Day: June 9, 2024

Chapter 1

Summer in the Cactus Patch came early this year. May was pleasant, with frequent gully washers that quickly turned into toad-floating spring floods, yet some of my neighbors ran their sprinkler systems on their already-soaked lawns, which added to the flooding. We live on top of a rocky hill, so our abode was protected from the rushing waters of May, and we don’t have a sprinkler system to water our rocks and cacti.

June came with a dreaded heat wave forming in the southwest desert and sneaking into Texas. The Mexican province known as California is experiencing the hottest weather in history, and that adds to the folks getting out of Los Angeles and Sacramento and moving to my state, which has done nothing to stop the influx of unwanted refugees. U haul and Ryder are out of trucks, so folks are building their own trailers or tying furniture to the tops of their cars. Yesterday, I saw a Tesla with luggage and home decor tied to the roof of the poor EV. Of course, the car had California plates, and the occupants were likely looking for a home to buy in my little town.

My grandparents, my father, and my aunt migrated from Texas to California in 1934 because there were no jobs in Fort Worth or the city of Dallas. When reaching the desert town of Needles, CA, they were immediately labeled “Okies” by the border guards. My grandfather, a man of many words, mostly curse ones, did his best to convince the guards that he was a Texan and had visited Oklahoma once for a funeral, which made the situation worse because the guards then labeled them Texas Okies, which was a double insult, and to boot, they weren’t welcome in the land of pleasant weather and movie stars. Grandfather turned himself into a poor man’s Will Rogers with plenty of aw-shucks, dirt kicking, and head-scratching and made the guards laugh, so the family was admitted. He forgot to mention the three pistols, the sawed-off shotgun, and his pet Rattle Snake, Bubba, stashed under the front seat of his Ford.

Chapter 2 coming soon.