Chavaria The desert and you What does the desert mean to you? Do you think it is beautiful? Boring? Too hot? Just right? Have its animals or plants been important in your life? Do you think you would miss the desert if you moved away? You could write a personal story, also called an essay, about the Sonoran Desert, just as Lorraine Varela and Linda Chavaria have.

From my window, I see a lot of houses. They are colorful - some gray, others pink, blue or green. I also see cars, people walking by, and all the neighborhood pets - mostly cats and dogs - roaming around. On the ground, I can see clumps of green boxes, where our cable gets hooked up. I live in a new development, the Posada Sentinel, in the Santa Rosa Neighborhood, at 10th Avenue and 22nd Street, south of Downtown Tucson.

Through the window I can see my sister, Gina, walking down the sidewalk with her best friend, Christina. They do everything together. They are going to check Christina's mailbox near the side of our house. They are having a conversation, but I can't hear them - they are probably talking about their dreams, their problems, or what they did during the day, the things they always talk about. There is no mail. I watch them walk back to Christina's house.

I'm looking out the window from my living room. The blinds are open and the window is up, letting the cool breeze come in. The sun is going down, and I can see the pretty colors from the sunset. There goes Gina and Christina walking down the sidewalk again. This time I got what they were saying. "Gina, look how pretty the sky looks."

"I know. Look at how the clouds are, the way that they are shaped."

"I like the way that the colors look from behind the mountains."

That's life in the desert, supposedly. I live in the desert, but I don't see much of it.

The only things I see out my window that are part of the desert are trees and dirt. The only way I know I'm in the desert is by what my other senses tell me.

Though I usually only hear cars driving by, once in a while I hear grasshoppers, a chirping kind of sound like a person whistling. Also, in the summertime, there are flies buzzing around. On windy days, the air blows through the windows, rattling the blinds. On rainy days, the drops hit the tin roof, and it sounds like millions of little pins over my head. Outside, there is dirt all around. People who live in the neighborhood of Posada Sentinel call the dirt "gravel." The trees grow right up from the gravel. When it rains, we can smell the wet dirt. In the summer when it is wet, I can smell that scent. I feel better right away because I know it means the heat's gone for a while.

On windy days, the dirt goes flying all over the place. It flies in our eyes and it goes in our mouths. The dirt tastes disgusting, like eating or drinking something you don't like, like me with meatloaf. I can feel the sand on my hands. It gets on my face, the floor, our coffee table, everywhere. Even if I sweep, it's still there. It makes me feel like I'm dirty, like I can never get clean. To make myself feel clean, I put lotion on my hands. I carry lotion around with me because it's so dry.

If I lived in a rain forest, I would see rain all the time. It is always raining in a rain forest. Of course, there would be a lot of trees, too, with bigger, greener leaves. There would also be a lot of different varieties of animals, from bugs crawling on the floor to monkeys swinging on the branches to birds flying through the trees. There would also be bright colors - birds, flowers, plants. I'd probably hear more insects' sounds, like grasshoppers chirping all day long, flies buzzing around all day. I would smell the wet trees and dirt from when it was raining. I'd probably taste the raindrops.

It would always be hot and humid, so my skin would be damp and sticky. But I don't live in the rain forest; I live in the desert, where the temperature is always the way I like it - not too hot, not too cold. I also like the colors of the desert's sunrise and sunset - they float across the sky like a rainbow. When the sun is barely going down, the pink color comes out, and the yellow blends to orange. The rainbow is like the houses around me.

This is where I feel most comfortable.

My home.