Notabilia

New Doves

Two mourning doves just landed on my porch light. They have the adorable, bewildered look of fledglings. Hello, Rosencrantz! Hello, Guildenstern! I don’t think they know what to do next. Where to go? What to eat? When to rest?

Oopsie, Rosencrantz almost slipped off the light. And poor Guildenstern is trying to eat stucco. Now they’re preening. Now they’re looking up down updown downup down down down down.

This is the world, little birds. I hope you like your time here. I’m sorry the Earth is in such shabby condition. There’s water two doors down. There’s food pretty much everywhere because much of this land is still wild. Stay cool. Live smart. Watch out for the Cooper’s hawks.

Post-Monsoon Bloom

I have a Mojave Desert wardrobe, but I’m a Sonoran Desert dweller now.

I need to be more columnar cactus, less Joshua tree. More legume tree, less pinyon-juniper.

More post-monsoon bloom of annual flowers, less monotony of Mormon tea.

More thornscrub, more upland, more plains. Less ecotone, less basin, less mountain.

More swelling tropical air, less strained, stolen aquifer water.

More desert, less golf course, less water park, less carwash.

More diversity, equity, and inclusion, less banning of diversity, equity, and inclusion.*

I don’t want to walk around like that old desert, its desiccated husk wrapped around my body, though the desert’s not to blame. No desert is ever to blame. As Samuel Green writes in his poem “Convenant: Saying Hello to the Land We Will Love”:

              We have only
              the compass of how we walk here
              how our feet move
              over the soil that will feed us.

Let us feed our lands, not feed on them. Here in the Sonoran Desert. There in the Mojave Desert.

Let the lands guide us. Let us honor them. Let us save them and in turn be saved by them. Let us not always destroy everything and everywhere and everyone.

Give me that wardrobe. I’ll suit up.

—

* Utah recently banned diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses and in government.

Dalexina

My husband is more than halfway back to our house in Utah, where he’ll stay for at least a month before returning to Tucson. Since he left this morning, I’ve made social plans for next week, cleaned and organized the house, written a prose poem, worked a small puzzle depicting Zion National Park, and made nectar so I can feed the local hummingbirds.

It’s important for writers to have time alone. It’s important for everyone to have time alone, but writers need it to produce work, which is what we’re compelled to do during our time on Earth. Have you ever been around a writer who’s not writing? Probably not for long. We’re intolerable.

My husband and I love each other and also need time away from each other. That’s been impossible since the pandemic, which is when his company went remote and there was no workplace for him to go to anymore. I was largely doing freelance and remote volunteer work, so I was also home most of the time.

From late 2019 onward, we’ve been one thing, a single entity. I have the antique typesetting letters to prove it. They sit on our kitchen shelf declaring that we are either Dajonna or Jodanna, not Dana and Jon or Jon and Dana.

For the next month, we will be Jon and Dana. I may eventually become one-half of the entity known as Dalexina, since Lexi is staying here with me. That’s fine. Lexi sleeps most of the day and doesn’t interfere with my thoughts and feelings, both of which need to be unfettered when I write. I might even get in on some of those naps. Dalexina has been busy lately. She’s accomplished a lot. She has big plans. She may be a tad bit overextended. Dalexina needs to curl up in her favorite bed with her favorite blanket and get some rest with her better half.

Did I just call my dog my better half? So be it.

Toads

Dozens of spadefoot and Sonoran toads died in my area after the monsoon rains last night. They’d come out onto Old Spanish Trail, which has a speed limit of 50 miles per hour in most places and is becoming more heavily traveled as dense developments transform the area.

Fifty miles is way too fast, in my opinion. There’s too much wildlife out here to be tearing through the area at top speed. A fox crossed the road when we set out yesterday evening. Fortunately, we and other drivers stopped, and the fox passed safely.

But the toads were a different story. It was dark as we made our way home, which is the least safe time to be driving. It’s when wildlife is especially active and much less visible.

We shouldn’t have been out at all. I don’t like driving at night because of the danger it poses. I should say the danger I pose when driving in the dark. We had an errand we couldn’t do earlier in the day, so we made an exception.

Other drivers either weren’t aware of the toads or didn’t care about avoiding them. Or maybe they simply couldn’t react in time, especially when driving so fast. To be fair, there were a lot of toads on the road. It reminded me of summer nights in Oklahoma down by the Canadian River when I was a teenager. Hundreds of toads would gather on the gravel road next to the river. You couldn’t even move your car if you stayed too late, unless you didn’t care about killing them.

I’m having several dozen funerals in my heart today thinking about those toads whose last act was coming out to enjoy the rain.

Palo Verde Beetle

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.

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.