by Jane St. Clair

Our Lady of Guadalupe is everywhere in the Southwest.  I have even seen her image over a bar next to a velvet Elvis painting.

She is of course in chapels

but people also name schools and businesses after her.

I have seen Our Lady of Guadalupe earrings, bumper stickers, baseball caps, throw blankets and tote bags

mouse pads, spaghetti strap tee shirts, ipad cases, cups, garden statues,
Christmas windows,

murals, clocks, coasters, magnets,
iron-on transfers,
calendars, and
coloring books.

Those who say it is wrong to do that — don’t understand it. We keep images of Our Lady of Guadalupe near us all the time the way you hang up pictures of people you love around your house.

Our Lady of Guadalupe first appeared to St. Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. When he opened his tilma, roses spilled out of it even though it was winter! Her beautiful image remains on the tilma today. Scientists have analyzed the tilma with carbon dating and such, but it’s not a scientific thing. People believe God the Father made the image the way God is doing in this painting:

Our Lady of Guadalupe has the titles of Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas and yet she is so very young – maybe just 15 years old. Instead of a halo, she has aura of light surrounding her whole body .. an aura like the golden aura of rays around a happy Southwest sun.

She did not come as an Anglo mother –the way the Europeans paint her, but as a beautiful Aztec princess who speaks the Aztec language.

If she were music, I don’t think her song would be Ave Maria. It would be happier lighter music full of light because she is the one who brings the hope of the world. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Gracias! Te amamos!

by Jane St. Clair

It snowed this day, and Arizona desert snow is rare.

I have forgotten the sound of snow because even rain is rare in the desert. I remember that rain makes little plip plop sounds like the trotting of little fairy horses. But snow is rarer than rain

and I have forgotten how quiet it sounds when it falls. I have forgotten how snowflakes fall in white ballerina dresses, small dancers alighting on the spines of cactus, and twirling with blades of grass as their partners.

I have forgotten how snow makes outlines, the way children outline the edges of their drawings, and how snow makes outlines so that everything stands out in a black/white panorama.

I forgot how snow makes trees as proud as if they were wearing their fall splendors,

and I forgot how snow settles into spaces I ordinarily overlook,

and I have forgotten how snow transforms the mountains into some icy moonscape that belongs in a galaxy far, far away.

But just as quickly as it falls,

Arizona desert snow melts away.

It is a rare desert moment that faded too fast.

I remember snow.

by Jane St. Clair

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 when 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!

At a great risk to myself and my reputation (people were staring after all)  (in fact, one woman looked like she was phoning Mall Security), I tried to stuff this tumbleweed in my back seat. I got covered in nasty little prickles that are probably poisonous, and finally gave up and stuffed it in the trunk. My dog is mad at me because he was sitting in the back seat and now he is covered in tumbleweed stickers too. That’s the sacrifice we are making to bring YOU genuine Tumbleweed that was genuinely tumbling in Arizona! So here it is! For Sale! $50 cheap! Free shipping!

I will throw in this beautiful picture of your tumbleweed in its natural Arizona habitat! For Free! Now you won’t get this deal on eBay.

I have since learned that people in Japan are crazy for jeans worn by cowboys out West. Well, we Arizonans love cowboy jeans too! –in fact, my best friend has a bumper sticker that says “Cowboy butts drive me nuts” which pretty well sums it all up. Arizona Cowboys wear nothing but Wranglers, available at Walmart’s everywhere. Nevertheless, I am offering these jeans for sale -because they were used out west — in Arizona!

These Wranglers are the same price they are in Japan — $500 a pair! These are rare Arizona jeans, folks! Genuine Wranglers worn out West! Go for it!

Another inspiration came to me! Last year I bought this genuine Native American turquoise necklace from an eBay seller in China. Although I paid only $3 for it from China, I am offering it for sale here at $1300 because it is a genuine turquoise necklace worn in Arizona! Well, it’s turquoise-colored anyway.

