Companions in Our Isolation

We are not “birders,” the Artist and I, but here in Arizona on our annual seasonal retirement (scheduled to end in May, but who knows right now, given the current world situation?) we pay a lot of attention to birds. The hawk that swoops in front of our car and settles with beating wings on a mesquite tree by the side of the road, the droll little roadrunner, the “confiding” canyon towhee, and all the rest. But I told the Artist the other day, as we sat out watching birds, that every time I see the bright red male cardinal, I am carried back to my graduate student apartment in Cincinnati years ago. 

It was one more evening alone, studying in a one-bedroom apartment much roomer than necessary for someone with almost no furniture. My few clothes hung in a luxurious walk-in closet that could have housed, I often thought, an entire refugee family. Few clothes, little furniture — and yet I felt unbelievably fortunate, for in my first year of graduate study I received a monthly fellowship check which, thanks to frugal living and cheap beans and cheap beer the last week of every month, covered my living expenses. And all I had to do to earn that check was read and write: my obligation coincided with my chosen work. Heaven!

But the scholar’s heaven could be lonely, too. 

I think I must have been holding my awareness of loneliness at mental arm’s length for quite a while, because when a tiny red mite appeared on a page of my book, I was struck with inordinate delight: another living creature! Charming! Fascinating! A companion in my evening solitude!

If you search online for information about bright red clover mites, tiny creatures each smaller than the head of a pin, you’ll turn up all manner of pest control results, although everyone admits that the clover mite is harmless. It isn’t poisonous. It doesn’t bite, anyway. And even if it invades en masse, the invaders won’t live long indoors. 

Well, easy for me to say, maybe, because for me there was only the one. One tiny, tiny creature the brilliant color of a cardinal. What happened to it? I don’t remember. How long does a clover mite live, anyway, in the best of circumstances? That minuscule receptacle of life achieved a kind of immortality, though, because even now, years later, every time I see a bright red cardinal I remember with fondness that other, much smaller, long-ago, anonymous visitor.

The following day, when I shared the story and my response to the mite with another graduate student, expecting him to laugh, I was surprised and gratified when he shared a similar story. For him, a spider had provided companionship during a long evening of solitary study. A memoir called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, tells of how much a small creature’s presence meant to one woman confined to her bed by a mysterious illness, and Barbara Kingsolver, in High Tide in Tucson, tells of a hermit crab she inadvertently brought back from a Caribbean vacation and the efforts she and her daughter made to keep it alive.

Other living things! They mean so much to us, these our fellow passengers on spaceship earth, perhaps especially when our socializing with human family and friends is necessarily limited. 

While those of us who share our homes with dogs and/or cats — or birds, fish, or reptile pets — know better than to take their companionship for granted, ever, I’ve been thinking of how much comfort and companionship we gets from plants, as well as from animals, during these days of staying home and “sheltering in place.” When I first shopped, as advised, for a possible two-week quarantine — how long ago was that? — one of the impulse items I added to my cart was a little $4.99 plastic pot containing a clump of three small succulent plants. The souls as well as the bodies of our household require feeding, I felt. And I don’t even know the name of this succulent plant. Maybe it’s some kind of hybrid. It doesn’t matter. I had bought the beautiful round clay planter at an estate sale, and the planter begged to be filled. A rusty piece of found industrial iron added height and variety. 

I can’t tell you how much I love looking at my little pot (it is right here beside me now) and inspecting the largest of the three small plants to see if it’s any closer to flowering than it was the previous day. On warm days it lives outside, but with the threat of freezing overnight temperatures (and we did have a hard frost that night) it came indoors, taking priority over stacks of books and magazines (can you believe it?) on the little table between our reading chairs. And actually, carrying the planter outside and back indoors increases my feeling of relationship with the plants in the pot. 

When the Little Prince in St.-Exupery’s story of the same name discovers that the rose he tended with such dedication was not, as she claimed to be, the only rose in existence, at first he felt hoodwinked, as if he had wasted his time caring for her. He is set straight (was it by the fox? I don’t have the book at hand) thusly: “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” 

The other day my hiking partner neighbor, after we had been out in the foothills with our dogs for a couple of hours, asked me if I would like a planter of mint. Sarah and I continued home, and Therese left the mint outside her gate for me to pick up with the car later. So now, when the Artist and I sit behind the cabin watching the birds, I also gaze fondly at a planter filled with healthy, vibrant, bright-green mint. My friend had advised me that I should water the mint when I got it home. Oh, good! The mint needs me! Responsibilities of caring for animals and plants that share our lives, like the responsibilities we have to each other, create bonds. 

