Post-holiday Post

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There is much to celebrate during the holiday season in the desert.

The temperatures recede, the A/C gets turned off and stays off, and outdoor activities are not governed by avoidance of the heat and sun. Desert sounds of bird calls, coyote serenades, and the breeze whistling through the palo verdes drift in through open windows, day and night. The occasional, too occasional, blessings of winter rains carry the mysterious smell of creosote. While many desert plants shift into idle for a brief rest, chuparosas come into crazy bloom, nourishing our year-round hummingbirds and the mustard headed hyper-active verdin. Javelina come down from the hills and deer visit our yard.  The desert becomes hospitable.

Thanksgiving can be the traditional feast of an herb baked bird with the usual sides, or the turkey can be glazed with chili and served with corn pudding, roasted squash laced with cipotle, and calabacitas, with a pumpkin flan for dessert. Regardless of the menu, it is a convivial holiday that focuses on feasting, family, and friends, and gratitude for life's blessings, especially the fact that perfect temperatures make for excellent hikes that mediate the the effects of indulgent eating.

Christmas is a wonderful blend of American traditions and the prevalent Hispanic cultural influence here in Tucson. No where is more brightly decorated that the barrios, tamales become one of the main food groups, and subtlety goes out the window. Our tree is the top twelve feet of an agave flower stalk, wrapped with colored lights and hung with ornaments collected over decades, a collection we still add to  yearly. Tohono Chul, a wonderful botanic garden in the Catalina foothills, holds Holiday Nights in the park where thousands of white fairy lights illuminate the sprawling mesquites and the paths are lined with luminarias guiding you to music venues and art exhibits. This is the second year I've purchased an artist made and donated ornament, part of a fundraiser for the park. It's a tradition I hope to continue.

The best part of Christmas this year was a visit from my daughter and her husband. We'd seen them twice during the year in their Bay area home, but it was lovely to share the week bracketing Christmas with them in ours. I'd just celebrated the anniversary of my propitious arrival in Tucson eight years ago when my daughter arrived days before Christmas, just like 2001. Their visit was filled with hikes and excursions and good time spent together.

My daughter's one "must do" request was to head south to Tumacacori National Historic Park on Christmas Eve to see the 2000 plus luminarias lighting the old mission. This is a trek we make the evening of December 24th more often than not; it is quite centering in the chaos of Christmas. Visitors' voices hush at the spectacle of soft light on the old walls, allowing the wandering carolers to be heard in the candlelit mission and on surrounding pathways. The mission is located on the sweeping floor of the  Santa Cruz River valley, the Santa Rita mountains curbing the view to the east and were this night silhouetted by a near full moon not yet risen. Visitors gather in the mesquite bosque under trees laden with white lights for homemade cookies and hot chocolate before returning to their own versions of the holiday.

Christmas stockings and a pannetone bread pudding made by my daughter occupied us for a good long while Christmas morning, but the day was too gorgeous to stay inside. A hike was in order and we headed over Gates Pass to Saguaro National Park's King Canyon. This is a familiar hiking spot for us -- in fact we've led hikes up it in our capacity as volunteer rangers for the park -- but it never fails to reveal something new. Cactus, including towering saguaros, cling to the fractured rock walls of the canyon, and each turn up the twisting arroyo provides a new view. There are a few places that require a bit of clambering, but it's an easy challenge and you are well rewarded by petroglyphs over a thousand years old at the upper reaches. We continued on to an old CCC built picnic area with a million dollar view for a brief rest, and then proceeded around to the old Gould Mine, one of the many copper mine shafts (covered) that dot the Tucson Mountains. It was an easy walk along a soft shoulder with a beautiful view of south to Baboquivari and Kitt Peak on our way to the parking lot.

We split up one day, the guys heading to guy things (Titan Missile Museum, the Asarco Copper Mine tour, and Avatar in 3-D) while my daughter and I took a self-guided walking tour of Tucson. We revisited some old favorite places, like Elysian Grove in Barrio Viejo, then a B&B where we stayed on our first visit to Tucson in May of 2001.

