Winter Is — Here? Now? Is It?

Morning cattle

For more than a week now, when I walk out the cabin door every morning with my dog, I revel in the sunshine and the quiet peace that surrounds me like a comforting shawl around my shoulders (until neighbor dogs get to barking, and that’s a kind of comfort, too), and every day I marvel at the fact that it isn’t winter yet. That’s how it has seemed to me, anyway, coming from wintry, cold, very snowy Michigan. Here in the high desert there is still foliage on the trees, and while the temperature goes down to maybe 20 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, it’s back up in the 40s, 50s or even 60s by the next afternoon. Frost appears on the ground every morning, true. But unless a hard, bitter wind is blowing, the morning air doesn’t feel all that cold — not when the sky is clear and bright with sunshine.

last week 

yesterday

The giant cottonwood in Railroad Park in Willcox is one of my favorite trees, one I never fail to admire every time we drive across the tracks. Maybe its leaves are not quite as brightly gold as they were last week (but then, I photographed the tree from a different direction, with the light falling on it differently, too), but at least the wind hasn’t blown those leaves all off and away yet. Many hold fast.

Netleaf hackberry

Closer to home, here in Dos Cabezas, the tree species and individuals I watch most closely to see how long they will hold their leaves are the netleaf hackberry trees. Some still have green leaves, others’ leaves are shriveled and brown, and most are thick with red berries. In fact, trees with only a few brown leaves left have a reddish tinge when seen from a distance, so thick with berries are their branches. 

green leaves, red berries

brown leaves, red berries

What evolutionary advantage, I wonder, do these trees achieve by having such a incredibly thick, snarled tangle of branches? Netleaf hackberry is not a conventionally “lovely” tree, and yet it is ubiquitous here, so it must be well adapted to the climate and terrain. Many birds and other wildlife enjoy its berries, and Native Americans used berries, wood, and bark in a variety of ways. It belongs here, and the more familiar it becomes to me, the fonder I become of it.

As for the mesquites, some of them are bare, and green leaves cling to others. What is it that can make that difference? It isn’t whether the plants are growing down in the wash or up on higher ground, because both bare and still-leafy specimens are found in both high and low places. 

Sarah sniffs tips of green-leafed mesquite branches

We've got mail!

Today is the official beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere, despite my impression of lingering autumn. Well, let winter come. Our propane heater is working, we had a delivery of fuel the other day, we have plenty of warm clothes, cozy throws and comforters, and shelves full of books for evenings at home. (I don’t write this in smug, self-complacency but in gratitude.) During our bedtime reading aloud, we have reached the part of Julia Child’s story when her correspondence began with Avis DeVoto. I love the letters those two wrote to each other, and I remember when a friend in Australia whom I’ve never met face to face — as Julia never met Avis in person for I don’t remember how long — was reading the letters at the same time I was. Reading and exchanging our views about Avis and Julia’s letters, their personalities and expressions and activities, formed much of the foundation of Kathy’s and my initial correspondence.

Oh, books and letters, letters and books! Winter is such a perfect time for both! And how well they go together! Let winter come. The snow was lovely here in Dos Cabezas last winter, but as of the present winter solstice, snow has yet to arrive.

It's All Mesquite to Me

Cows wander through it

Normal winter temperatures have returned: at night the air here in Dos Cabezas plunges below freezing and by day barely makes it into the 50s, making it much more like the winter we remember from three years ago. We keep the cabin warm with a propane heater and are comfortable indoors night and day, but when I go outside with Sarah, I leave the warmth  reluctantly. I put on jacket and hat and mittens, and on a still morning, walking into the west, I feel chill air on my face, even without a noticeable breeze. And yet — I also feel the sun on my back, and the sun feels warm, warm despite the chilly air, and I relax into my walk, losing any sense of hurry to get back indoors. 

Someone should put together a book of southeast Arizona desert vegetation in winter. This tree by the wash, 15-20 feet in height, with multiple trunks and with a tangled nest of twig-like branches bristling (so many desert plants “bristle,” in one way or another) with small dark orange berries — what is it? The book I have consulted on Arizona plants is very complete as far as it goes, explaining the Latin names, giving economic uses for plants and listing animals that feed on them, and showing photographs of entire trees in full leaf and line drawings of those characteristic leaves. But what do they look like now, in winter, bare of leaves and yet full of last season’s fruit? That’s what I need to know! 

