Dress Less

For the better part of my fifty-nine years, I have dressed in an unvarying uniform of sweatshirt/tee shirt and jeans. It served me well at fourteen and felt comfortable enough in the years as a young mother and by the time my forties and fifties came, why bother to change? So it has been rather a 'shock' to the old "Same ol' same ol'" to have the opportunity here in Arizona to wear shorts and tank tops and dare I say it... sundresses?

I have always had a soft spot for sundresses, mostly because living in Dillon Beach, one didn't have much call for them. But I'd buy one whenever one would take my fancy and if we were vacationing in Mexico or Hawaii or a warm weather Caribbean climate, then I'd trot one out and wear it. A sundress makes one feel airy and light and cool and almost like a child again. A sundress is just something I could never take on a daily basis. Until we moved to Superior, that is.

Shorts are fine. I've learned to show my legs and I must say I haven't been tanner in years. But donning a sundress and sandals for running uptown, well it just feels mannerly and grown up and the right thing to do. (Maybe it's my Southern roots emerging!)

When we closed up our house in Baja last year, I asked Bill to bring back a rust colored full skirted sundress I'd bought thirty years ago. It still fits and still looks good on me, so the other day before heading into town, I put it on. When my sister and I went into a newly opened dress shop in Casa Grande, the saleslady commented on my dress saying how pretty it was. I agreed and told her it was thirty years old and time to buy a new dress. I emerged with not one, but two dresses. They liked me both and didn't want to be stuck back on their hangers in the store. Suddenly, my closet was getting smaller.

A few days later, I put on another sundress, a little red coverup I'd bought in the sales brochure from Victoria Secret ten years ago (are my clothes all this old?) and wore to several different Caribbean resorts. Bill and I walked downtown to do some shopping. Our first shop was at a secondhand shop. The owner is a beautiful flamboyant lady who prides herself on wearing smart vintage clothing. That day she was wearing a handpainted (big purple orchids on a turquoise background) sleek shift from the Seventies that put my little red knit number to shame. The one I like on her is heavily adorned with long swingy fringe. But she looks real good in most everything she puts on, maybe it's her honey gold locks. Whatever. The vintage shop lady in her vintage clothes. She's definitely into dresses.

Then we progressed uptown to another shop. Here, two sisters in their fifties were also wearing some nice little cotton frocks. When the temperature was hitting the low Nineties, it was the way to stay cool. One of their customers came in wearing black stilettos and a black mini skirt with an off the shoulder tunic adorned with long black fringe. Goodness... this was fun! Most of the time at the beach, my customers dress much the same as me: sweatshirt and jeans! This warm weather dressing could get to be fun.

So I've got my eye peeled for some vintage sundresses. I'm sure they're here somewhere. It will just take some time to open up a trunk filled with the right clothes and then I will blend right in. And leave my sweatshirts and jeans packed away for the beach visits.

Queen of EBay

I have gotten myself heavily involved in selling my Something Fishy shirts on EBay this past week and have neglected my blog. Sorry... but this become addictive after a time. My first sale occurred the week after Easter while I was in Dillon Beach and though I continued 'selling' items the next month, I didn't have any sales.

The past two weeks, shirt sales took off. A Hawaiian guy in Kona liked the looks of my "Island Girls" shirt, a brightly colored red and blue and yellow creation with 1950's bathing beauties reclining in palm trees. I figured if I could sell Hawaiian shirts to genuine Hawaiians then I was off and running. So I started hammering away on the Island Girls shirts. And I found there were a lot of extra large and double extra large men on EBay looking for a way to stand out in a crowd!