The tour included Armory Park and passed the Temple of Music and Art where my daughter became engaged at midnight on New Years Eve in 2003 in the midst of a contra dance celebration. We followed the tour's aqua line through downtown, enjoying the history of some of the buildings and appreciating a few old signs. We wandered the renovated train station, still a functioning Amtrak stop, but also home to trendy restaurants and eateries with great seating indoors or out. We had lunch across the street at The Cup Cafe in the historic Hotel Congress, another tradition of ours. We tried to visit Picante, a favorite shop that specializes in Mexican and other mostly South American imports, but alas, they were shut (we did catch them open a couple of days later). It was a terrific mother-daughter day with lots of old favorites and a few new experiences.

We mostly ate at home -- my daughter and I share an interest in cooking and are good in the kitchen together -- but we had a memorable lunch at Taqueria Pico de Gallo in South Tucson. Their namesake specialty is a large cup of fresh fruit spears -- watermelon, mango, pineapple, coconut, and more -- drizzled with lime juice and sprinkled with salt and chili powder. It sounds odd but is amazingly delicious. Everything they make there is good, but if you go make sure to order at least one taco and choose the soft corn tortillas instead of the flour ones. They are the best I've ever eaten; plump, hand-formed, and fresh off the griddle. This is a Tucson must-do if you like Mexican food, and at the easy end of the cost spectrum with ordering and picking up at the counter and meals on styrofoam plates, but the food is exceptional. If you're looking for a high-end experience, my favorite Mexican food in the world (more central Mexican than border) is Cafe Poca Cosa. If you eat nowhere else, eat there. We missed it this visit, but will catch it the next time my kids are in town.

It was a terrific Christmas, rich with experiences and full of motion, [mostly] healthy eating, and precious time together. And the desert will keep on giving us the best weather in the nation, days in the 70s with chilly nights, for months to come.

There's a change in the air

Things change around this time in the desert, even though Fall is still over two weeks away. Our days are shortening as the sun's trajectory lowers. The high temperatures still flirt with the century mark, but that's way different from edging up on 110. As our seriously insufficient monsoon staggers to a close, the humidity will vaporize and cool will return to our nights, allowing for open windows and the symphony of sounds of the nocturnal desert will once again color our dreams.

The animals are behaving differently. It's been many days since quail parents have put their adolescents through their paces in our garden. The mated pairs are splitting up, reforming into coveys until spring drives them back into coupledom. The white winged doves have, for the most part, headed south though I did see one straggler barreling across the back yard yesterday, headed for the sheltering shade of a big mesquite. Tarantulas are out and about, looking for love. This male (you can tell by the black legs) was waiting for me on my front doormat when I headed to the mailbox. I assumed he was looking for some other blond (females are a dark blond color), but he hung around the courtyard for a few days and then we found him crumpled and dead. Older than many people's pets, male tarantulas breed at about eleven years old and die shortly thereafter. A day after he lay motionless, we found him pecked into bits -- a furry leg here, a carapace there -- the circle of life. A road runner on the hunt for lizards in our yard dropped into an odd crouch before walking up the leaning mesquite trunk and onto the wall, dropping to the other side. A collared lizard chilled in comfort on a cushion still in the shade in my barrio garden.








Plants are beginning to rally, ready for their second spring. While much of the rest of the country's vegetation is beginning to shut down for the Big Sleep, ours is getting its second wind!
Plants that hunkered down for mere survival over the summer are now finding the energy for a first or second bloom.

We took a hike up King Canyon this morning on the west side of the Tucson Mountains. Resurrection fern was green and limberbushes were leafed out. Ocotillos exploded from the ground like huge green pipe cleaners, leafed out from what rain we've had over the past few weeks. At 9 AM it was already quite warm and still humid from the remnant moisture from recent hurricane that hit Baja California, but there was plenty of shade in the canyon and we took it slow, enjoying being outside again in full daylight.
Not that the gorgeous walk up the canyon isn't its own reward, there are walls of petroglyphs along the way, images pecked in the desert varnish of the rocks over a thousand years ago by Native American Indians. The hike back to the trail head on an old mining road rimming the canyon, cooled by a nice breeze, was over all too soon.

Despite feeling that Mother Nature has been behaving a lot like Lucy with the football -- we've watched longingly as huge storms have drifted by us, leaving us dry but putting on a good light show -- we are becoming friends again with the desert and are impatient to be once again fully immersed in our love affair with this place.