The sound of rain is layered like a great overture and is unexpected music in the desert. I hear home in the pitter-patters, a cloak of comfort around the casita I am getting used to. Different melodies sing at each door or window; water falls as a solid sheet or separate drips, depending upon the part of the house it slides from to the ground. From inside the sounds give weight to the building, letting me know where run-off is heavy, where puddles will gather. Split splat or repeated pangs, an orchestra conducted, and I sit in the pit.

If I close my eyes, I am in my apartment in New York City, on a day made for staying in. The house is darkened, cloud cover dampening the sun. Under lamplight, soft around the edges, I am tucked into a couch corner, deep in its cushions, blanket around my shoulders, open book in my lap. Better yet, a teenager again, pulled over on the side of the road during a storm. My hands, raised flat against the convertible's rooftop, feel the downpour pelting the vinyl and using my car as a trampoline. Inside this protected bubble the sound could hardly be closer.

Listening to rain always brings me comfort, and my best sleep. I delight in waking up to its chorus, which lulls me at night into a dark cocoon I can never find on my own. Right now, however, the effect is muddied. In between the home I left and the one I have come here to create, I am waterlogged by confusion and feeling slightly lost.

Does winter in the desert equal rain? I have been here ten days so far, at least three of which have been wet. Packing for this shot at a new life, I expected nothing but sun. I had read that Tucson is bathed in it more than 300 days a year and when I came here for the first time four months ago, during a personal leave from work, sunshine was ever-present. Sun block was a staple of that visit as the Southwest Fall quickly tanned my pale usually-inside-an-office-building skin. It baked the always-thirsty earth and softened the encircling mountains so that their brown palette was that of a cover girl brushed with shimmery face powder. Yet I found nothing in this existence that required make-up. The desert is raw and alive, a place to survive, and for me it broke past a superfluous surface to awaken something visceral at my core. The feeling was immediate. I had fallen in love.

I took that personal leave because after years in Manhattan, I couldn't handle the ever-present noise of construction workers outside my apartment. Headaches were constant and, under the pressure of full-time work and part-time school and all the other things that add up to equal life, I had lost the ability to sleep. I fell so in love with Tucson during those six weeks that after two months back in New York, I quit my office job, withdrew from school, hugged my family and friends and roommates, and borrowed a car to fill with the possessions that would accompany me on the cross-country move.

When packing this time, for relocation instead of a trip, I tossed an umbrella into the last bag as an after-thought. It could fill extra room once the important items were ensured a space. Oddly, now I stay inside on these wet desert days, despite having moved to be outdoors, to experience nature in a way not possible with the concrete and skyscrapers of my regular life. There I carried an umbrella with me everywhere, a staple like the Metrocard that was my subway fare or the latest library book I'd read to pass the commute. Although a damper on the day, rain was commonplace and surmountable. Here, I should dance in it, celebrating not only its life-sustaining effects but its rare presence. I should be celebrating the courage I gathered to make this move, and the vision for my future that inspired it. Why, instead, am I trapping myself inside?

Now that I will live here, I don't quite know where to begin. I am sleeping on my friend Dan's couch until I find my own place. He has been gracious. "Stay as long as you like, Ames," he told me when I called from New York with a car full of boxes. But as my presence quickly encroaches on a second week, I need something to help me move forward, wherever that may be. The rain clouds cover the sun that saved me my first time here, and I am still in pajamas at mid-day. It is dark outside but the false light from the bulb at the ceiling is too bright. It bounces off the pages of my book when I try to read and reflects white lightning back at my straining eyes. Yet without it the little black letters crash into each other like waves in a storm. With no clear distinction, there is no world into which I can escape.

