This week I tried to find the oleander and Boy Scouts story in old newspapers. I couldn’t find it. That bothered me because I had by now heard this story many times over the years. The storyteller always told it with great drama and a catch in their voice.

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Thunderheads are beautiful. It can be dry at your house and raining across the street. And it’s also true in Weird Arizona that we have ostrich races, mystery castles, Civil War Battle Reenactments and cars on sticks.

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As you walk around Old Tucson, you get deja vue because you have indeed seen this landscape and these buildings all before – in productions like Tombstone, Hombre, Bonanza, Gunfight at OK Corral, and many more.

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I love the way butterflies slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –Open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening,

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Some say Kokopelli is an insect with dragonfly antennae. Some say he is priest of rain, a trickster, a fertility god. One story is that the first Kokopelli was actually a traveling salesman whose humpback was really a sack of wonderful goods, and that it was Kokopelli who came from Mexico and brought the Anasazi people the first seeds of corn

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Soon it was warm and dry again so that the sound of rushing water in our desert wash became a memory, and so that all that’s left for the javelina and quail and other desert animals to do is to wait for the next rain.

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Within a month, the team in Biosphere 2 was losing weight and feeling deprived of oxygen. They ate their three-month emergency food supply, and even birdseed and hummingbird nectar. As one member put it, “We were suffocating, starving and almost going mad.”

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Like all Americans, we in Arizona light up Christmas trees. Okay, we light up cactus. We have to make do with the whole snowman thing. Jingle bells. Jingle bells.

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Mexican Dance! Danza Mexicana ! by Jane St. Clair The elder prays for all the people who are crossing the desert today, that they might not die from the heat and their thirst. No more deaths on the desert, the elder prays. Then the drums begin and the dancers march into the room, single file. […]

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Clouds, rocks, mountains, lakes, and other natural things all have kachinas. To the Hopi, all are alive, spiritual and interconnected. The Hopi say all things have two forms: their visible form in the Upper World, and their kachina who lives in the lower world of the spiritual. Sometimes a kachina shows itself in this world. For example, if you see clouds form over a mountain — it is a rain kachina.

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