I purposely kept the price low when I started out, selling them at about half the amount I normally would at the Landing. Bill said I was going to go broke slowly but I figured that was the best way to start. This past Monday, at the end of an auction on a 2XL shirt, I had my first bidding war going on. A man from California who badly wanted it for $20. was bid up to $36. before he 'won' it. The other dude emailed to ask if he could have a "Second Chance" at it, meaning, if I had a second shirt just like it, he would buy it at his highest bid, which was $35. I checked my stash of fabric. There was just enough of the Island Girls print to make a 2XL shirt. So Monday night I sent him a twenty four chance to buy the (still unmade) shirt for $35. and I danced gleefully around the living room telling Bill I was "Queen of EBay!"

Tuesday morning, I got the shirt cut out but didn't get to the actual sewing of it because I got busy with the purses I've been making and when the twenty-four hours was up on Tuesday evening, I was hurt to discover that the Second Chance Buyer was not interested in pursuing his chance at the Island Girls shirt after all. Since I had it cut out already, though not sewn, I posted another sale on EBay, adding that I was opening the bids at $25. but if someone wanted to, they could "Buy It Now!" for $35.

So Wednesday morning, I sat down and started sewing it up. There was a message on there first thing from a man in Texas asking how big the chest measurement was. I answered him and set to work. At one thirty, I took it off the machine and wrapped it up, and put it away. I went to the computer and fired it up and Lo and Behold! the man from Texas had weighed in thirty minutes before, struck the "Buy It Now!" button and paid by PayPal. He was ready for me it send it. I wrapped it up and delivered it to the post office before three o'clock.

Now... that's what I call Poppin'! And that's why, at least for a day, I felt like Queen of EBay.

Superior Business

Business on Main Street is getting weary and I am wondering if it is because of the Recession that is on us or if the fact of running a business in a modern day ghost town takes its toll after a few months. This morning, Bill and I spent poking around the few stores open in our fair city looking for a suitable Mother's Day gift for me. The stores on Highway 60 were open and we greeted a few friends we knew at one of the shops down there. Traffic was whizzing by on a warm May day and prospects for doing more business looking promising.

We headed uptown to check out the shops on Main Street. One gift shop had already put a notice on her door that today she'd be open at ten AM and she was having a "Going Out of Business" sale. She's had some real Hard Times this year in her family and hadn't been open since the first of March. So seeing her "Going Out of Business" sign wasn't surprising. Sad, though. At ten fifteen, she still wasn't open so we urged Chuy up Magma Street to check out a yard sale that was advertised. I met an extremely chatty four year old, named Julia, who tried to sell me her doll with cerise pink hair. "She smells of cotton candy!" the child commended. "Or you could buy this one..." (It was an identical match to the pink haired doll but had bright purple hair), "but she smells like bubble gum!" (Julia, you'll make a fine sales lady someday!) But no, I resisted and bought one of her grandma's old cookbooks instead.

The Going Out of Business shop still hadn't opened when we returned to Main Street so we walked downtown to another store that's only open on the week-ends. It's run by two convivial ladies and they were having a massive "Fifteen Percent Off Everything In The Store!" sale, so of course, I had to duck in and check things out. I picked out a couple of trays and a bright green wicker basket and talked to the ladies as they rang up my purchases. I told them about the demise of the shop down the street and said how sorry I was that she would be leaving. They tsked-tsked themselves, then one lowered her voice and said she expected that they too would be calling it quits when the torpid summer days set in. (Yeah, you hardly find any shops open in July and August in this neck of the woods. I guess folks just get too hot to shop and take off for the beach.) But instead of just closing for a few months, they'd be closing up and leaving. Being open on the week-ends was just not bringing in enough cash to pay the rent and meet their bills.

