A Beautiful and Prickly Place

Perhaps because I have been watching, The Last Alaskans, perhaps because I live in Tucson, Arizona, perhaps because I have a camera, I have been paying attention to such a place as this is.

It is prickly and beautiful. It is impossible not to know that we share this space with plants and animals long-since adapted to this Sonoran Desert, who define, more than we do, what it is to be here.

That is probably true of all places. I know that, born in Tacoma, Washington, and having grown up (more or less: less) halfway between Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier, that graveled soil and a sea of Douglas fir trees were everywhere, and that there is a mountain always in my mind, and the incessant slap of water against stone.

Here, while it is snowing in Minnesota, the saguaros are blooming. It is the time of year when 100 degree days F. become ordinary, when the Tucson Old Timers baseball team starts playing ball an hour earlier in the day to avoid total desiccation and dispersal by a passing breeze.

Our stalwart, fourteen pound Miniature Pinscher parks himself by the patio door by day, and the bedroom window by night, to report attempts by little lizards to reclaim the land.

It is the time of year when javelinas introduce their piglets to spillage beneath the bird feeder, driving Cooper to heroic attempts to scare them off by tenor-barking through the fence. The javelinas conceal their terror well, lying down for a short nap before going on to whatever is next.

It is a special place. A beautiful and prickly place.

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