Look closely at the staircase at the Hotel Gadsden in Douglas, AZ. You’ll find a chip in Step #7 – made by none other than the outlaw and liberator Pancho Villa. In 1916 Villa and his horse stormed into the town of Douglas and then he rode his animal up these stairs, making the chip you can still see today.

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Trees are just there. Trees are just happy all day long – not wanting or striving or doing, just being, and constantly changing, alive and wonderful.The poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Let be be the finale of seem.” He might have been writing about ice cream, but he might as well have been writing about trees.

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I didn’t know mountains have individual spirits, and that, as the Chinese say, some are charming enough to attract dragons. I also didn’t know mountains are always dancing with the clouds and the sky — complicated dances more tango than waltz, more grande ballet than two-step.

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Someday I will have a field of sunflowers. I would never put them in a vase because they are too big and they belong in a sunflower field after all. They are too big and electric with light and sun to go into a vase. Van Gogh knew that, which is why he got so crazy just drawing a simple vase full of simple sunflowers.

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Superior, Arizona looks like a movie set from the 1950s. It’s perfect for a science fiction movie in which something terrible just happened!

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Arizona desert snow is rare . I have forgotten the sound of snow because even rain is rare in the desert. I have forgotten how snow can transform the Arizona mountains into some icy moonscape that belongs in a galaxy far, far away, and I have forgotten how snow settles into spaces I ordinarily overlook,

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The other day I found out that Europeans are crazy about tumbleweeds from Arizona. They’ll pay $25 for a small one and $50 for a big one — as long as they are genuine Arizona tumbleweeds. So –today at the Tucson Mall I saw a great big humongous tumbleweed nestled next to a potted plant in front of Sears and about to roll into the parking lot, it was just like finding $50 cash! I couldn’t let it go tumbling to waste! I am also selling jeans worn in Arizona and totillas made for cowboys to eat in Arizona.