8 March 2024 (desert rain)

desert rain

the verdin’s song

short and sweet

March 18: Ocotillo

desert morning

raising arms to the rising sun

ocotillo

July 9: Hot Cat

Several years ago my husband and I were visiting Saguaro National Park in Arizona. Because it was about 100 degrees outside, we watched for birds at the feeders from inside the air-conditioned comfort of the visitors' center. While there, we observed a ground squirrel doing a strange thing under the feeders. It was lying splayed out flat on the ground, all four limbs completely outstretched, looking like it had been squashed. We wondered if it was ok. It eventually got up and ran off, as squirrels do, and we eventually came across the educational sign explaining that this is how overheated ground squirrels in the Sonoran desert cool off, by transferring their body heat into the ground.

The past few hot days my cat has been doing something similar. She's been (thankfully) shunning our warm laps and instead stretching out along the cool flat surfaces of a countertop or hardwood floor. It must be tough to be covered with fur in the middle of a steamy summer. First thing in the morning, though, and she's right back in her patch of sun at the front door. Domestic cats originated in the heat of the African deserts, after all. So she's clearly dealing with the heat just fine, in her way.

As we all do. A co-worker brought in a box of popsicles for us to share today. Another co-worker goes for a swim on her lunch break. I moved my exercise mat out to the back yard this evening so I could stretch under the shade of the leaves and feel the cool evening air on my skin. I let the cat out onto the porch where she seemed content to just lie there and look around. Then wisps of fog began to blow in off the water, moving fast overhead. And just like that, it wasn't hot anymore, so the cat and I came inside. So far, though, she's still avoiding my lap. (Uh oh, I spoke to soon... here she is...)

These long, sultry days
cat remembers ancestral
roots, Egypt's desert.

June 21: Summer Solstice

This afternoon as I was driving home from a meeting, the car thermometer read 90 and the sun was high in a deep blue sky. Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. After this, as one friend put it, it's all downhill till the Winter Solstice. I reveled in the lush steaminess of the day.

Besides being significant on the world's seasonal calendar, this day is also important as my niece Nola's first birthday. What a powerful day on which to be born, the day when the sun god is in his prime, when the sun has reached its apex. Surely she will go through life fired by an inner solar power.

I was musing on the luxurious heat and light of late afternoon, the richness of the foliage on this humid Midsummer's Day, when I noticed an odd-shaped cloud scrawled on the sky's blue screen stretching over Mount Battie. The cloud looked like a big, white C. Immediately I thought of certain mountains I've seen in Arizona desert country (and in other places out west) upon which proud locals have painted the first letter of their town's name. A mountain right outside Parker, Arizona bears a large white P, for example. This seems to be a common practice, and rather than defacing the mountain, it serves in its way as a link between landscape and community.

So even though Mount Battie bears no resemblance to the arid, patchy hills of the west, today the weather  shaped a fluffy C to perch on its craggy, pine-covered summit, just for Camden, just for a moment. I looked up later and it was scattered. (I guess it was too much to ask for an N for Nola--nature's sky-writers would have a real challenge with that one.) Ephemeral as it was, however, that special Solstice cloud bridged a gap in my memory between two places I love: Maine and the Sonoran desert of Arizona. And today both of them were hot and sunny for the first day of Summer.

Strange how even on
a humid Maine summer day
I think of desert.