My best guess for the tree in the pictures above is netleaf hackberry, Celtis reticulata, a member of the elm family not at all reminiscent of the stately American elm of the Midwest. My source says:

This hackberry occurs as a small tree, up to 30 feet tall and less than 1 foot in diameter, generally. It grows along dry washes, desert grasslands and river valleys.... Its characteristically scraggly appearance develops because several feet of new growth occur on only a few limbs during years of adequate water.... 

-- from Woody Plants of the Southwest: A Field Guide with Descriptive Text, Drawings, Range Maps and Photographs, by Samuel H. Lamb. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1989

Anyone else want to weigh in?

Then there are the grasses and brooms and other ground plants. There are half a dozen only a few steps from the cabin door, but identifying them in books from their winter appearance is beyond my capability.

As for the many brittle hardwood shrub-like plants, branches alive and, yes, bristling with thorns, they are all “mesquite” to me, though I know there is more than one species and probably more than one genus here in the ghost town. There is even, I find in the plant book, more than one “catclaw”! There are catclaw mesquite and catclaw mimosa. (And no, spelling program, I do not mean “catcall,” so please stop “correcting” my spelling!”) Those I think I could tell apart by their long, pea-like seed pods, similar but distinctive. Both are in the legume family (as are all the mesquites), but the mimosa pods curl. Three years ago I had quite a collection of dry seed pods. This year I can't find a single one near the cabin. Was the drought so severe and food so scarce that cattle and deer ate them all? Perhaps there is another explanation, but I have no idea what it might be.

There was a photo of a small oak in my account of our most recent drive through the Stockton Pass in the Pinaleno Mountains, but learning the various Arizona oaks is a project requiring more ambition than I possess in that direction. Often, whether it’s a question of a tree, a wildflower, or a bird, I’m satisfied if I can mentally attach to it the correct genus. Often, but not always. The sparrows (like warblers, so numerous, various, and confusing!) challenge me to greater efforts. Just the other day I came in from a walk to consult the bird book and felt triumphant when I was able to identify a bird I had seen in the wash as a black-throated sparrow. Understand — black-throated sparrows are far from rare: the book says it is “Arizona’s most widespread and numerous breeding sparrow” (Birds of Southeast Arizona, by Richard Cachor Taylor [Olympia, WA: R. W. Morse Co., 2010). So my sighting, if I want to give seeing the bird a fancy name, is no great event. It’s nothing like seeing, three years ago, the hooded oriole here in Dos Cabezas or the vermilion flycatcher in Willcox. It’s not even as exciting, objectively speaking, as the little loggerhead shrike I saw out at Twin Ponds our first winter here. 

Vermilion flycatcher, Willcox, AZ, 2015

But that’s just it, don’t you see? Excitement has nothing to do with objectivity. My little sparrow triumph made me happy. I’ll go further. I would not give up my excitement over ordinary events for all the objectivity in the world! Do I “romanticize” my life? (I have been accused of that more than once.) Well, if I don’t, who will? And if I were to stop, what would I gain?

“Horses! Look, horses!”  Well, why in the world would I ever want to give up the joy I feel at the very sight of them? Let others shrug and roll their eyes and twist their mouths into disdainful, supercilious looks. Their hearts are not swelling with happiness! How would the world be better if any of us were to feel less happiness on a daily basis?

As for the mesquite and all the other dark, unremarkable, bare-branched plants I see every day on the high desert floor, while I regret the way they have overtaken so many square miles, replacing more diverse vegetation suitable to grazing and browsing, and while I would love to see the high desert grassland reclaimed and flourishing, rather than simply used up, it’s also true that as I look out over this scrubby, scruffy, poor, eroded, overgrazed land, I feel an irresistible and growing affection for it just the way it is. The plants and animals here, from mesquite and cow to cholla and packrat, are only doing what every plant and animal species does, including human beings: they’re trying to make a living in the place circumstance has placed them, and we’re all here now, trying to find ways to live together. 

Now, finally, early, early this morning, for the first time this year we heard the familiar chorus of coyote song, a sound we heard often during our first stay three years ago. Arizona is not Michigan, and the ghost town cabin we call home here is not our country farmhouse in Leelanau County, but the coyotes sound the same both places. They sound like home.

