Arizona, situated in the American Southwest, shares a border with four US states and one other country—California to the west, Nevada to the northwest, Utah to the north, New Mexico to the east, and Mexico to the south.
When my younger daughter said that she wanted to go to Sedona, Arizona during the April vacation of her university sophomore year, we went together, adding a visit to the Grand Canyon and to the Tucson,* Arizona home of one of my mother’s best friends.
Leaving the red rock buttes of Sedona and the steep, mile-high walls of the Grand Canyon behind us, we headed south on Rt. I - 17 then followed Rt. I - 10 to take us clear to Tucson.
Traveling through the desert, our car windows rolled down in the heat, the day’s temperature was a far cry from the cool day of our departure from Massachusetts. There the maples in our yard were budding, readying themselves for their rich green color of summer. Here, the vegetation of cacti—two of which I later learned were saguaro and prickly pear—and the low-lying scrub were all gray-green in color—as if over evolutionary years the impact of the sun had resulted in faded shades.
My thought had previously been that a desert was sand, but from the mile after mile ride through this textured gray-green biome, I learned that was not true. Little traffic passed us. Our world was the desert’s rumpled gray-green cloth and the blue sky, interrupted only by the road.
When a landform, shaped like a triangle, appeared in the distance, I thought that we would be approaching it soon, but that didn’t happen. It remained in view for miles, receiving our curious attention but seemingly never coming closer to satisfy it. This mysterious landform did gain both a name and a description when I wrote this story. It is Picacho Peak, formed from ancient lava and now a visitors’ park. Rising 1500 feet above the desert floor, it has no competition for being called uniquely striking.
My daughter’s and my time at our friend’s Tucson home on Via Raposa was special, for we lived more intimately in the desert’s nature. Two years later, the details of that experience became the source for the locale of my poem, “Santa Fe Wedding Dress.”* Apart from the wedding dress having been purchased in Santa Fe, New Mexico when on tour with my future husband, the setting of the poem is from those earlier days in Tucson.
SANTA FE WEDDING DRESS
What I want is to be married in that white Mexican sundress
hanging in the window of the dress shop across the brick patio
from Casitas.
What I want is to be married before the pomegranate tree
and the ten-foot saguaro
with a hole in its heart where the cactus wren nests
inside the wall that keeps out peccaries and bobcats.
What I want is to be perfect in love,
looking away from angry words
that touch me no more than rain
falling on the other side of the street
in Tucson.
What I’ll accept is to be drinking gazpacho,
reading in the shadowed light pierced by hummingbirds,
the nectar of your love
two thousand miles away
on my tongue
suddenly
sweet.
My realization is, “The written images of special moments are timeless.”
* Pronounced “too´sahn.”
* Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God, publication forthcoming in 2019.