I am sorry to see them leave. It won't leave hardly anything open and won't provide even a casual shopper an excuse to come peruse Main Street. It shocks me to see how dreary business is done in this town. For instance, at the beginning of Main Street, is a fairly new (opened last year) restaurant/bar. It has a top of the line building and an adjoining garden patio area. When they were open one day in January, the owner told us excitedly of his plans to have Ladies Night on Thursdays, and each week-end during February and March he had some sort of entertainment planned to drum up business. He ennumerated so many plans I asked him if he had a website I might refer to. He said, yes, soon, it would be up and running. Well, since that long ago day in January, we've found him open only about half a dozen times. Most days, even week-ends, it's shut up tighter than a drum with only a "Closed" sign on the door, never any mention as to when he might possibly be open. Townspeople fume to each other about the strangeness of a brand new business being more closed than open and "What's with that?" There's a rumor that it might be for sale. But mostly, the "Closed" sign is what you see.

Last week, I took an afternoon business seminar given by the Central Arizona College in conjunction with the Small Business Administration. The goal is to create more businesses in Pinal County. The instructor told us to prepare a business plan for what we expect to do in this community. Here's my plan: I'm going to rent one of the dilapidated storefronts on Main Street. I'll gussy up the front of it with bright colored rainbow paint. Bill will sell framed prints from this Australian Outback artist he's fond of and who is trying to get a following in this country. I'll stock it with my Something Fishy Hawaiian print shirts I've been sewing and the patchwork and drawstring bags Gloria and I have been working on. We'll be open only once or twice a month. We'll send fliers out to the locals and take advertisements in the local papers on the week-ends when we will be open so folks will get excited and come out and see what we're offering. And you know what I'm going to call it? Superior's "Never Open" Shop! So when the few days a month when we are open, it will be a red letter day for Superior. What can be any different than the way things are done now?

Apache Leap Hike

Time is getting short before I head back to Dillon Beach for the summer season at the Landing. And we hadn't gotten to climb up Apache Leap yet. So yesterday, we took up our (still new) walking sticks and set out on a two and a half hour walk up towards Apache Leap. The first shot shows how far we actually got. No, we didn't get to the top of the mountain itself. The odd thing is that the mountain peak which looks so nearby here from town, is actually a far piece when you come to walk it.

We got on the old Raymert Mine Road that winds up toward the bottom of the craggy bluffs themselves and walked it for an hour and a half. The walk was rocky rubble in places and mostly straight up. At times, I'd have to stop and try and catch my breath. We thought we were in pretty good shape from our daily thirty and forty minutes walks, but a hike uphill for four or five times that long tends to let you know what kind of shape you're in! And it wasn't as though we finally ran out of road to walk on. No, it continued on up, towards the bluff's base. While we felt we could still go on, we weren't sure we'd have much energy for the rest of the day, so reluctantly we called it quits and came down.

Coming down was quicker, by far, but in some of the rubblier places I was glad to have that third leg of the walking stick and it caught my fall at least two times. We paused on several overlooks to get some good shots of the town and Queen Creek canyon below us. Resolution Copper Mine, the old mine north of town, showed up real good from that elevation. In that second picture there, we climbed a ridge of rock jutting up from a peak to get a view of Highway 60's Queen Creek bridge just north of Superior. I was surprised by how agile Chuy was, able to perch on rocky shards like a little mountain goat.

At the end of the walk, though, Chuy flung himself into the shade under the car and panted. I put my walking stick into the car and picked him up. He was covered with big stickery burrs from the plant he'd been lying in. Docilely, he allowed me to clean him up and he curled up in my lap for the ride home. We didn't get a lot more out of him the rest of the day and today we purposely didn't walk anywhere. We thought we'd give the puppy (and ourselves) a day of rest before we find somewhere new to explore.

Why Can't I See One Too?

My aunt saw one in her bedroom. A realtor saw one in a house she was selling. Last week, a friend told me about seeing one in a old hotel he was visiting in Bisbee. Gosh darn it, I'd like to see one too! What do I have to do?

I'm talking about ghosts. Spirits. Entities that aren't exactly of our realm but still have some connection to this life here. And the more folks I talk to this year, the more commonplace it seems to be to have seen one. There are shows on television about trying to prove or disprove the existance of ghosts. And didn't I have a ghostbuster visit me too this spring? Well, gee, being's as how interested I am in the supernatural and open to all of this, why haven't I seen one?

