Arizona.
Desert.
Dry.
Cactus.
Tumbleweeds.
Dust.
Heat.
Scorpions, rattlesnakes, centipedes, millipedes.
And also...
as strange as this may seem...
snow.
Yes, snow, the white powdery stuff, has fallen in Arizona. It does this, actually, every year, but because of the aforementioned desert, I have the pleasure of seeing cactus and tumbleweeds half-buried in mounds of snow. And this year, I was extremely fortunate in that I had a camera to boggle the minds of all my out-of-state friends. Especially the ones who live in rather more northern latitudes than I and who never, except maybe once every decade, actually get snow, and thus have to go up to the mountains to get snow. I live in a valley in the middle of Arizona, and yet it snows. Irony.
Without further ado, the picture, to prove to all you doubting skeptics that Arizona isn't just the "but it's a dry heat" state; Phoenix, too, can get the famed NYC benefit of dirty streets covered in a blanket of pristine clean-making whiteness. (Well, maybe not. I don't live in Phoenix. They may be more up to the stereotype of heat-desert-ness than Chino Valley is: they just broke a one-hundred-forty-day-plus dry streak.) Anyway, here it is: