Extremes

My father moved us out to Arizona when I was six, claiming that he would never shovel another snowy driveway again. I think about this as I walk the streets of my adopted home, while the wind whistles past my ears and the freezing cold tries to dig its broken fingernails into the chinks in my armor to rip it away and gnaw the warmth from my bones.

I'm not scared, probably because I don't know enough to be scared, because growing up all I knew was that death didn't come from the cold, but from heat. Heat was dust, and thirst, and filth, the sun and sweat and burning that leeched the life and color out of the world, while cold was a cool shower, shade, rain coming off the mountains, a swimming pool, snow above the Catalina foothills, a drink of water that kept you alive.