I'm certainly not a skeptic. Maybe I embrace the thought of spirits far more than most people. It's not as though I haven't communicated with them. In my meditations, I get messages from those that have died and pass the communications on to their loved ones. That part, to me, seems perfectly plausible and understandble and doesn't "cweep me out!" (Thanks, Sage, for that line). But the thought of actually getting to see one, to communicate on that level. Yeah. That "cweeps me out" a bit. Maybe that's why I haven't been privy to seeing one yet.

The one the realtor saw, she looked out a window in an old house she was selling and saw a man dressed in old time-y clothes sitting at the bottom of the garden with his hat on. She was a far piece from town, out in the country and was waiting for clients to show up and there was nobody around. But here sat a gentleman, who turned to her and nodded his head and raised his hand in a salute. At that moment, the client's car turned into the driveway and she watched the man vanish into the morning air. She felt he was the original owner of the house. And she figured he was there to make sure that whoever bought his home would be good to it. Truth to tell, she was rather blase about it. I was the one who got goosebumps over her story.

So okay, maybe if I were to have an 'encounter', I'd be blase about it too. I could hope. I might be just a touch too 'hyper' to be that cool with it. I'd probably be running around telling everyone I saw what just happened and blogging about it too, of course. So.... now I've opened myself up to the Universe with this request, haven't I? I'm ready for my Encounter. Let me see one and then I'll report to all of you. Hey, if nothing else, it will liven up the blog, won't it?

The Back of Beyond

Last Friday we took a trek up to some property we own outside of St. Johns, Arizona. It was the second time I've gone there and the third time Bill has visited. St. Johns is an active little farming community in the eastern corner of Arizona about forty miles west of New Mexico. It's fairly high, around sixty eight hundred feet and is officially in the White Mountains. The hills are sparsely covered with small junipers and grass is sketchy. Even the cactus are few and far between. While the temps have been in the low Nineties around Phoenix, it barely reached sixty degrees the day we visited and the wind blew. I guess the wind blows a lot up there.

It's a part of Arizona that you could call desolate, or at least remote. Depending on how poetic you want to be. The first time we visited was four years ago when we drove out with my parents trying to find these forty acres Bill had bought on EBay. We didn't have a real good plot of the land and thought we'd found the area, rather than the actual acreage itself. There are few fences and fewer houses. Here and there, someone has parked an RV. And there are a few windmills for pumping water. Basically, in the four years since I've seen it, nothing much had changed. It's wide open spaces and windy prairies come to mind. So it is far different than the colorful mountains we live in now or the frothy breakers of the Pacific we left behind. I don't know as though I'd like to make a steady diet of this 'remote' part of Arizona for long.

I did discover one thing unique about this place. It didn't hit me right away. We'd been there for half an hour before it registered. Bill parked in a sandy wash that might actually have been on our forty acres and immediately we began finding pretty red iron pyrite stones. There was also some unusual white rocks that looked like dead coral, which I guess it is. Evidently, eons ago, this area had been underwater too. We were basically walking around with our noses stuck to the ground when it came to me: the absence of sound. I mean that literally. There was SILENCE. No highway noise. No barking dogs. Not even buzzing insects. It was dead quiet. No, I take that back. Every once in a while, you could hear the distant call of a bird. But in the middle of the day when we got there, even they were strangely quiet. You don't find that very often anymore, do you? The complete absence of sound. A lot of folks anymore even wear their Ipods for exercise or running around and aren't even aware of the regular sounds around them. But to be hit with complete silence.... Hmmm, it's almost eerie.

Well, after a while, a National Guard jet flew over and the air was crowded with that sound for a bit. Then I heard a quail call out for its family. But for the most part, it was just the rocks and the trees and the sigh of the breeze through the junipers' branches. And it sounded pretty good to me.

