I’m gonna pull down the shades, try to take a cold shower… (guitar riff) I’d migrate to Portland if I had a thousand dollars. (guitar riff) I called up my weatherman, he said, “Hey— You’re gonna hafta wait til San Juan’s Day.” (chorus) Sometimes I wonder how I’ll make it through— There must be a cure for the summertime blues.
— a Tucson parody after “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran, August, 19582
Through the windshield during a monsoon in Tucson. (Don’t do this yourself)
Ordinary World: It Starts Getting Hotter
IN TUCSON, summer doesn’t arrive all at once. It sneaks up slowly in small details: sharper light, thinner shadows, a nagging sense that something is coming. The air gains weight; even the “cold” tap shifts toward lukewarm.
By just following your ordinary patterns, you may suddenly find yourself in summer. You know it’s happened when you keep oven mitts in the car and stepping outside feels like opening an oven. By the time you notice, it’s too late: you stayed.
Folklorist Big Jim Griffith knew summer had arrived when “my wife scattered corn for the chickens, it all started to pop. The chickens thought it was snow and they froze to death.” If that doesn’t get your attention, the Arizona Daily Wildcat spells it out in black and white: “Three reasons why Tucson is the worst place to be in the summer.”
In 2026 the weatherman said the first 100˚F day was March 19, the earliest triple‑digit day on record. The brittlebush in my yard already knew; they and other spring bloomers flowered in February, weeks early. People quietly start leaving for cooler places—Portland, Maine, Canada, Greenland—as if admitting they might not truly belong here. By June, the streets in my neighborhood are empty. You could walk out in your underwear, but I don’t go far—one could get sunburn.
But the desert does not empty. It gathers itself.
Some stay because they can’t afford to leave. Others stay from a quieter mix of desire, curiosity, and the wish to pass the audition, and imagine themselves as natives. Staying becomes the first step in their education.
The Lessons
Summer in Tucson is a school. The first virtue we learn is waiting. The sense of time changes to one of slowing down and watching. Go outside—not between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.—Keep your eye on the sky.
Accept the lethargy. Your body is working harder to keep cool, losing fluids and minerals, and trying to repair itself during long, hot days. This is not a moral failure; it’s a signal. Let the desk pile up, postpone a few appointments, let a deadline pass if you can, and plan iced‑coffee dates with friends instead.
Then there is fatigue, soaring electric bills, the low‑level irritability of too many days over 105°F, and too much time indoors.
The next warnings come like a fire alarm in late May–June: the hottest days with no clouds in sight. You stayed for summer. Cicadas love this time; nymphs have waited years underground for these hottest days. They sound like an electrified tree with something gone wrong, an all‑absorbing acoustic architecture. As you walk away from one in the wild, just as its buzz begins to fade, you pick up another in a tree ahead. You could walk, following this handoff of static all the way to South America; only the timbre of different cicada species changes. Nevertheless, resist this temptation.
You will still learn the deeper meaning of thirst, a longing nothing you drink can satisfy. In desperation, you’ll run cold showers, but the cold tap will produce only warm water. You won’t know it yet, but this is part of the plan. Only rainwater can satisfy this craving, and without the months of waiting, the transformation—and the final joy—would not be complete.
Crossing: Listening to Summer
The second lesson is attention: you cannot move through the day as you did in December; learn from life forms that has been here longer than you.
Morning becomes the primary field of action. Birdsong compresses into a narrow window after sunrise—around 5:15 a.m. near the solstice. Curve‑billed Thrashers begin foraging before the sun clears the horizon, whistling ‘wheat WHEAT!’ as they trace their routes through yards and washes. Listen: you’ll learn to distinguish white‑winged doves from mourning doves—the sharp ‘Too HOT for YOU!’ and the haunting ‘coo‑ah, COO‑coo‑cooo.’
By midday, the desert withdraws into stillness. Even the wind seems to reconsider its commitments. You should too.
At dusk, lesser nighthawks and bats take over, their erratic flight stitching the sky together. Learn to distinguish the flight patterns of birds, bats, and moths. It gives shape to the twilight and marks your passage from the ordinary day into the charged evenings of pre‑monsoon. Go outside then.
Threshold: Cactus Calendar and Rain
If you stay, you begin to see that summer here is not a dead season but a threshold—a turning point into a less familiar world. One with a different calendar—not a gap in the year, but a core chapter—based on a cactus. That stretch between April and June, as saguaros bud, flower, and ripen, is the ecological anchor for the O’odham new year—an annual reset that only makes sense if you’re present to watch it happen. Now, you can look forward to San Juan’s Day.
In the Sonoran Desert, June 24, the feast of St. John the Baptist became an ‘opening day’ for the summer rains, blending Spanish‑Catholic and Indigenous traditions tied to the monsoon.” Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado cemented this truth when he prayed for rain on San Juan’s Day in 1540 and the Santa Cruz River flowed with rainwater. History does not say how long he waited.
