Mushroom Land

We welcome you to Mushroom Land.

We wish you could stay forever.

But we all know that you can't.

(Unless, of course, you eat the mushrooms. Then anything is possible.)

Cicadas

Hey there, R.J. Reynolds. You're hard to escape in this small town. 

So is the sound of cicadas, chirruping in a mechanical chorus more like a car alarm than an insect love song.

If the song is successful, the mated cicadas fertilize and die. Their hatched offspring bury themselves underground and emerge years later to sing their own love (death?) song.

It's rather poetic, despite the fact that cicadas are still insects, prone to mistaking human arms for sap-filled tree limbs. I imagine it's hard to differentiate between tall, swaying entities when your eyes are bigger than your brain.

Fix to Summer

Is it wrong that summer makes me crave the fall?

It reeks of sacrilege.

When I was young, summers were spans of long shoe-free, school-free days that hardly began before they ended. As the sun hung heavy overhead, my mother would start the fans, draw the shades and send me out to play with a knobbly cucumber in hand. Each bite exploded and dripped down my chin until all that remained was the bitter end.

Much, in fact, like summer itself.

I love summer days wiled away by the water and nights spent staring up at the stars (it seems impossible that all those lights hang in three dimensions). I love the steady warmth of sunlight on my shoulders. I still get excited to eat cucumbers in one go.

But I get restless. I want the blackberry bushes to shed their flowers for fruit. I mentally paint the trees shades of red and rusty orange. My collection of canvas jackets hangs in the closet, waiting for the days when I can again have warmth in the face of the brisk.

In the meantime, I hike, and look forward to the day when a path is actually a path rather than a poison ivy exposure test. Summer reigns abundant but some things serve a better purpose as detritus.

There was actually no poison ivy on this particular hike.
I am somehow never inspired to take a picture when I'm dodging leaflets three.

Thoughts on trees

Arboretum: "tree-garden," 1838, from L. arboretum, lit. "a place grown with trees"  ~ http://www.etymonline.com/

How does a place become an arboretum as opposed to a forest?

The difference must lie in the spaces between the trees. The garden, the lawn, the paths where one can stand and contemplate the contrast between tree and not-tree. In the forest, such distinctions blur into canopies and shadows. All is tree.

I like forests. I like trees in their unlabelled, unclassified state. Arboretums are tree-zoos: spaces to preserve and exhibit a waning kingdom.

In a perfect world, suburbs would not exist and cities would be ringed with forests.

In an imperfect world, we have cities with arboretums and I live in the suburbs.

If I could choose, I'd rather live in the arboretum. The suburbs come in shades of beige and they don't smell like spring.

Messages

 
Messenger
By Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Until Monday I had never heard of Mary Oliver. Despite having won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, as well as numerous other awards and fellowships, Oliver failed to make any reading list in my English classes. The canon lives! (though its components are all long dead).

I would have much preferred her work to the rather soporific Romantics. Alas.

I start a new life in two weeks. I'm young (though even half-perfect is questionable) and I'm open to astonishment.

Hey there, moth, I'm leaving town. Let's rejoice. 

Ho-ho-who?

This little alien graces the retaining wall just outside my back door. He (or she) is a fairly recent addition to the landscape, still vividly drawn and commanding in the surrounding cement. Yet how long will this image survive? Months? Years? Weather will undoubtedly wash away the paint if the city doesn't take care of it first.

The longevity of the Hohokam artists clearly outranks that of my neighborhood graffiti artist. An ancient culture centered in the Phoenix basin, the Hohokam built canals and irrigation systems across the desert to support ambitious agricultural pursuits. When they weren't growing maize, beans and squash (otherwise known as the Three Sisters) they were carving pictures in rock. (It seems the Hohokam appreciated a challenge. If it had been up to me, I would have grown my corn in the Midwest and carved my pictures in oak trees.*)

One of their artscapes, the Hieroglyphic Canyon Trail, has a bit of a misnomer. Petroglyphs are pictures, hieroglyphs are words. The Hohokam didn't have a written language, a condition which prevents them from being a "true" archaeological civilization like the hieroglyphically-inclined Mayans and Egyptians. Wordlessness aside, the trail and its ancient petroglyphs offer a glimpse of life in the ancient American southwest, pre-stucco villas and urban sprawl. It went something like this:

I was fairly certain the animals in these drawings were deer but I didn't immediately realize that the box-like objects were people. Truth be told, they don't look all that different from my retaining wall alien.

I've yet to see a real snake while hiking, which I consider a good thing. This squamate (or scaled reptile) is awfully cute though. Maybe all snakes should look like this? And maybe we can start calling them squamates, which sounds a lot more innocuous than snake.

Most humans aren't prickly enough to thrive in the desert. Somehow, the Hohokam and their ancient neighbors did anyway.

*This is, in fact, exactly what I grew up doing.

It's Always Sunny in PHX

The desert seems intent upon discouraging life in all but its most prickly forms. Water, the precursor to life, is a foggy concept. Rivers contain dirt, not water. (True story: In 1944 25 German prisoners of war interned in Phoenix's Papago Park tried to escape by boating down the Gila and Colorado Rivers to Mexico. They were easily apprehended when their boat failed to float down the dry riverbed.)

Outside of the faux green lawns and non-native palm trees of Phoenix the skyline disappears into a swath of burnt sienna and spiny cacti. Actually, much of the city looks like that too but the neon In-N-Out Burger signs lend a different air of desolation to the cityscape.

After so much brown, a field of sunflowers in downtown Phoenix served as a jolt to the senses. Such a vibrant yellow is missing in the earthen, rusted desert color wheel. Planted as a sign of life and regeneration in what has become a derelict downtown, the field was abuzz with bees.