We Santa Cruzans are blessed to live in an extremely pleasant climate. We are more or less officially blessed with five seasons, not the usual classic four we learned about as school kids. But there may also be a sixth season.

The first of our “official” five seasons is Spring, which arrives around mid-February and usually lasts until mid-May. It’s the cool, flowering season here.

Our second season could be unique to Southern Arizona. It’s Pre-Summer which usually arrives in May and lasts till around the end of June. It’s our hottest season, with extremely bright and sometimes brutal sunshine. Rain hardly ever falls during Pre-summer. Historical weather records confirm this: May and June are our driest months with June the hottest. But as hot as it can become, it is never as hot as Tucson, because of our higher elevation. On any given day, the daily highs here are usually 6 to 8 degrees cooler.

Then comes our third season, which is the Monsoon Summer, with its dramatic and cooling thunderstorms. It usually arrives around the first of July and lasts, if we’re lucky, into the first week of September.

We marvel over the rapid twenty-degree drop in temperature within fifteen minutes when a monstrous monsoon storm sweeps up from south of the border. Monsoon Summer also brings our mostly harmless, spectacular lightning displays.

Our fourth season is Fall. It usually arrives by mid-September when daytime temperatures finally begin to cool down without the help of monsoon storms. (Well, maybe, sometimes?)

Our Fall runs into late November when our fifth and final season, glorious Winter, comes. Winter arrives with our first frost, which in Santa Cruz County seems most often to be around Thanksgiving Day.

Winter is my favorite season. There are few places in the whole of the United States of America when a frosty winter morning regularly warms into the mid-sixties by mid-afternoon.

But we Santa Cruzans may have a sixth season. That would be our Second Spring, which arrives concurrently with the Monsoon Summer when its dramatic storms often drop an inch or two of rain within an hour.

During our Second Spring, shrubs of yellow daisies suddenly appear, along with whimsical clumps of tiny blue flowers that bloom under the shade of the newly greened mesquite trees. Prickly Pear cactus plump up and turn green from the yellowed, shriveled skeletons they’d become during Pre-Summer.

Clumps of dark green grasses erupt everywhere. Virtually overnight, Ocotillos adorn their thorny stalks with tidy rows of tiny, oval, deep-green leaves. The familiar desert poppy displays its newly poached-egg blossoms above its once shriveled, prickly stalks. Tiny pink and purple flowers bloom underfoot, and down in the Santa Cruz River Valley, hundreds of rain-nourished tall shrubs push out new leaves that are topped by fragrant blossoms.

And so, we very lucky Santa Cruzans may actually be living through a year of six seasons if our very definite Second Spring is included.

Which leads me to wonder why am I publishing this piece. After all, I’ve been seeing far too many new houses sprouting up here in my neighborhood. Santa Cruz County has been “discovered.” There’s no denying that and no way to turn that back.

I’m also convinced that our six - not five - dramatic seasons are a major reason why I’ve been waving at more and more new neighbors.

Another Rio Rico Weather Report

Follow up:

As a migrant here from gloomy New England, I’ve become merrily obsessed with the weather I’ve found in Rio Rico.

I always discover notes about weather in my journal - like this revised entry I wrote shortly after I moved here :

“July, 1997 - My dogs and I head down to the valley to take a hike. The temperature is 92F. And as we pile into the car, I see what could be an ominous monsoon storm forming.

We're just a half-mile’s hike away from the car when the deluge falls. There’s nothing shy about a monsoon storm, and I swear the "raindrops" weigh half a pound each. We are pummeled, and I giggle. But how cold the rain is! Soaked and shivering, I turn around to huff back to the car.

Bandida, my spinster shepherd mix streaks on ahead. But my golden retriever, Utah - certified water dog he is - finds a mud puddle. I turn around to see him settle in.

I bark a command at him. He reluctantly rises with a great sucking sound and follows me to the car. I jerk open the rear door of my car, and Bandida leaps in, followed by Utah. His ever-wagging tail splatters Bandida, me, and the car’s rear windows with mud.

Bandida, thoroughly disgusted, jumps into the front of the car and tries to climb into my lap. She nervously licks my face as a huge bolt of lightning drops very close.

And so, in a car whose windows are now totally fogged, I drive home, which is only a mile away.

The temperature has blessedly dropped at least 20 degrees and is heading farther down. I'll be looking for an extra blanket tonight. Southern Arizona has the strangest, most extreme weather,” I noted.

But my first July monsoon storm gave a false impression that weather here is extreme. The longer I live here, I’ve learned that I enjoy what surely is one of the most benign and steady climates in all of the US of A.

Our monsoon storms only appear to be extreme because they fall during such a short rainy season that lasts, if we’re lucky, all of ten weeks. Actually the only extreme thing about the climate here are all those delightfully sunny days.