The rain waited until right as I finished the book I’d brought with me.* Then it fell, not lightly, but not pelting either, a cool rain with sun lighting the drops that made sitting out there, letting it fall and dapple skin and clothes, seem exactly the thing to do. We didn’t head back down the mountain (specifically, Mount Lemmon) until a rumble suggested heavier rain to come.
Clouds rolled over the mountains around us as we made our descent.
As we neared the city, the desert warmed up, and we left the best of the clouds behind with the cool mountain air.
*Said book being Kathi Appelt’s The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, which I thoroughly recommend. It’s mythic in ways not unlike The Underneath, only with more humor and a contemporary edge that doesn’t get in the way of its timelessness at all.