There are eight one-bedroom units in this horseshoe-shaped housing patch. The one-story buildings could use some extra paint, and the fence leaves something to be desired. Chain-link, it encases a sinking-in pool in the center of the horseshoe. Maybe the problem is the in-ground pool itself, its white lining pulling away from the edges, the whole scene accented by scraggly deck chairs with holes in their plastic lacing, and an old piece of Stairmaster-like home exercise equipment. There's an inhabited 19-foot trailer at the back of the gravel road around these units, against another chain-link fence dividing the property from an open, grass-spotted lot behind it. On the other side is a rusty school bus bleached almost white by the sun, tilting into the earth at the driver's side. The back end against the fence is slightly raised off the ground, as if propped up by the surrounding weeds while it reaches for the sky, saying, "Kiss my ass."

Looking out at all of this I can't help but question if what I felt for Tucson during my first visit was really love or just the relief of something new and different. Maybe I was a single woman on the rebound. After the heartbreaking end of my relationship with New York City, would any next pretty face have been equally appealing? During the two months spent back in my noisy apartment after my personal leave ended, I tried to embrace the crowds again, the speed, the astounding architecture at neck-craning heights. Instead, the once majestic skyscrapers were now merely very tall buildings standing on tiptoe in a struggle to push up through the smog for some fresh air. When I could sleep, dreams brought cacti and stars and Palo Verde trees with green bark looking as soft as moss. I thought this meant love. I can't yet believe I was wrong.

A knock at the door startles me. Cindy lives directly across in the housing horseshoe. At 5'6", she's twice as wide as my petite 5' body. I could get lost in a hug, although a hug in itself would be difficult because of her enormous breasts, which would probably prevent my arms from reaching around her to the other side. The slang term melons comes to life in front of me, round and firm cantaloupe or honeydew claiming the space between her shoulders and belly button. Her face is just as round, open to me, and the 50 years don't show at her nearly wrinkle-free, shining brown eyes. I am 28 and have twice as many crows' feet as she does.

As usual, it is her knock on Dan's door. "Hello? It's me." A raindrop slashes her forehead and another dribbles down her cheek to her lip. This morning when she comes in wringing her hands, I don't understand the subservience in her lowered eyes, any lack of confidence completely unexpected. "I'm having some trouble with my new hand-me-down printer," she says to me on the couch, projecting her voice so that Dan in his bedroom can hear. "When my friend connected it yesterday, I had that terrible headache." She gingerly touches a spot above her right eye, as if the pain still pulses there. "You remember. I had to have my sunglasses on. I was all out of sorts." She'd explained the headache when I saw her outside her front door, in the middle of the day, wearing a stark white bathrobe, blue slippers, and large black sunglasses.     

Now she can't print a recipe, and this minor setback is magnified because the day is already off to a bad start. Her 80 year-old father, Bob, occupies one of the eight housing units, and this morning he asked Cindy to cut his toenails. Unable to help it, I see them warped and yellow, and wish the image from my mind before the words are fully out of her mouth.

Two sisters out of four siblings also live here, and Bob already shoo'd them away in the middle of their unsatisfactory cutting attempts. He is living here for a few months of hiatus from his snow-covered, flannel-clothed town in upstate New York, a New York so very different from "The City" that is my own. Everyday, sitting outside shirtless, soaking up Tucson sun onto his balding head and pregnant-looking belly, he smokes a pipe and reads a conservative media book by one of the Fox news anchors. Everyday, we share a friendly hello. His hand shoots straight up into the air in greeting, head nods once up, once down, and his hand returns to the book. "Another beautiful day," he says, clenching the pipe between his teeth and smiling. I don't see any signs of anxiety that Cindy mentions privately; she jokes about asking his doctor for the same calming medication that Bob hopes for on his next visit.

Of all her family, Cindy drinks the least. It's not uncommon to see her walking from her sister's place next door with an open can of Bud Light before 10 in the morning. If she's buzzed, I don't know her well enough to tell. "They're calling me '30-can'," she laughingly explained two days ago, referring to the quantity picked up at the corner store's great sale. I accepted the invitation that followed, to her nightly cocktail hour with Dan. The ritual ensures these great friends a chance to catch up on a daily basis.

