Faith, Folklore, and Friends

The saguaro cactus defines the Sonoran Desert, the only place it grows. These are in Cave Creek, Arizona, a western tourist town located a little northeast of Phoenix. Saguaro cactus can grow up to 60' tall, and have up to 25 arms.  They produce white blossoms in April, then red fruit in June.  The birds love them. Can you see the round hole in the cactus near the top? That is a bird's nest.  Sometimes, there will be several in a mature cactus. When I first saw them, I thought that the red was the blossom, but one of the locals informed me that the blossom was white and  long gone by June.  The red petals are part of the fruit that the cactus produces and the birds love. The local fellow also told me that getting water from a cactus was a bunch of baloney made popular by movie westerns.  The inside, I was told, is similar to a pine tree.  After a cactus dies and the soft flesh decomposes, the woody ...

About 1992, someone suggested I read  Tony Hillerman's  latest novel.  I did, and I was hooked.  I read everything he had written up to that point, and got every new novel as soon as it was released.   His eighteen mystery novels are set in the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona with protagonists Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee of the Navajo tribal police.  Hillerman's books describes the Four Corners area, Window Rock, Arizona and other desert landscapes. We had been to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, but had never stopped at these places and seen them up close. We had a long winter here, and one cold, rainy day, I was thinking (daydreaming?) about how nice it would be to be in the Southwest. I started rereading Hillerman's  novels , and Hub read some of them for the first time. His descriptions make you want to be there, to see these places with your own eyes, to taste the dust with your mouth, to hear the wind and the silence. So blame it on a wild ...