Last night, while I was bobbing in the pool and doing gentle stretches in the water, Silas came out and pointed at the sunset.

            


Silas pointed at the sunset and said "Yep, that's why we're in Arizona".

Thus, I learned that my wife is a desert sunset.

It's simple - it's an axiom of mathematics that if A == C, and B == C, then A == B - i.e. "two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other".

Silas says that the sunset is the reason that we're in Arizona, whereas I happen to know that the reason that we are in Arizona is....Ethel. She picked it, she bought the house, she won't leave (sorta like Colonel Troutman's proclamation: "I recruited him, I trained him, I served with him for three years in Vietnam - I'd say that makes him mine" from "First Blood").

So, since a desert sunset is the reason that we're in Arizona, and Ethel is the reason that we're in Arizona, then Ethel is a desert sunset. Q.E.D. I'm glad we had this little talk.

That is some comfort to me, too, knowing that, if Ethel dies in her corporeal form, I'll still have her with me, for about an hour every evening.

Of course, Ethel being the reason that we are in Arizona has nothing to do with where Ethel is, as Ethel isn't in Arizona right now - Ethel is in Utah, that wonderful, cool, mountainous area where we used to live, and to which she refuses to let us move back. In fact, Ethel goes to Salt Lake City for a week in the middle of July every year - right when the weather is at its hottest. (editor's note: the average high temps for the Phoenix area are at their highest for the nineteen day period from 10 July to 28 July, inclusive).

So Ethel, who won't let me move to Utah to get out of these summers, gets out of the worst heat of the summer every year. This is called "fairness". Look it up.

She goes to the cool, green mountains, and leaves me in the heat, during Monsoon season, when it is muggiest and nastiest, and leave me alone with three dogs and an 18-year-old. This is called "reasonable" (look it up).

(Editor's note - the above photograph isn't the way it looked as he was pointing at it - this is the way it looked after the conversation was over, and Ihad gotten out of the pool, dried off, gotten my cell phone and took the picture. This is a pale memory of what the sunset looked like. But it's still not too bad.)

The sunset slowly faded, leaving that band of clouds to turn gray and the open sky between the ground and the clouds to turn a pale champagne color. However, about fifteen minutes after Silas made this remark, and after the sunset had faded, we got yet another sunset - it seems that there was some other band of clouds or dust well to the west, such that the band of clear sky turned bright pink and orange, framed between the clouds and the horizon. Obviously we were getting somebody else's sunset - probably LA's sunset.

I know that the first sunset was Ethel, but I don't know whose wife that second sunset was.