A palo verde beetle emerged from the ground today by digging up through the insulation on the perimeter of our Arizona room’s slab. They emerge when monsoon season starts, triggered by the heat and humidity. This one needed to make her way outside, so I let her get oriented for a few hours then gave her a lift on a dustpan. She was very accommodating. I have a photo of her, but it’s not flattering, so I won’t share it.
Notabilia
Impossibly Human
My husband doesn’t like saguaros. I felt an immediate connection with them. They’re columns of water, not unlike humans. They store what they need so they can survive dry times, deadly times.
Their arms are few or many or long or short or tangled and twisted. One is called Shiva by locals who check in on her and wish her well. She’s as beloved as the wild mustang colt at Salt River who the locals have also named.
Sometimes saguaros grow up and through Palo Verde trees. Sometimes their arms grow into each other. That’s when they look like they’re dancing or embracing or holding up one of their own who would otherwise fall.
Human, human. Impossibly human. More human than humans, perhaps.
Imagine walking around with woody nests in your hair, the rustle and racket of fledgling Crested Caracaras who see you before they see much else.
Imagine white blooms erupting from your crown every day for a month before the heat comes, the dry heat, with its days as monotonous as the desert you live in appears, at least at first glance.
Imagine howling nights. Imagine remaining so silent and still some see you as a spiritual teacher, your pleated roots ready to expand for water and more water and more water.
Upheavel and Loss and Despair
I heard stories of fear growing up, stories of anger, stories of upheaval and loss and despair. The aunt who was poisoned by her husband who was also the man who molested my mother when she was a child.
The great aunt who drowned in pills, who scraped her throat raw trying to force the pills back up after regretting what she did in the moment, in the moment. Before that, the way she waded into a lake and tried to drown herself but someone saw her and fished her out to face the blessing and curse of another day.
Stories of fish on the line, writhing, all muscle and intent. Streams of urine flowing like fountains into the red-tongued water. Who stole watermelons again? Who was chased by a landowner with a shotgun? Father, father. It was father. The urine was him, too. The fish was everyone he touched, everyone who wanted to break free from his hold.
Father and his women and his girls and his parties and his CB radio and his handle and the handle he gave me when he made me talk to truckers on one of the biggest sex-trafficking highways in the country.
Oh, wait. That’s my story, not one I heard. I only understood it completely two years ago. It seared my mouth when I tried to tell it, so I wandered toward the sun and begged it to turn me into ash, into smoke, into anything other than this dredged body. Wait, that’s my story, too.
Exploding and Floating
A turkey vulture glides over the creek, wings bent, head down. Fist-shaped clouds fill the sky. Am I the only one who braces a little all the time—in the Walmart, in the wildlands, in my home? You just never know what’s coming. When I was manic, I told the ER doctor my family was always exploding and floating. It’s true. The only way we survived each other was to float like vultures in our violent skies. Mania is a way to float when gravity’s fussy little hands won’t let go, when the weight of reality is unsurvivable. It’s a way up and out, all wing and wonder. Then you land, hard, the earth splitting you with its open hand. What’s my faith? That I’ll be broken again in this lifetime. I have faith in that the way the vulture has faith that he’ll find carrion before nightfall.
Boxcar Mama
My mother was named after a vaudeville dancer and circus performer. That performer also had a Pullman boxcar named after her. That means my mother was named both after the performer and after the Pullman car. So I can legitimately refer to my mother as Circus Mama, Vaudeville Mama, and Boxcar Mama.
I’m going use all three nicknames when referring to her.
My mother would absolutely adore these terms of endearment if she were still alive, especially Boxcar Mama. I can see her laughing and taking a drag off her Virginia Slim then tapping her too-long ashes into the amber-colored cut-crystal ashtray before picking up the cordless phone to call her two oldest children and let them know their little sister is at it again with the wordplay and, as a result, she will henceforth be known as Boxcar Mama.
Time to Eternity
We live in an ecotone, those of us here in Southwest Utah. An ecotone is the transition between two biological communities. Here, we have three: the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert. A triad, a trinity, that perfect number we arrange interiors to and pray to and dance the waltz to.
1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3.
Look around. Look up. You’re in an amazing place, a sacred place, the kind of place Wendell Berry talks about in his poem, “How to Be a Poet.” He writes:
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity.
Patience joins time to eternity. Be patient. I’ve been patient for more than fifty years—fifty going on eternity.
Good morning, all of you. Good morning, all of me. Time to wake up. Wake up to where you live, to who you are, to what you can do.
Dana Henry Martin 