I believe this cholla to be Tasajo

How Green Is My Desert

Flowering shrub is bird-of-paradise

The Artist and I have never stayed in southern Arizona this late into the spring before, never seen the desert so green, and every day the change from bare, dead-looking winter trees and shrubs becoming vibrant with leaves and blossoms astonishes us anew. “Are there many deciduous trees where you are?” my son asked me on the phone this morning. Oh, goodness, yes! The mesquite is often more of a large shrub than a tree, but it is ubiquitous, and it is deciduous, and some individuals reach tree size and can have beautiful shapes, and right now all are leafed out, providing shade for cattle and hiding places for birds to build nests. But mesquite is only the beginning. In the photograph just below, looking past the bird-of-paradise and down into the wash, there are at least four more large, green, deciduous plants, three of them trees. At the far right top (back corner) is a walnut tree. 

Nogal in leaf and bloom

The walnut tree’s leafy crown dances in the afternoon wind, and suckers sprout at the base. For five years I’ve been wondering what kind of tree this was, and how I see another farther back behind the neighbor’s fence, and down the road just past another neighbor’s house I’ve spotted a whole row. I don’t know if this is the Arizona or the Texas walnut, but either one goes by the Spanish name nogal, the plural of which is nogales. It’s walnuts that give the name to that Mexican border town, and I am happy to know this beautiful neighbor tree by name at last.

In the center background (and not sharply in focus) of green things growing along the wash is a netleaf hackberry tree, a tree I've written about before. In winter there have always been enough dried berries and dead leaves on the hackberry that I have been able to identify it almost from the beginning of my desert stays, but it looks very different now, clothed in green. 

Center left of that composite shot but not all the way to the left, the light green tree you see is desert willow, another newly learned-by-name tree to me and one that charms me in every way. Since learning it, I’ve found myself photographing the desert willow at different times of day. It is not, you should understand, a true willow. It is a different genus and member of a completely different botanical family from the willows along the no-name creek just north of my Michigan farmhouse. 

Flowers on the desert willow below the cabin have not yet opened, but when we went for a little ride down Chiricahua way, I was happy to spot a desert willow in bloom. 

Does that flower remind you of a catalpa blossom? Both trees belong to the Bignonia family, the desert willow’s flowers smaller and more colorful but very like those of catalpa trees back in Leelanau County, Michigan.

We have never seen the wash flowing with water, a phenomenon that arrives only with the summer monsoons, each flood lasting only a few hours. Over closer to the Chiricahua Mountains, though, where streams flow for much of the year, water-loving sycamores are found. Some are of magnificent size, although during the winter, when they look like ghost trees, it’s hard to believe they are alive. 

Arizona sycamore in winter 

Now look at the difference! It seems nothing short of miraculous. 

Arizona sycamore mid-May

Oaks are deciduous, also, but in this climate they hold onto their leaves through the winter and bring forth new leaves in the spring, at the same time that they begin to drop the old, gradually, with never a bare season to them. Oak trees near streams and in mountain canyons are peaceful places to rest the eyes all year-round.

Cochise County and I have been getting acquainted since January of 2015, but my desert is still full of surprises. Of course, what surprises me is familiar to those who have lived here all their lives. How can I call the desert “mine” at all? 

It’s true I’m a newcomer, but I do love it, more deeply each year, and this year – this strange spring of the COVID-19 pandemic, with stay-at-home orders in Arizona from mid-March until the end of April, being here in a whole new and unexpected way, I feel I have paid a few odd dues and earned at least a beginner’s merit badge in Arizona living. 

Our resident roadrunner has accepted us unconditionally. Bless his little heart!

Adventures Close to Home: Physical and Spiritual Hills and Valleys

Humans keep safe distance; Sarah eagerly leads the way

Saturday morning’s walk with my neighbor and our dogs would have been better had I not opened a bottle of wine the night before. It was wine I’d been saving for company, and then Friday night I thought, well, that isn’t going to happen! And I yielded to temptation, with the result that I woke up only 15 minutes before Therese and her dogs (“Puppies are restless,” she texted) were ready to hit the trail. As we set out on the dirt road that leads to the old mine in the mountains (we never go that far), Therese noted, “You don’t seem to have your usual zip.” No, I did not. It was a short walk yesterday morning. Lesson learned.

We don’t go as far as the mine, much higher in the mountains, but we do regularly visit some of the “ruins” of old mining structures. The walls in the image here, I thought, had quite a presence in the early morning light. But Therese teases me for lugging a camera along on these walks and directs remarks at Sarah, such as, “Hold still, Sarah. Your mom wants another picture of you!” It’s true. I do photograph my dog a lot. Although she is probably carrying a few extra pounds these days in dust alone, she is always beautiful in my eyes.