(Disclaimer: The beads may be made of wood)

I am also selling genuine Mexican  tortillas! Tortillas may go for eight for a dollar, but since these were made here in Arizona and are usually eaten by cowboys, I am selling them at the fantastic price of $20 a package.

I am now totally inspired! Let’s see if I can get my genuine Arizona pick-up truck that is sitting on blocks in the yard right now and hasn’t cranked up for years — well,  let’s just see if I can get that baby started up.

Remember: for all your Arizona needs, you come right here, pardner — right here at  TUMBLEWEEDS-R-US!

by Jane St. Clair

Tonight there is a blue moon, as in once-in-a-blue-moon moon and blue-moon-you-saw-me-standing-alone moon.  I want to get a picture of it over Pusch Ridge, my mountain in Tucson, Arizona. It is clearly very blue…

 … but only if I use a blue filter, and I decide that’s cheating.
Here it is without the filter, you can see some blue anyway.

I snap many more pictures and they all turn out with a white moon on top and a blue moon on bottom.

I mess around on Google to figure out some scientific reason why I am getting two moons until I decide I don’t care why.

I really like the pictures and I really like the news headline “Blue Moon Shines Throughout the World.” That’s just such a nice thought.

Okay, one more blue-moon picture and then it’s …..

Good night moon.

Southwestern Doors
by Jane St. Clair

Artists paint pictures of Southwestern doors because they are unlike doorways anywhere else. I think it’s the sun.

The sun is so strong out West that buildings look two-dimensional. As if they were made out of paper. You open them up and you walk into nowhere in particular or just into nowhere.

Southwestern doors are strange and look as if they lead into simple space.

Southwest doors must be passages to something wonderful and interesting. Open them and where do you go? You could go this way, or you could go that way or you could just find yourself somewhere strange.

Southwestern doors can be powerful and mystical and from somewhere very old and long ago.

Southwestern doors can have wild colors so you notice them.

Or they can be hiding so that you discover them unexpectedly.

Even the ones that are for business ….

Even the doors that are for business are magic in the West.

Christopher Morley said if we did not have doors everything would be a hallway.

He said the meaning of a door is to hide what lies inside and to keep the heart in suspense.

“The opening of a door may bring relief: it changes and redistributes human forces. But the closing of doors is far more terrible. It is a confession of finality,” Mr. Morley said.

But I say …

I say … one two three …  Open Sesame.

Open Sesame.

Open Sesame.

by Jane St. Clair

Bisbee, Arizona, sits on top a hill in colorful pieces like a kid’s jigsaw puzzle. It was once the biggest city between the Mississippi and the Pacific, but it shrunk and it is still shrinking even as you read this.

Bisbee is arty and has a love-and-peace 1960s vibe, but don’t you believe that one minute! Bisbee is full of ghosts and the paranormal investigators and ghostbusters who track them! You can even sign up for ghost adventures in Bisbee Arizona! Scared yet?

Bisbee has always been and still is about copper. Today the Big Lavender Pit Mine uses bulldozers and technology ….

But back in the day, the miners rode little railroads into the cruel darkness of the underground caves blasted open by the Phelps Dodge Corporation, and back in the day Bisbee was full of violent men who’d shoot each other and hang each other over women and cards or because they were too drunk to know better.

Today people come to Bisbee from all over the world with their ghostbusting thermometers and proton packs, and some even take a ghost tour while riding in a hearse. They’re looking for spectres and ghosts of cheating card sharks, murdering cowboys, zombie miners, and dangerous women you don’t want to know. Scared yet?

The Oliver House alone was the scene of 26 murders.

It’s so creepy that its neighbors may have put up gargoyles as a feng shui measure to keep those ghosts in their usual home. Scared yet?

City Park at Brewery Gulch looks peaceful enough, but it’s a place where you can get extreme readings of paranormal activity. It used to be a cemetery, and the legend is that all the bodies and caskets floated down this innocent-looking hill during a flood. Scared yet?