We found a lot of rocks. A lot of rocks with some type of jasper in it, stuff we don't find in abundance here in Superior. Bill found another streambed on the drive back towards town and we spent another hour poking around. To our astonishment, we found some lovely chunks of flower agate that had tumbled down from the surrounding hills. So it was a good day. A long day. And Chuy was a dustball by the time we got home. You couldn't pat him but that a cloud of dust rose up from his caramel brown fur. So, Chuy got a bath that night and then slept like a log. (Or one of those rocks.) And since it was about four hours each way, Bill and I slept pretty good that night too.

But the silence.... It's hard to ignore how profound that was.

Similiarities

There's a lot of differences between Dillon Beach on the Northern California coast and Superior in the Sonoran Desert mountains, but yesterday we found something that ties them together. The howling angry spring winds. At the beach, we get the March and April and May (and sometimes February and June, too) gales out of the northwest. Here in the mountains, we get them out of the northeast. Whoo boy! It's April, I guess the wind's going to blow.

At "home" (Dillon Beach) we used to equate the spring winds with the opening days of salmon season, whether it was April 1st or 15th or whenever, the winds could be counted on to scour the beach when the season opened. It doesn't look like there will be much, if any, salmon season this year, but the winds were still blowing the second week in April for the opening of abalone season and they probably will do their duty off and on through May and perhaps in June as well. They usually disappear by the tenth of July, if we're lucky. They make the sand dunes nice and smooth, but the endless days of blowing winds take their toll on one's mental health, it makes your teeth set on edge. They just go on for too many days and get old real quick. So... I was glad, at least, to escape that aspect of spring. I thought.

The weather called for ninety degrees this week-end. Plenty warm, yes, but I figured we'd find something to do in the mornings and late afternoons when it wasn't too hot. Friday night, the wind started howling out of Queen Creek canyon around ten PM. All night long the palm tree outside our bedroom was slashing its fronds in the relentless wind. If you imagine hard enough, you can make the slashing fronds sound like rain at times. Otherwise, if your brain is fully engaged, it sounds like a palm tree getting the bejesus shaken out of it. A few times, there were thumps and bumps against the house. But by ten or eleven Saturday morning, the wind calmed down somewhat. Now, at the beach, the winds calm down (usually) during the night and the dawn is the quietest time, then by mid-morning they get pumping again and really scream by afternoon.

So I found this phenomenon to be pleasantly different. Even if the screaminess of the wind is much the same. Oh yeah... the temperature is different too. Even with the screaming wind, the temps were still around eighty-nine degrees. Kind of like a heater left running wide open, hot air blowing into your face. At the beach, it'd be more like low fifties with a wind chill in the low forties. So yeah, there is a difference.

But then, Saturday night, darned if the wind didn't blow up again. There were even more thumps and bumps all night long and it was still howling in the morning. We found shingles from our roof scattered in the neighbor's yard and one hanging from a tree branch. One of my outside bird cages for the parrots had been blown across the deck and was on end. The palm trees didn't look like they needed to be trimmed any longer. The wind had taken care of that for them. When I walked downtown later in the day, Route 60 was littered with broken shingles from hapless homes. Normally, on a Sunday, there would be a raft of bikers riding up the canyon but the road was pretty quiet yesterday.

Today though, on another walk through a different part of town, we found more damage. A lot of the miner's cottages in this town have these quaint aluminum clad roofs. One such cottage at the foot of our street that faces the eastern Apache Leap had a third of its aluminum sheeting roof skinned right off. Like a big banana peel, it was just skinned back. I gawped at it. The winds had blown in the neighborhood of forty plus mile per hour, but I didn't know they could do this kind of damage!

No, we don't have the kinds of wind damage like tornadoes. And no, we don't have the North Coast howling winds. But yeah.... we're not immune to spring winds, I reckon. I'll just have to stay tuned to see what other "goodies" the weather has in store for us here in Superior.