December 03, 2002
but it always fades..
Arizona winters are enchanting. I could sit outside all day underneath a stormy sky with a light breeze blowing through my clothes and occasionally, water droplets falling on my unturned face. It�s just so witchy and raw.
The rain brings the green out in everything and for a few short months the desert seems to shine. The rocks glisten different colors and the wet dirt smells wonderfully salubrious and fresh.
My mother owns fifteen acres which border a large plot of government land. Hundreds of acres of wilderness. If you walk for five minutes you can turn a complete circle without seeing a single sign of civilization in sight. No telephone poles, nothing. There are washes people rid on in dirt bikes or horses, but they never travel very far.
About a mile or so down, a few feet away from a wash that leads directly to my mother�s driveway there�s a palo verde tree. It�s surrounded by hundreds of other palo verde trees, and I�m sure if you saw it you wouldn�t look twice. But when I was younger I was in love with that tree. I would go there to write in my diary. To search for devil�s claws to use in my artwork. To relax and meditate.
This time of year, this weather, makes me want to go there again. To sit underneath that tree and forget the world for an hour or so. Except that now I know it�s not really safe. Arizona borders Mexico and illegal immigrants sometimes walk through areas like that in order to evade the border patrol. Drug smugglers drop and receive shipments from other countries in areas like that.
You can hear the private helicopters pass low sometimes and although it�s practically impossible to drive on any road out in this area for more than half an hour without coming across a border patrol vehicle, the government land is always empty of people.
So many things could have happened out at that tree when I was in middle school and weighed under 100 pounds. Or in high school and weighed a whopping 105 pounds. Immigrants and drug runners and snakes. Coyotes and Javelinas..
Of course, that doesn�t mean I won�t go there. I�ll just be smarter this time. I�ll take my uncles dog, Bullet, my cell phone and maybe eventually [once my mom buys me one and I get through an NRA course] a gun..
7:52 a.m.