Without rain, the plants in the desert grow brown. They lose their tops first — their tops shrivel up and fall off and then the whole plant goes into shock and struggles to survive. The big saguaro cactus turn into drying watermelons; the paws of the prickly pear go from thick and chubby and childlike, to old and dry and thin.

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Merton once had a transcendental experience looking at a vase of carnations. The flowers with their colors and crinkled edges struck him right to his soul, and he went rapturous. He wrote, “This flower, this light, this moment, this silence = Dominus est. God is eternity. He passes. He remains.”

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The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has a Southern mansion from 1860 where Scarlett first encounters her Rhett. A Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A tenement building from the 1940s with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweet heart. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s. There are 500 of them,

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What I really like is when a work of art just pops up when you least expect it. If I stare down from a parking lot at work, I see a beautiful Tucson mural that just lights up the city scape.

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It’s easy to picture how Tumacacori once was so many years ago – serene, tranquil, beautiful — the active center of a small community in this isolated desert. And it is still beautiful in its own way.

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E; Tiradito is unique to Tucson. It is a wishing place over 140 years old where people who have loved and lost go to mend their broken hearts. People light candles there, and leave little notes in its walls. El Tiradito is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

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I could picture the Wells Fargo wagon a’coming down the street, and all of Mayer’s townspeople gathering at the Big Bug station – wondering if they got salmon from Seattle, a box of sugar maple or a cross-cut saw—the way we wonder what’s in the Amazon box on the porch. I could also picture the ladies of Mayer in their long dresses and corsets, living in the dust and heat of the Wild West.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson would have liked Tohono Chul Park because he loved gardens. He once said he would rather walk around gardens and nurseries than among the Pyramids.

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Since the desert is mostly dusty browns and a zillion shades of pastel greens, this means when the Palo Verde trees bloom, they are the whole show. The contrast of bright yellow flowers against the bright blue sky can be too much for human eyes to take in. No wonder Van Gogh went nuts.

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Fourth Avenue in Tucson is the groovy neighborhood full of bookstores, coffee houses, and shops where you buy art, marijuana, tattoos, vintage clothing, and tarot readings. You see people who got left behind there and who are still living in the 1960’s. And you see people who got left completely behind and who are living in stairwells and on park benches. But you’ll also see writers, artists, students, musicians, revolutionaries, and philosopher-kings living there as well.

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