John the Baptist is associated with water and ritual cleansing. A tradition after morning mass on his day was to walk into the nearest canal, pond, or puddle and immerse yourself fully clothed. To be as wet as possible was to be more blessed. If it rains on this day, it predicts a heavy monsoon season more accurately than any climatologist can.
For the O’odham, the threshold is carried in language and song. While waiting, people have a job to do. O’odham poet and linguist Ofelia Zepeda remembers her mother explaining that the songs of the rain ceremony must be sung before the rains will come. Young Ofelia answered her, “The rains always come at the same time every year, anyway.” Her mother replied, “It’s because we always do the ceremonies at this time of year.”
Zepeda describes the powerful language that brings the rain as a kind of spirit journey to the place clouds come from:
And somewhere along the way, I stopped again And it was my cloud that reached me And it was sprinkling, wet And here I reached the rainhouse and looked inside There lay many winds, there lay many clouds, There lay many seeded things And you set them down and sat upon them And with them, I touched you And you moved and breathed your wind And made something with it Here you dropped it upon my land And with that, my land was sprinkled with water and was finished.¹
My weatherman would call this a seasonal air‑pressure pattern; Zepeda calls it a cloud being carried back from the Rain House.
Extremes naturally resolve to their opposite. The heat creates a low-pressure zone that naturally draws in the cooling monsoon rains. Meteorologists explain the North American monsoon as weeks of May–June heat over the Sonoran Desert drawing moist air north from the Pacific and Gulf of California, turning a parched landscape into one of towering clouds and sudden downpours. The monsoon rain is ocean water.
June, the ‘Saguaro Fruit Month’ in the O’odham calendar, is when saguaro fruit, the ha:ṣañ ba:ṣo, ripens and bursts open, showing red to the empty sky, cueing what is to come. July, the ‘Rainy Month,’ is the O’odham New Year, a sacred time of renewal and planting in trust of the coming rains.
If you spend quality time with a saguaro from May through August, you’ll see all the stages from bud to fruit on the ground, a feast for many other lives. Note the tiny red dots, red velvet mites, for their size comparison—we’ll talk about them later. (photo by Paul Mirocha)
That’s when I walk outside in the downpour. Yes, fully clothed, to feel as wet as possible. Monsoon clouds can tower up to ten miles into the atmosphere—the water is so cold, it’s a shock. After months of dry heat, this cold and wet feel like a baptism, a cleansing, a fitting beginning to a new year.
Extraordinary World: They Came from Underground
Some things only appear in summer. They could not survive in a mild season. They survive by disappearing—buried underground until heat and rain line up just right. That’s their lesson for us: patience, timing, and knowing when to move. Once we slow down enough, we can notice them and with them, a richness of life we didn’t know was here.
Red velvet mite, Dinothrombium (size is 1/8 – 1/2 inch.)
Red velvet mites, Dinothrombium, or “rain bugs,” the color of ripe saguaro fruit, are one rare sight. These arachnids live underground all year and climb to the surface for just a brief window—right after the first monsoon storm—to gorge on swarming termites and ants, then disappear back below until the next summer.
Spadefoot toads spend most of the year underground until the sound and vibration of heavy rain trigger them to rise. They come up to party only when they’re sure there will be temporary puddles and ponds where tadpoles can grow before the water evaporates. The sound of the monsoon is males bleating like sheep.
Arizona cactus frog, Notocereus hopalongcasidii (illustration by Paul Mirocha)
Finally, you may be one of the few to observe the Arizona cactus frog, Notocereus hopalongcasidii. Although common, it has only recently been described by science. This is probably due to the remote areas it inhabits, emerging only during peak heat, when no sensible observer is present. In addition, the cactus frog clings to saguaro trunks, an effective camouflage. Scientists assume females lose their spines before mating. Reports of this true desert amphibian may underlie the legend of the ‘jumping cactus,’ which does not, in fact, exist.
Return: Nothing Is Quite the Same
The desert does not apologize; it waits for you to figure it out. After enough summers, you stop seeing heat as a problem to solve, and start feeling it as a deeper layer of experience, kind of like a sauna.
Summer is not for everyone. But if you stay, observe, and participate, you may find that when you go back to your routines, they no longer feel like the whole story; part of you is still listening for cicadas and watching the horizon for rain.
The only thing I can guarantee is this: you will understand the phrase, “The desert smells like rain.”
. . . . . .
P.S. Please leave your own Summertime Blues verses in the comments. We’ll collect and edit them into a song.
1 When It Rains: Papago and Pima Poetry, 1982, University of Arizona Press
2Summertime Blues, Eddie Cochran, 1958, (covered famously by The Who, Live at Leeds, 1970)
Blog post, photos, and artwork courtesy of Pima County Master Naturalist Paul Mirocha
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