Is it time to put another suet cake out for the birds? I’d better check....

…I thought I had finished a draft of this post, and then I looked online for other quotes from The Little Prince. When I got to this one, my skin broke out in goosebumps: 

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well….”

He loved his desert, I love mine. 

I ask you, what does it matter if the imaginary cat in the box is alive or dead? What matters to me is whether or not the sheep has eaten the beloved flower…. Books are also our companions, and The Little Prince gives us, in fantasy form, another example of an everyday hero, along with an ethics of care. Be well, stay safe and healthy, my friends!

Can This Be Real?

Spring comes to southeast Arizona

I had a sudden insight upon awakening this morning, because, you see, we went for a drive yesterday, our first pleasure trip since we started hunkering down. Sky, clouds, grasses, cattle, wildflowers, mountains! They are all still there! In fifty miles we encountered only a single other vehicle, when the Artist had stopped so I could jump out with my camera, and the driver of a pickup truck loaded with hay bales stopped to see if we needed help. 

“Everything okay?” “Yes,” I told him, “it’s just so beautiful!” 

We went on, past the road to the Chiricahua National Monument, continuing south. Prickly poppies all along the road will be blooming by next week. We always appreciate places where water flows across the road. The day was golden, and we stopped again and again.

Turkey Creek

I walked a while along Turkey Creek Road, in  surroundings so heartbreakingly lovely I was holding back tears when I returned to the car and could not speak for several minutes. Finally I said softly, “It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” And the Artist answered, also in a low, reverent tone, without losing a beat, “No, it really doesn’t.”

These days we all, especially people our age, consider the possibility of dying. Even without coronavirus, the future grows shorter the longer we live. 

“We might never have seen this,” I begin haltingly.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, it’s unlikely I’ll ever see Ireland.” 

My mother and father made that trip before they died, and both my sisters have visited the land of our maternal grandfather. One of my old boyfriends, who lives in Ireland with his wife, invited us to visit! But travel by plane to a foreign country may not be on our agenda any longer. 

“Why not?”

“Well, we can’t drive there, and if we were there we couldn’t rent a car.” 

Friends told of the cut-off age for car rentals, and the Artist had been appalled. 

“But,” I go on, getting to my real point, “we’re here. We’ve seen this. I’ve seen this.” 

We continued along the way, leaving private land for national forest, climbing into an entirely different life zone and following the beautiful creek that rushed along beside and below us, loving every inch of our road.

The Coronado National Forest isn’t the Grand Canyon, and I don’t mind a bit. It’s enough for me. More than enough. The various pieces of the Forest in the Chiricahua, Dragoon, and Pinaleño Mountains fill my heart with joy, lift it with silent song. I can hardly believe I have been so fortunate as to be here, sometimes can hardly believe this land exists at all.

So my insight was about Americans who still think the coronavirus danger is a “hoax,” “fake news,” even while their Great Leader has changed his tune and admitted it’s real and is acting to mitigate the danger in various ways. It’s so peaceful here, so normal, and we don’t know anyone who has the virus. It doesn’t seem real at all from here. 

And yet the virus is real. The danger is real. But unbelievable beauty is real, too. Love is real. The danger of the virus, the beauty of the mountains and high desert, the gifts of love — at times all these realities seem equally hard for the human mind to encompass. This world of ours is amazingly complex, and both what we love and what we fear can be overwhelming at times.

So I do all I can to protect myself and others from the virus and take every opportunity to drink in and feel gratitude for beauty and love, and I hope you are doing the same. Today is the day we have. We're here now.

Spring comes even in dark times.

Everyday Heroes: Which Books Help in Our Times of Need?

You'll find out why in a minute.