My friend is mocking me!

Beautiful girl!

We humans keep a safe distance not only from one another (life in the time of coronavirus) but also from at least one select spot along the way, and we encourage our dogs to stay away from this one, too. Javelinas live in that cave! We do not need any close-up encounters with javelinas! 

Plant life is safer. Cactus spines can be avoided by keeping a safe distance (and we are all about safe distance these days, aren’t we?), while other vegetation can be safely touched and examined. Look! Netleaf hackberry is putting out new spring leaves! What a cheery sight! And here a primrose, there a primrose — nice!

Later:

From the valley of a hangover to a peak of joy in the natural world, the walk with dogs was only one part of my day, the beginning, but it’s the only part for which I have visual images to share with you. Incidents after that, good and bad, were either not camera-friendly or not camera-worthy. I could have photographed the popovers that failed to “pop,” but why advertise such an abysmal failure?

One very bright spot of the day was e-mail from the friend who owns the building where the Artist and I have our studio/gallery (his) and bookstore (mine) back in Northport, dear Clare proposing a financial accommodation that lifted a big load of worry off our minds. We had been discussing the situation and wondering how much we could ask of her — and then she initiated a solution with terms more generous than we had considered requesting. Relief!

And you might think that would set me up for the rest of the day, but a couple of Facebook exchanges managed to plunge me into another dark valley. By this morning I finally came to a decision and posted the following on my status: 

There was a piece on NPR yesterday about Internet outrage. People post stories about happenings that outrage them, and then other people chime in with their outrage, and everyone’s outrage builds, and everyone feels as if they’ve done something, but they have done nothing. The postings do not reach the people whose actions outrage them — and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t change any minds with ringing contempt and death wishes! 

I understand the outrage some of my friends express. It comes from fear. I’m afraid, too. And I don’t mind criticizing government officials: after all, they are in positions of responsibility, and being criticized, even criticized harshly, comes with those positions. But I cannot join a chorus of disdain and contempt and hatred for ordinary Americans, whatever they are saying and doing, however misguided I find their views, however dangerous I find their actions. I certainly cannot wish death upon them! And reading posts filled with contempt and hatred and death wishes contributes nothing but agitation to my already troubled mind. 

There were bright spots in my day yesterday, but a cloud hung over all, brought on solely by a couple of Facebook exchanges. So I am going to be looking less, reading less, and joining in certain comment threads not at all, for the sake of my own mental health. Yes, everyone is “entitled” to their feelings and their free expression of those feelings. I am, likewise, “entitled” to express my disapproval of their expressions. Freedom of speech is a two-way street. But I’m not changing any minds, either. I’m not convincing anyone to refrain from rants. 

So right now I need to withdraw, even to pull away from certain of my friends. These times are hard enough for all of us. We all have our worries and fears already. And I do not find expressions of hatred helping me or anyone else, so if you want to engage in them, fine, but I’m turning you off. It’s what I need to do right now. And you won’t even miss me, I guarantee it. 

That, at least, was my draft. [I have now broken it into paragraphs, here and on Fb, at a friend's request.] Pasting it into Facebook meant losing the italics — and you know I am addicted to italics! (Note to self: try to wean yourself away from italics. Good, strong writing does not need italics! Or underlining....) By posting that paragraph in blue above to Facebook this morning, I was able to climb back up to higher mental health ground, though my spiritual feet still slip from time to time — on the loose gravel, as it were — due to not having heard from an old friend since she last e-mailed a week ago to tell me her husband was hospitalized for coronavirus. 

Ups and downs, joy and fear, gladness and anger. Deep breaths, deep breaths. I know you know what I mean. It is our world today.

Thank heaven for our old girl!

We Look for Different Things

 

Sunny Juliet and I go for a long walk every morning, each of us exploring in her own way. My eyes are my foremost sense. For her, I suspect it’s her nose, but she uses her eyes, too, to spot something interesting up ahead, a reason to run up and inspect with her nose and then, often, give her teeth and taste buds a workout. 

The glove I dropped yesterday! I was looking for that!

Sunny notices visually either movement or novelty. If something appears that wasn’t there before, that’s something she has to check out. And if birds fly up out of a mesquite shrub or a cottontail or jackrabbit breaks its frozen pose to run, she’ll give chase – with equal success, I might add, in case of birds or bunnies. I’m looking at forms of mesquite, abandoned nests, seed pods of different sizes and colors, and speculating about remnants of old stone walls. I’m told that some of these courses of stonework were built to direct the flow of water during monsoon season, and that’s intriguing, but I also see pictures in my memory of two beloved former dogs posed on one particular section of wall.

