Down the path I see trees–weedy looking desert trees. I haven’t seen real trees like back home in Michigan since I was in California. Is it this way all through middle and southern Arizona?
Cacti, creosote, and then the trees: mesquite, palo verde, sweet acacia (which makes everyone sick in their sinuses). All self-contained and meagre, hardy, like you have to be just to survive in the desert. By their very foreignness, the desert inhabitants make me homesick for my past, for a vision of Michigan that exists only in my memory.
Then I walk close to a tree and, gazing in, I see the tangle of life and in the confusion I see that this is the way it is meant to be. Far off, the threads of memory, and up close, the everyday details.
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For more on “small stones,” you can read my first post on the subject. It’s all about this: find a moment in which to be mindful and record it.
