Overachiever

There’s one in every crowd – the overachiever for whom the best is not good enough. You know them. The high school valedictorian who graduated with a 4.25 GPA. The marathoner turned triathlete turned ultra triathlete. Richard Branson.

Every April we begin watching the saguaro for the little flat green buttons on the prickled pleats of this cactus. We know these smooth discs will grow into knobs that will, some time in late April, open in the dark of night into iridescent white cupped flowers. These flowers will be filled with cool sweet melon scented nectar, manna from heaven for everything that can get to it during this parched dry pre-monsoonal season. Bats and moths visit by night. Bees and birds by day, particularly the white winged dove which follows the saguaro blooms up from the southern Sonoran Desert in Mexico. Enticed and rewarded by the fragrant nutrient-rich liquid, partakers leave their host dusted in pollen, carrying it to the next flower they visit, fertilizing flowers for fruit and seed production, the benefits of which they will reap in June.

A few weeks ago as we left for a ramble in the Tucson Mountain foothills, we spotted our first open saguaro blossoms, usually soloists this early in the blooming season; occasionally with two or three in a saguaro’s crown. A few miles later we spotted in the distance what looked like a saguaro wearing the white flag of surrender, or a brilliant white tee shirt a wind had caught and tangled in its thorns. When we got closer we realized that this overachiever of saguaros had cloaked itself in well over a dozen blinding white blooms crowded cheek to jowl in remarkable display of overabundance.

There must have be some extremely sated birds resting in the nearby mesquites.