Mesquite dragon growing from hackberry embrace...

...found life ended where it began.

Long a landmark for me, this one.

This more recently stumbled upon.

Sunny does not share my fascination with effects of light and shadow on distant mountains, and I do not share her enthusiasm for cow poop. Does she have memories of other times in the wash, from last spring or earlier this winter? I’ll never know.

 

While our interests are not identical, however, they are more or less compatible, and we both enjoy our rambles over the range together. At least, in our own fashion of “together.” It’s a bit the way the Artist and I enjoyed our books together. Each of us had literary loves not shared by the other, and we also enjoyed considerable overlap in our reading tastes, which is what allowed us to take such deep pleasure in reading aloud to, and being read aloud to by, the other. Of the three first books I’ve read in this new calendar year, I think he would have enjoyed most certain parts of On Trails but might have preferred the book I’m reading now, Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies, about a frontier expedition made in the 1830s. For the rest of you, here is my beginning-of-the-year recap:

 

1. Spragg, Mark. An Unfinished Life (fiction). I picked up this novel because I was absolutely crazy about the author’s memoir, Where Rivers Change Direction, but I hadn’t gotten very far at all into An Unfinished Life before I realized I’d seen the movie based on the book, and then as I read, I kept seeing scenes from the movie. The author and his wife worked on the screenplay, I read on the dust jacket. But I’ll say to you what I always say in cases like these, which is – if you haven’t seen the movie, read the novel first. And if you haven’t read the memoir, be sure to do that. It’s a completely different story but one not to be missed!

 

2. Moor, Robert. On Trails (nonfiction). I wasn’t sure I would read this book in its entirety. Thought maybe I’d dip into it, give a few pages a try. Well! Moor’s prologue tells of his hiking the Appalachian Trail, but the very fact that he put that in a prologue should have told me he had much, much more to say. Not only does he hike beyond the North American continent, not only does he investigate how animals other than human beings make trails, but he also investigates the notions of spiritual paths and introduces the idea of “desire lines,” as well as giving details of how public hiking trails are con- structed, so that as I read I kept thinking of more and more friends and family members and bookstore customers who would appreciate this book. He writes of how every hiker alters a trail:

 

Here is where the notion of the spiritual path, as portrayed in countless holy books, falters: scriptures tend to present the image of an unchanging route to wisdom, handed down from on high. But paths, like religions, are seldom fixed. They continually change—widen or narrow, schism or merge—depending on how, or whether, their followers elect to use them. Both the religious path and the hiking path are, as Taoists say, made in the walking. 

 

This is exactly what Henri Bergson said about life and about arguments of free will vs. determinism that depend on an image of a forking path and Moor has such a lovely philosophical turn of mind that I wish he had not dismissed Bergson as quickly as he did, but that was my only disappointment in a book that I highly recommend.

 

3. Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley (fiction). My admiration for Charlotte Brontë has grown by leaps and bounds through my reading of this novel. Set during the time of Napoleon, the story more than touches upon economic disruptions brought about not only by machinery but also by the war itself, the plight of those thrown out of work highlighted without demonizing factory owners struggling to avoid bankruptcy and ruin. Had I written the novel (there’s a dream for you!), I might have called it Caroline and Shirley, because it’s hard to say that only one of the two main female characters is “the” protagonist. In fact, Shirley comes into the story long after the character of Caroline has been established. Friendship between the two young women is based in large part on the recognition both have that their interests and values and thoughts are not those of other young women in their social circle. 

I can imagine readers who would be impatient at the long speeches the author sometimes puts in her characters’ mouths, more like carefully written and smoothly edited mini-essays than realistic conversation. I didn’t mind. I enjoyed them. And at other times dialogue moves swiftly, in short bursts like the thrusts of a fencing duel. There is even a passage in which I saw Caroline and Shirley as a kind of Greek chorus, delivering a description of a scene the author could have described herself more directly, and that struck me as a brilliant and fascinating experiment. 

Charlotte Brontë’s views of gender equality and social justice were way ahead of her time, and this book deserves a broad new modern audience.

 

Lose yourself in a book!

What do you look for in a book when you are reading purely for pleasure? Story, character, social commentary, mystery and surprise, crime and punishment, or something else entirely? If something else, what?