that natural changes that mean mere inconvenience for me mean extreme hardship for many others. It’s hard, though, because their difficulty is far off and hidden from my ordinary paths much more than it was my poorer days.  I remember once in Benin coming in from a storm drenched, delayed and frustrated, only to see that one of the bamboo and sheet metal houses on my street had blown completely down,its former occupants now lined  up in the shelter of a concrete wall.  Talk about in your face. And some hypothetical person’s hypothetical eletric bill is supposed to move me how?  It’s just not the same as sitting down with a neighbor while her kids are running around in her crappy apartment which is identical to your crappy apartment and actually going through the bills together. I recognize the loss of immediacy and personal urgency for others that comes with my moderate financial success.  Maybe I need to make some changes.  And yet, I am so reluctant to go back to those poorer times voluntarily.  I like that everything in my apartment works and that the lights and roads in the neighborhood are reliable and that it’s not too loud and I don’t have to wade through a giant miasma of stress, fatigue, and worry on my way from the parking lot to the front door. Yet that very miasma is what I need to recognize more.

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