Dichroic Reflections

Spring in the desert

This is a time of year when I get restless being cooped up indoors. It’s a pleasure whenever I have to go to one of our other buildings, just to be outside and stretch my legs, and feel the breeze and smell the fresh-cut grass and the carefully tended flowers and even the new asphalt. Though very pretty, it’s not as satisfying, in this highly landscaped office park, as being out in the desert and smalling sage and dust and creosote bushes. Still, it’s outside, though in a more artificial rendition.

It’s already too hot for perfection, not the perfect temperatures we get earlier in the year. That just adds to the rush to be outside right now, to enjoy the time we have left to be out among the unstippled blue skies and all the shades of earth before the desert turns into the kiln that it is in June, our hottest month, and then glowers with the sullen sweaty heat and spectacular lightning-and-dust storms of July and August that bring such a brief bit of cooler air.

I read something recently that described the ‘uniform browns’ of the Arizona desert. Either the writer had never been here, or she didn’t stay long enough to learn to see the desert. It does take some acculturation to learn to see the desert properly. The Sonoran is very lush as deserts go, not with the bright green of Southern swamps or the calmer green of Northern forests, but with a more subtle mix of shades from true green to olive to yellow-green.

Our landscaping plants, at least in places that don’t have their own full-time gardeners, are different, too. Right now, among the houses, the jacaranda trees are in full lavender bloom. They’re coming to the end of their short blooming cycle, so now there are contrasting green leaves among the flowers and the trees look like Mardi Gras beside the yellow blooms of the paloverdes. (At least I think they’re paloverdes.) The saguaro, always last of the cactus to bloom, all have their buds on top that always make me think of hair sticking up on a head. I can see three different kinds of flowers from my desk at work, and there’s a bird that occasionally stops on the outside of my windowsill. I can just barely hear him singing through the window. At home we have mourning doves, strange gray and pink birds whose babies have miraculously survived their parents’ pitiful attempts at nest-building on our narrow porch beam this year. They’re flying a bit now, so I think they’ll make it.