"Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Arizona landscape stretches out thousands of feet below me, brown and green, with its rolling hills, peaked mountains, and dry river beds. The plane banks slightly to my side, offering me a wider view, and I drink it up, thirsty, like the thousands of saguaro below me. I am almost home.
Once off the plane I savor the southwest-ness of the airport. The gift shops are overflowing with silver and turquoise jewelry, mini-barrel cacti with fuchsia paper flowers glued to their tops, and mexican jumping beans. Sombreros are stacked high next to baskets of maracas and shelves of U of A shot glasses. The sculptures and paintings lining the hallway to baggage claim celebrate sunsets, rodeos, and cowboys. I love all of it. If I don't get a tamale soon, I may explode.
Outside we wait for my younger brother to pick us up, surrounded by our luggage and an aura of travel fatigue. It is late, the sun is down, and the bats are dipping and twirling under the street lights. The Catalinas rise on the north side of town, enormous, like black sentinels against a velvet sky. When David pulls up to the curb we pile into his big, white Toyota Pathfinder and start the usual family banter about the kids, the weather, and our plans.
The next few days fly by, a rush of shared meals and clicking cameras. My family travels like a caravan, in two or three cars, criss-crossing town for hikes, museums, grocery stores, ice cream, and meals. We inch through parking lots looking for those highly sought after spots in the shade of a rare tree. Every time we park I put the giant windshield visor up in a feeble attempt to keep the interior of the car from reaching hellacious temperatures. It's only March, so we are still somewhat safe from the thermal assault that is Tucson at its worse.
One night we all drive to El Molinito, which is conveniently situated in a strip mall between a mortgage company and a Baskin-Robbins. The restaurant has bad murals of Aztecs and parrots painted on the walls, and a dark, patterned carpet in desperate need of cleaning. Eleven of us situate ourselves around tables that have been hastily pushed together to accommodate us, and the kids settle in with their paper placemats, crayons, and 24 oz. styrofoam cups of Sprite and lemonade.
When the waitress puts my plate down I take a picture of my dinner with my iPhone The refried beans are running into the rice, which is covered with shredded lettuce and cheddar cheese. Resting against the bed of rice is a crispy, ground beef taco, orange with grease. Wedged next to the taco is a slightly congealed cheese enchilada, and next to that is a beef tamale wrapped ceremoniously in corn husks. The tamale has a green olive in it, which makes it authentic in my book. It is all incredibly delicious and I wash it down with a cold Pacifico and lime. I look forward to this dinner for 51 weeks each and every year.
At night I lie in bed with the window open and the blinds up so I can see the stars and hear the crickets, or sometimes, coyotes and javelina. The coyotes howl and scream, and the pigs snort, root, and trample, and both are somewhat terrifying. They remind you that the places humans have carved out as their own are only temporary, and must be constantly guarded and maintained, or nature will take them back. Those primitive things that are closer to the earth are the ones that truly own it. The scorpions in the bathroom tell me this.
The lights of the city shine below the foothill that I'm nestled in. In the morning I wake to the sounds of quail and morning dove, and the smell of mesquite and desert life. If I am lucky I will smell rain at some point, too, although this is rare. When it does rain, it smells like months of tangy dryness being beat from the land, like dust from a blanket.
19 years after leaving the desert, I miss it terribly. When I first left my home it was in a frenzy, and with a sense of urgency. My life was waiting for me somewhere else, and I did not look back. I've built that life over the years, accumulating a husband, two children, a car and a house. It seems a bit surreal that I did those things in the Midwest, so far from my roots. Can you be double-planted? Now, when I go back, I find myself completely enamored with this place I so badly wanted to escape.
The harshness of the desert makes me wonder how growing up here might mold a person. What does it mean to grow up surrounded by barbed plants, poisonous bugs, and deadly heat? What were those early settlers thinking when they stopped their covered wagons, looked at the parched, spiny terrain, and staked their claim? Does a swimming pool count as a survival tool?
People in the Midwest always ask me, “Why would you leave Arizona for these winters?” and I always say, “I couldn't take the heat anymore. The climate there is just as extreme as the climate here.”
“Oh, but it's a dry heat!” they exclaim, as if I may not have realized this. “Yes, and so is the inside of your oven, but you wouldn't want to live there,” I retort.
Now, almost 20 winters later, my memories of those summers have faded, much like my memories of childbirth, appendicitis, and orthodontia. Chances are a few weeks of 110 degree temperatures would leave me withered and weeping in a corner of my bathtub, begging for mercy and dreaming of a blizzard. Chances are I'd get tired of burning my hands on the steering wheel, and wearing a bra ever damp with sweat, and the incessant pounding of the sun. I would miss walking barefoot and hearing the gentle sweep of the waves on the shore of Lake Michigan.
So for now I'll stay where I am and savor the one week a year I get to spend with my family in the desert, cradled by mountains and covered in stars.
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