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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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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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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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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So far there are still more cowboys than ostrich-boys in Arizona, and more people still go to rodeo than to the Ostrich Races, but give ‘er time, as the ostrich-boys say. One of these days Arizona will be the home of ostriches everywhere! Go Big O, we love you!

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Doors of the Southwest are unlike doors anywhere else. They can have wild colors so that you notice them. They can be in hiding so you have to discover them. Doors are powerful and mystical. If there were no doors, everything would be a hallway. The meaning of a door, Christopher Morley said, is to hide what lies inside.

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“The American West is the real deal. It is a spiritual space.” Spring in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona is so beautiful that it proves the poets wrong. Sometimes it is enough that April comes running down a hill, spewing flowers everywhere.

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