We saw a show on television yesterday (it was a rerun) based on the “Great American Read,” in which different Americans appeared, one after another, to pitch their favorite books to viewers, with the idea that each of the books depicted a character styled as an “everyday hero.” Nominations for heroic stature ranged from Don Quixote to Katniss Everdene, and viewers were urged to vote — by phone or online, I forget which, but it didn’t matter, because a line of text at the bottom of the screen informed us that voting was already closed. Books by James Patterson and Tom Clancy were nominated, their main characters put forward as “ordinary” men who rose (repeatedly) to the occasion, whatever it was, when necessary. But the Artist and I both felt that the most convincing pitch was made by the man whose favorite book was Charlotte’s Web, a book that also won the #1 spot for children’s books. Yes, we nodded, with tears in our eyes over that man’s urging, we would have voted for Charlotte! 

When I was a young girl and a voracious reader, I was also genuinely and completely, through and through, horse-crazy. So while I read Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, of course, and Little Women and Swiss Family Robinson, my favorite books featured horses at the heart of the stories, and the fictional characters I found heroic grew to be great-hearted in meeting challenges with horses. Sometimes the heroes were the horses! There was Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet, in which a girl dressed as a boy so she could ride her horse in the Grand National … The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley, with a boy shipwrecked on an island with a magnificent and untamed horse … and there was the heroic horse in Black Gold, by Marguerite Henry, a horse that finished his race on “three legs and a heart” when his trainer insisted on racing him despite injury.

I still love a good horse story and always will. But as we watched that program on television, I kept waiting for a fictional hero in everyday situations. That’s what was missing for me in the books and characters put forward to inspire us. Not that they failed on that count. And yet, dystopic novels, action thrillers, and children’s stories were not what came to my mind when I heard “everyday heroes” in connection with fictional characters.

The novel I thought of almost instantly stars as the main character a young woman without parents. She never knew her father, and her mother may not have known who her father was, either. The mother abandons her little girl on the streets of Chicago. Her only living relative, as far as anyone knows, a grandfather back in Michigan, refuses to give the child a home. 

Told that way, the story sounds almost like Dickens, doesn’t it? But South of Superior, by Ellen Airgood, is an American novel of our own times, and everything Madeline Stone goes through is common enough. Madeline is young, in some ways naive. She has a good heart but can’t help bearing grudges against the dead who failed her, and she can’t help the many mistakes she makes along the path to greater understanding, either. 

Madeline had the great good fortune to be adopted by a woman in Chicago who raised her with love, so when her adopted mother was dying, of course Madeline cared for her. The blow, however, was severe. When first we meet her, she is working as a waitress and engaged to be married. Then she gets a letter, inviting her to come work in the home of the woman who was her grandfather’s romantic partner until he died, a woman who now lives with her sister. They could use some help, the letter says. For reasons even she does not completely understand, Madeline Stone decides to drive her old beater car north to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to share a house with two old women who are complete strangers to her. 

War does not intrude on Madeline Stone’s U.P. life. There are no shoot-‘em-up sequences in the story. The situations and challenges and even the tragedies are definitely the stuff of ordinary, everyday life. 

When household finances look bleak, Madeline takes a job in a pizza restaurant, a job she loses when she borrows and wrecks the owner’s car and, almost worse, doesn’t show up for her shift. Bright spots and dark color her life. She discovers a retarded uncle, her mother’s brother, living in a group home and resents having his existence kept secret from her, but little by little she finds comfort in visits to him. She finds a place to hide away, a secret refuge, a place where she can paint undisturbed — and then almost burns the place down after a foolish night in the local bar. Most movingly, she comes to love dearly a little boy who is, as was she, the child of an irresponsible young single mother, and what nearly breaks her heart is that she knows she can never take his mother’s place in his heart — but she struggles against the urge to try and does everything possible to keep mother and son connected. That was heroic!

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is not an easy place to live. “Nine months of winter and three months of bad sledding” is one way it’s described. Another saying has “three months of company” as the finish. Keeping warm through the winter is difficult and expensive, let alone keeping a business alive, and life there is not for the faint of heart. But Madeline Stone is not faint of heart, and she finds her place in the world in a small, struggling community on the south shore of Lake Superior. 

I have read South of Superior many times, first in manuscript form, as the Artist and I had come to know the author and her husband on our annual September getaway trips to the U.P. I don’t know if I’ve told you enough of the story so that you can see why I find the book such a comfort or why I have always found Madeline Stone such an inspiring character, but South of Superior has been both comfort and inspiration to me over and over. When I’ve been discouraged by troubles in my own life, I have turned to Ellen Airgood’s novel and put myself vicariously into the life of her fictional protagonist, and by the time I reached the last page, I would always feel stronger and more able to face my own challenges with strength, courage, and hope.

