I’ve come to feel a connection to Tucson. When I enter the stark desert light and drive past saguaros that look like phantoms, trees more barren than lush, and rock and gravel front lawns, I smile now. At first I was surprised by it all – an alien landscape, I called it – but now it is familiar.
I was cruising down a main street lined with palo verde trees in brilliant bloom – a thousand yellow flowers fill canopies – and I saw a man sitting on a low ledge holding open a yellow umbrella for shade and the image stuck in my mind. Wow! How incredible that at this moment I saw a painting in real life. Because an artist’s work is to help us see, and nature is an artist, providing a showy monochrome of yellow under harsh sunlight against a flat background. The image looked manipulated. AI even. It was striking.
Later, as I walked to the nature reserve just blocks from my Air BnB (another plus about Tucson are all the reserves and natural areas), I saw purple cactus in bloom, more signs of a desert spring, and it gave me tremendous joy to be right where I was at exactly at this time.
I arrive in Tucson each month and set up “home” so I can pick up Tin and we can be together in a comfortable setting. It’s no easy feat to create something that feels normal when living with a teenager is abnormal. Here is a person who wants to be close but whose entire body language eschews connection. And yet this is becoming familiar – navigating connection without sharing the same language or desire. When a baby eagle is ready to take flight, the feather fluff of the nest has started to fall away making it a nest of thorns. Its discomfort makes the chick want to fly away to find something more comfortable.
I know how long it takes to feel comfortable in your own skin – your true home – and so I still want to protect this chick. I want to hold this prickly cactus, even though it is filled with thorns and tough on the outside.