A miner’s ghost turns on the jukebox at St. Elmo’s Bar, another ghost climbs into bed with guests at the Bisbee Inn, a prostitute-ghost roams the streets of Bisbee looking for the cowboy who killed her accidentally while cleaning his gun, and a Madam refuses to move out of Opera Drive Brothel. The Lady in White shows up at the top of the staircases,

and once she scared three boys so badly that they ran away — accidentally saving their lives as the ground behind them collapsed in a sudden torrential rain. Scared yet?

Even the Bisbee prom has a zombie theme.

Bisbee locals even put up scarey posters. How scarey is this one down here?

Every night teams of ghostbusters go around looking for spooks and spectres and the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man! Aha! We have a reading here by the Copper Queen Hotel that shows a non-repeating phantasm or a class-5 free roaming vapor, circa 1912 .. Scared yet?

Lions and Tigers and Bears and things that go va voom in the night. Scared yet?

Yes! Oorah!

We’ve made it to dawn — Bisbee’s not a bit scarey in the morning.

Good job, you Ghostbuster of Bisbee, you. Oorah!

by Jane St. Clair

Lately I have discovered John Denver.

Okay, I’m tardy to that party — but whatever, I’m here.

Why do I like  John Denver? Let me count the ways.

John Denver could get high looking at sunshine. Sunshine on his shoulder makes him happy, sunshine on the water makes him high.

If John Denver lived here in Arizona, where the sun shines 360 days a year — just think!  John Denver would have been happy all the time just because of all that sunshine.

I like John Denver because he could write exquisitely romantic songs. You fill up my senses like a night in the forest. Let me drown in your laughter, let me die in your arms.  Okay, he and his wife got a divorce, but what a love he must have felt to inspire that poetry!

Let me be the end of your rainbow, Let me be the stars up above,  Let me be the one you dream of …  let me be the one that you love.

John Denver like so many of us who live out West came from somewhere else. He was born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. and grew up all over the country as an Army brat. But when he came West , he found out that…

He was born in the summer of his 27th year, Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before …

He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again ..You might say he found a key for every door …

So many new Westerners have had that experience. One day you look out at that gigantic sky and endless landscape, and you know you are home.

Although John Denver is often accused of being a cornball, the truth is John Denver had a dark side. He sang about flying away … just leaving the planet forever.

All of the days have gone soft and cloudy, all of the dreams have gone dry, all of the nights have gone sad and shady, she’s getting ready to fly .. Fly away …

John Denver sang about wanting to fly away, and he sang about feeling alone in the universe and being lost in its screams.

It’s a sweet, sweet dream … Sometimes I’m almost there  …. Sometimes I fly like an eagle  …And sometimes I’m deep in despair.

John Denver died alone in a small airplane. He was up in the sky, flying like an eagle …

when his plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Monterey, 150 feet north of shore, south of Lovers’ Point. I like to think he found his dream there. I like to think that the sweet sweet dream was finally his.

If there’s an answer, it’s just that it’s just that way ……….  

John Denver

(1943 to 1997)

by Jane St. Clair

When I first moved out West, it was so hot and dry that I thought they needed a few good shade trees. You know, “the under the spreading chestnut tree where the Village Smithy stands-kind-of tree,” and  the “I think that I shall never see a poem as-lovely-as-a-tree” kind of tree.

Instead they had the saguaro, which did not even look like a tree to me. They certainly don’t do much in the shade department.

After a while, I began to respect them, even though I didn’t like them.

You have to respect them because they are so heavy they can crush a car, and because they live in the hot desert without water. You have to respect saguaros because it takes so long to get one. They start out as babies as big as your thumb, and it takes about 100 years to get one arm, and more to get a bunch of arms.

Some people think they look like candlestick holders.

They are home to birds and all kinds of bugs and little wildlife things.They have dorky flowers that turn into little fruits. The natives know how to make food out of that. People here decorate them at Christmas,

And use their bones for fencing.