South of Superior is back home on my bookshelf in Michigan right now. Just thinking about it, though, and thinking about the main character, someone I see as a very ordinary, everyday heroine, calms my morning-nervous heart. And I'll bet I'm not the only one who feels that way!

I think about Ellen and Rick, too, how impossibly hard they work at their place of business, the West Bay Diner in Grand Marais. You can look online and see their beautiful, delicious food and the happy customers. None of that happens by accident. Ellen and Rick are some of the hardest-working people I know. You’ll see online also that the diner is “temporarily closed.” Had they not opened yet after the winter? Are they closed because of coronavirus? Are there enough groceries and supplies in that little town, and are Ellen and Rick all right? I trust they will be, because they have Madeline Stone’s sisu — but I sent them love across the continent, and I want them to know that as I think of them with love, and think once again of Ellen’s fictional character, Madeline Stone, I find comfort and inspiration to help me deal with these strange times we find ourselves living. 

What Are YOU Doing These Strange Days?

Some of my indoor activities

And no, I do not generally have my books and journals on the kitchen counter. They were only gathered together there briefly (next to chocolate chip cookies on a rack and fresh fruits and vegetables in bowls and my cell phone on the charger) so I could economize on the number of images for this post, because the only way I have wifi “in place” (the library in Willcox, along with the schools, is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic) is by using my phone to create a hotspot, and while I have unlimited calling and texting on the phone, I do not have unlimited data, and I’ve been burning through my available data so far this month, posting to my various blogs and keeping up with friends on Facebook.

So the cell phone makes possible the online part of my life at present. It also makes possible the all-important calling and texting with family and friends — family as far away as Michigan, friends as near as right across the road, because we are all practicing social distancing, in order to stay safe and keep others safe, as well. 

My journals have taken on new importance for me as the days go by. Begun in December, they were only some kind of scrapbook-in-words, recording what I wanted to hold as memories of another winter in my beloved southeast Arizona. Gradually larger issues crept in and now absorb many pages, but even so, I continue to record the small and near at hand. My journal entries are free-ranging, like the cattle here in Dos Cabezas: there’s no saying where they may wander.

This morning I noticed a phenomenon connected to handwriting — the way my mind runs out ahead of my hand and shapes and reshapes sentences as they are being written. Once in a while I go back to scratch out a word or insert a phrase, but most of the time my insertions and deletions have been done mentally before my pen has gotten farther along. The rhythm of writing by hand, on paper, is very different from what I’m doing now, tapping at a keyboard, fingers flying, and seeing my words appear on a screen in front of me. The screen is more distant than the page, the page much more intimate. But some of what I write on my journal pages I later translate to the screen, and even when what you find here was composed on a screen rather than a page, I hope some of the intimacy of my thoughts comes through for you, my readers. 

You already know I do a lot of reading. That’s been evident from the very beginning posts of this blog in 2007. The comfort of books is not limited to reading them, however. There is looking at them and touching them, admiring them on the shelves. And now, beginning yesterday, in a more librarian-type undertaking, I began the task of making a catalog of my Western collection. So far the catalog is only author, title, category (broadly conceived), but I may go back and add publication dates. Already the nascent catalog been helpful to me in seeing where there are gaps in my personal library. For example, I’ve read books on Cochise, but those were library books. I have books of my own on Victorio and Geronimo but none on Cochise. 

We’ve all been cooking and baking more, haven’t we?  What delicious meals and treats are coming out of your kitchen these days? Food is such a comfort! Even the aromas of food add to our quality of life, don't they?

The Artist and I consider ourselves very fortunate, in that we are not sequestered in a city apartment (snowbound or otherwise) but can get out in the sunshine every day. The Artist has set up a little studio space in an outbuilding, Sarah and I have adventures with our neighbors, and for all of us there are daily explorations very close to home. So much to discover in a a ghost town, where traces of the past linger to the present day!

Often when I am on the phone with my son (our conversations daily since the unexpected decline and death of his father mere weeks ago), I am outdoors, and part of what I’m seeing I describe to my son and sometimes photograph, either while we’re talking or after we’ve ended our chat for the day. He also tells me what's happening in his world, where yesterday it was snowing in Kalamazoo and where he often sees deer in the backyard. We picture each other's worlds across the miles that way. 

