Dealing with the monsoon's jealous boyfriend: Dust

If summer in the desert were a Stephen King thriller or a Shakespearean romance – and it's both – a dust storm would be the jealous boyfriend of monsoon rain.

Dust is blustery, possessive. Dust has a temper. (Don't call him "Haboob." That really sets him off.)

Dust doesn't want the monsoon rain to travel without him. But she does so anyway.

There are days when dust rises up and shoulders its way into town, looking for the monsoon, interrupting our routines, tossing about our possessions, frightening our pets. Searching.

But dust can't control the monsoon. The monsoon is fierce and independent.

Sometime in late June or early July the monsoon gets restless and wanders north from her home in the Pacific

It's as if the monsoon craves attention and knows that she will get it from us. Some years she hangs around for weeks on end. Then leaves. Then returns. Then leaves again.

Other years we rarely see her, catching only a glimpse of lightning in the distance or the low rumble of faraway thunder, longing for the comfort of a downpour.

As a strategy for gaining affection it works well. We ache for the rain.

Dust knows the monsoon is coming to see us. He knows we've been waiting for her. The monsoon, in the meantime, realizes how much we long for the flash and roar of a real storm, one with showers, torrents. She knows how much we yearn to see streets and washes filled by a summer deluge.

Dust hates this. It seems at times as if he's trying to keep her away from us.

Dust storms have blown through town several times recently.

It happened once when I was out walking the dogs. They sensed something in the air, something powerful and reckless headed in our direction.

A sudden hot breeze blew in behind us as we stood near a stand of tall Aleppo pines. The dry brown needles from the pines were yanked away by the wind and pitched into the air with abandon. They fell to the ground in clumps and were blown together into hair-like tumble weeds, making the wide street on which we walked look like the unswept floor of a barbershop.

But there was no rain.

No monsoon storm.

The filthy wind gusted and swirled, gritty and ferocious enough for the dogs to close their eyes. The dust storm seemed to search everywhere for the monsoon, climbing fences, squeezing through narrow openings between buildings, swooping down from roofs and forcing itself under doors.

But there was no monsoon rain. Not this day. So the dust flew off to some other neighborhood, some other town, not bothering to pick up the overturned lawn furniture it left behind or to clean the debris out of swimming pools.

I'd hoped the monsoon had been watching from a safe distance and would wander over.

The dogs tilted their snouts to the sky, as if picking up the scent of precipitation.

That's the perfume the monsoon wears when she visits us.