It Isn’t Winter Yet — But Almost Christmas

Those mesquite branches are not bare.

“You’ll be somewhere warm,” people back home commented, often enviously, when they learned of our winter plans. Not really, I would tell them, insisting that we would not have real warmth until about March, when spring would come to the high desert, admitting however that, while night temperatures would dip below the freezing mark, we wouldn’t have to shovel snow or have our driveway plowed, even in the event of a light snow, and we could expect sunshine almost every day. Oh, the sunshine! I feel spoiled for that reason alone. 

But it was February first when we began our winter here in 2015 and January 15 when we arrived in 2018, and now we are still in calendar year 2018, already here, and astonished to find ourselves in what seems to be autumn rather than winter. The days do get warm, after all — a high of 61 degrees expected today in Willcox, with 70s in Tucson — and we don’t know if this is normal for December here, since we’ve never before arrived early enough that the mesquite bushes (and a few pods) were still green and the big cottonwoods in Railroad Park in Willcox just turning from green to brown, their branches not yet bare. 

Or that one species of flowering plant (turpentinebush?) in the wash has not gone completely to seed but is still attracting butterflies and pollinating flies. Butterflies! In December! They were small white ones, like those we call cabbage butterflies in the Midwest. One other plant up by the cabin had a still-yellow blossom, also. 

Ten hours and two minutes of daylight today. We are almost at the turn-around point: first the solstice, and then the days will begin to grow longer. We take it all for granted, we moderns, and do not pray or make sacrifices to gods for more hours of sunshine. Somehow, though, I feel an offering of gratitude is in order. I am deeply grateful for the bright sky that lifts my tired, Midwestern, winter-worn spirit and delighted by a cactus wren’s morning greeting.

A Midwesterner could make a problem out of sunny warmth in December, in that it “doesn’t feel like Christmas,” but I brought Christmas lights from Michigan to string in our high desert cabin windows, a box of folded paper Moravian stars, another set of easily packed, brightly colored ornaments, and the bare minimum of decorating ingenuity I possess. So you see, while it may not be winter, and the weather outside is anything but “frightful,” we are ready for a little Christmas in our mountain retreat, settling in to enjoy the last couple days of autumn and welcome winter when it comes in its turn.

The Garden Works Seven Days a Week, Too, in Summer

How is the vegetable garden like the small-town bookseller in summer? The answer is the title of this post.

Below is a different view of the garden, showing the meadow that stretches out behind it--the meadow where autumn olive has been eradicated (a lot of work involved in that project, too) and the area now safe for grasses, persistent alfalfa clumps and lots and lots of milkweed, which I'm happy to say has finally begun to attract the monarch butterflies.


Cukes, collards, squash and eggplant to the left, beans and strawberries on the ground, tomatoes in the right-hand back corner from this view, with peppers out of sight. The peppers would be in the lower-right corner, so see the top picture again to spot them. They are sharing their straw bales with pansies, as the tomatoes and cukes share with nasturtiums.


Here's a closer shot of those tomatoes and nasturtiums, with squash in the background.


I love the way the collard leaves hold and collect water. Poor thing, though--it's been nibbled a bit. Well, we all get nibbled a bit once in a while, but we keep on working.


Here is a lovely little lavender star, holding the morning dew. Do you know what it is? When it turns from blossom to fruit, it will transform into an eggplant, but right now it looks like something that should be decorating an expensive French pastry. Not to take away from the beauty (below) of the hardier, hard-working, peasant-like squash blossoms. My dear French landlady in Paris years ago thought I was a "delicate flower." Where did she ever get that idea? If I am a flower at all, surely I am a squash blossom!

And now I can't write any more, because it's time to leave the garden to work on its own while Sarah and I get up to Northport to do some bookselling!