I don’t often look straight up into the sky and might have missed this unique cloud formation, had I not been on the phone. The tiny, tiny flowers (most people would call them weeds) I would no doubt have noticed sooner or later, but because I was sitting in one place, I saw them sooner. 

The Artist and I have not been taking long drives to other areas of Cochise County for a while now, but there is plenty to notice and wonder and learn about right here in our own backyard. Next time I post here, I think it will be about adobe. But we’ll see. The “situation,” local, national, global, is changing daily. While I see right now a cardinal in the mesquite in front of the cabin, tomorrow it will undoubtedly appear somewhere else, and it could be that what I anticipate sharing with you the next time I write here will be superseded by another story. 

And you have stories of your own, too. What are they? This was Michigan when we left in December. So much has happened since then, it seems like a lifetime ago. Does it seem that way to you, too?

Adventures Close to Home: Cactus Hill

Adventure? Sarah is ready!

Sheltering in place in a ghost town allows for a great deal of fresh air and exercise. “We’re so lucky to live where we live!” my friend, neighbor, and hiking partner Therese says often of our lives here in Dos Cabezas. She was saying it before the coronavirus came along and says it now in heartfelt tones. I agree wholeheartedly! We are indeed lucky to be able to get outdoors to explore the mountains with our dogs!

Comforting neighbors

Therese and I also agree (and the Artist does, as well) that having cows for neighbors is very comforting. Calm bovine demeanor is contagious in the very best way. Cattle are not oblivious to our presence — and their alert looks hold a certain wariness when they see our dogs — but our little high desert pack is under control, and we pass by without the slightest molestation of livestock taking place. Not a single teasing bark! Good dogs!

See the little one?

Once again we followed the old mine road back, back where it becomes hidden from view from our cabin, making it difficult to explain to the Artist where we've been. Here (below) I’ll make the picture clearer by borrowing a photograph from our last adventure. That day we looked from our hillside ramble across the mine road to what would be our destination today, the place my friend calls Cactus Hill. In the following cropped image, I have zeroed in on the rocky hilltop.

Remember this view?

Our destination today

Here is the pack again, too: Mollie, Sarah, Buddy. The fourth dark object is not an additional dog but the jacket I removed and left down by the road as not needed for our sunny climb.

Being right up close, within touching distance, of rocky outcrops so like the highest peaks is exciting!

And I loved the raking morning light across the opposite slope, the one we’d explored earlier in the week.

Cactus Hill holds far more and larger prickly pear plants than we have down in the ghost town itself, and the higher we climbed, the thicker together the prickly pear, and the more challenging to duck around or squeeze between cacti.

Mollie was intrepid! She was like a mountain goat!

Sarah kept up pretty well, though, for a girl so old I’d almost left her home, knowing we would be climbing Cactus Hill. Then, no — I just couldn’t leave her behind, when she knew I was going out with the pack! And what a wise old girl she is: she was better than usual about drinking water when I offered it to her, and a couple of times she took advantage of large rocks to rest in the shade for a few minutes. 

Ferns! Astonishing!

For me, the hardest part was not climbing the slope or getting down on the ground to photograph plants but standing up again. No matter. It was worth it. I certainly had not expected to find ferns up there among the prickly pear, ocotillo, sotol, and agave. And then to see ferns and cactus right next to each other — that was even more astonishing! 

Ferns & cactus

Here is the view, looking down to the east, with the road continuing toward the old mine site.

Therese took my picture as we started down. The breeze was picking up by then and felt delicious.

Therese and dogs paused in their descent so I could catch up. I kind of hated to “return to earth” so soon but looked back long enough to take this shot illustrating where we had been. See those rocks on the right? Yes!!!

We were up there on the right!

Sarah and I were pretty tired by the time we said good-by to our friends and covered the last quarter-mile to our own winter home. Somehow, though, I have no feeling of “anticlimax” in the wake of one of these mountain adventures. Happy, satisfied, ready for an early lunch — but still open enough to the small and beautiful sights along the way, such as this one, lone, lovely little Mexican poppy blooming right in the middle of the road. What a lovely morning! Something cheery to write in my journal!