Arizona

Falling in Love with Places

I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.

Morning Prayer September 21, 2024

In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.

The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.

It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.

The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.

Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.

May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.

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.

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.

Rustle and Racket

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.

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.