After a while, saguaros looked tall and stately to me. Dignified. Vertical.  And even noble.

Saguaros can look human, especially if you’ve been cowboying alone in the desert too long.

Hello, friendly Cactus Person.

And I liked the way they looked in different kinds of skies,

(even the skies I make up).

After a while, that could mean only one thing.

The desert had become home.

A cowboy/artist named Maynard Dixon once said, “The American West is the real deal. It is a spiritual space.”

Others have felt that way too. Georgia O’Keeffe, D.H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, Theodore Roosevelt – each fell under the spell of magic cathedral mountains, endless skyscapes, fiery sunsets, and the black starry nights that touch you in your deepest soul places here out West.

But you have to be open to it.

When I first came here, I didn’t see these things. It was so hot that the water in my eyes dried up. The air smelled like old musky dust, and all the plants were dry and withering up. Everything needed a good rain, I thought. And I thought these people here could use some good wide shade trees like the ones back home in Illinois. Everything was dead-looking — it depressed me.

It took me years to understand the subtlety of my new desert home. That she really does have seasons but her seasons are very subtle. Spring does not come, like Shakespeare wrote, “with daisies pied and violets blue,” but rather spring here comes subtly in sugary pastels. All the dead plants were not dead after all. With almost imperceptible subtle slowness, they come back to life in spring.

I also did not know that a place with no spongy earth or carpets of forest moss, with no smells of wet loam and no warm spring rains could be full of new growth and germinating greenness. I did not know that the dry still deadness of the desert could suddenly surprise you with a host of poppies, and that the quiet pastels of cactus and creosote could suddenly give way to a field of dreams.

Palo Verde trees make yellow April flowers that beam against the turquoise sky, in a perfectly wild contrast, and then they drip delicate yellow blossoms on the ground. They stand so gracefully and beautifully! like a Tchaikovsky ballerina in a yellow tutu swirling and dissolving into his music.

Walt Whitman said of spring in the Midwest, “Oh wonderful, wonderful, and then again most wonderful!” He could become tipsy at the sight of it. He should have seen that in the Sonora, in April, warm soft winds come, bringing spring. I am finally able to see it everywhere.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”

But then again, she did not live in Arizona.
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NEWS FLASH!
Tucson is on Time Magazine’s 2023 List of Greatest Places in the World. One of fifty greatest places in the world, one of seven in the USA. How cool is that? Go here.

Tucson Rodeo
by Jane St. Clair

Tucson Rodeo is the biggest time of the year. Schools and businesses close, so everybody can cowboy up and go down to the arena.

The rodeo is decorated with cows, adding to the excitement.

Before the events start, you can buy a cowboy hat and a beer, or just some honky-tonk tourist souvenirs at the booths below the stands.

It costs plenty to get in so our noble cowboys can have a chance at a big purse. A real rodeo cowboy can make upwards of $20,000 here in just one event, but some events are so dangerous that they earn every penny and then some.

Tucson Rodeo has got clowns who pretend to fight bulls and lots of stunt riders …

These cowgirls compete for who can ride around the Coors barrels

and back the fastest.

But the most famous event is the buckin’ bronco. Ride em cowboy!

This event is timed in terms of seconds, as are most Tucson Rodeo events.

R0pin’ is harder than it looks and sometimes that little doggie gets the best of even the most skillful cowboy.

The most dangerous event is bull riding because the bull can come back at you if you fall off.

Here a cowboy went down, and his foot got caught in the stirrup

and he got hurt badly enough

so that they had to get the medics.

But he got a big round of applause for getting up and walking home.

Rodeo is so many things – a time for a cowboy to strut his stuff —

Show his skills at ropin’ and ridin’

And win him some money too.

Everybody’s got some cowboy in them — which is why rodeo will last forever!

Happy Trails to you, and y’all come back next year!