Dan brought a package of croutons, a new flavor for them to try. Cindy put out cheese and crackers. Watching her prepare, I had a frightening glimpse of a salmon colored cheese wheel. I still don't know what the purple-ish confetti-like pieces inside were, and I stuck to the croutons. But the quiche and cookies she made during the week were delicious. Bringing servings to the house for Dan, she brings enough for me, too. Yesterday's surprise, a bag of the new swirled chocolate chip morsels (milk and white chocolate) from the supermarket where she works, was for both of us.

I am only too happy to be able to help now with her printer. It reminds of my old corporate life, problem-solving in a business suit, carefully untangling and reworking connections behind someone's desk. I welcome the raindrops splashing down on me as I run across the twenty feet to her cozy home warmed by blonde wood furniture, plush forest green carpet, smiling pictures of cats and her teenage daughter.  

Her daughter and ex-husband still live in upstate New York, in the house Cindy left six years ago when she came to Tucson after the divorce. I know there's less money to send to her daughter this month than the $20 she hoped to manage. Still, she's back at Dan's an hour later offering two cans of tuna for his cats, Hank and March, and this time knocking on the door and entering with the self-assurance I have come to expect. "Dan, don't you think the cats would like this? I can't eat it. The chunk light tuna isn't edible. I really think it's cat food."

Dan's cats, along with her own, are Cindy's children here, and she caters to them day and night, finding more enjoyable conversation with or about them than with her family.

She faces me in the living room and, realizing Dan is still in the bedroom, turns her head that way and speaks up. "I gave some tuna to Howard, too, and I think he was offended. But the cans were only 25 cents. There's a tin cover floating in the cat's water bowl outside. Hi," she says when Dan joins us. Back to a regular volume, she plows on. "I saw it when I passed by and took it out. What if one of the cats goes to take a drink and cuts his tongue on it, right?"

Howard is her older sister Barb's partner, and she detests him. This morning Barb is still "completely shit-faced" from last night. "Stay away from her today," Cindy tells me, although I've run into Barb only once in these ten days. Cindy prefers to be safe, also protecting me from the stories she's had to hear about her sister's sex life. By way of putting an end to that conversation, Cindy told Barb that we all take "major dumps" but don't have to share the details with everyone.

Her eyes twinkle as she delivers the next piece of news. "Wait, get this! I don't have to cut my father's toenails! He did it by himself. He thought they'd be too hard so I told him to soak his feet first."

I am thrilled for her, feeling more relief myself than I think even she does. Through my round of applause, she keeps talking. "We're riding to Albertson's Supermarket so he can get tobacco. We stopped at the Dollar Store before that for sun block. It's $8, $9, $10 now; you won't find it for less. And I told him not to look for new shoes now." I'm not connecting the pieces but it seems I don't have to. She hasn't stopped for breath or for input since the talk of tuna, although she looks between Dan and me as she speaks, and I shake my head or open my eyes wider when appropriate, thus communicating without words. She keeps right on going. "He wants to listen to Rush Limbaugh in the car, knowing I'm a registered Democrat. I can't even drive while I listen to that man. But, oh well. What can you do? Ok, I'm going to print out another recipe now. Thanks again," and here she finally slows down, "so much, for your help."

When she leaves, I am already looking forward to the next time she'll drop in, to the latest news she'll share, to the way her mere presence will warm the room. We come from two very different worlds within the same boundary of New York State, and there our paths were as likely to cross as a gecko and a cab driver. Yet here, in listening to her laugh at her struggles, as survivors do, I have inadvertently found an east coast transplant whose lead I can follow in this Southwest existence. I am confident that Cindy will always plow forward. I am confident that soon I will find a job and then a place of my own, and that Dan will always welcome me in. Mostly, I am confident that, through varying weather and coming seasons, I will love this place.

I step into the desert rain.

amihoff@gmail.com