I Want to Live Somewhere it is 90 at Night.

Many years ago, when we were new to each other, he told me, “I want to live someplace where its ninety at night.” Well, he said a lot of things. How was I to know how serious he was about this? I followed him from Annapolis to Portland Oregon, to California’s South Bay and finally to the Colorado desert outside Palm Springs. We settled on the “dirt” side of the freeway 20 minutes away from glitzy resort towns with their water-soaked, emerald-green golf courses. He found the last house on the road nestled up against the hills as they rose to the Joshua Tree plateau. So we gloried in star-spangled, 90 degree nights. He had found his heaven – and I had followed him.

Moving to the desert is like moving to Mars for northeastern stock like us. Your eyes have to learn to discern the gazillion shades of brown and forget about green. The year we moved there was a decent wildflower bloom. Not a super-bloom like this year, but enough to stir my decades-old training in biology. Each morning I rose as soon as the sun did and trekked out into the seeming brown void with the assuredness I would discover something new and remarkable. After all, it was all new to me!

I quickly noticed the common names of many of the plants pointed to the newbies who came before me. Were their brains so fried that they couldn’t seem to come up with unique names or perhaps they were just pining for the familiar plants of home?

They came up with “desert holly”, “desert dandelion”, “desert lavender”, “desert milkweed”, and the “desert willow” to name a few of the uninspired or wishful appellations. But when it came to naming the bewildering varieties of cacti amongst the ubiquitous brittlebush and creosote, they must have been reminded that they had slipped the traces of anything they knew previously into uncharted territory.

My scientific training and my husband’s artistic training led us to integrate this overload of newness in different ways. I was always wondering about this and that while he was in acceptance of things just as they were and letting it inform his creative muse. I wanted to identify and quantify while he breathed it all in. We were to find out that life in the desert is a highly-tuned organism that doesn’t necessarily follow a cycle.

We soon were in a drought and learned that things just don’t bloom if there’s not enough water. They can awaken and blossom in response to a light rain or stay asleep for years in its absence.  I had to throw out the rule book and forget about cycles and seasons and regularity. What do you make of bobcat walking across your patio in the heat of a triple-digit day? Or why does the ocotillo sometimes bloom before it leafs out and sometimes leafs out before it blossoms? Or one ocotillo is blossoming and green while the guy next to him is a naked brown stick despite nearly identical conditions? He would say “don’t try to figure it out”. Left unsaid was “just enjoy the mystery”.

Life and death became a daily topic in this new land of extremes. As we watched every creature play out the prey and predator role, it became hard to choose sides. This was a lesson rudely learned one day when our beloved and well-fed roadrunner jumped straight up in the air to grab a hummingbird out of mid-flight and gobbled it down in an instant. We were mortified until we acknowledged it as the nature of the place.

Opportunistic is an understatement. The snakes are stealthy and the chuckwallas blow themselves up so you can’t pull them from the rocks. The myriad rodents never stop chewing and the hawks are constantly scouting. There was a daily reminder of the glory of living and the hard but ultimate truth of death. Though little margin for error exists in the desert; it also has a surprising amount of fragility.

Take the creosote and smoke tree. These tough customers epitomize the desert spirit in our area; but it took me a while to appreciate them. The smoke tree is a poor example of a tree from an Oregonian’s perspective but a glorious thing in the desert.  Its blossoms rival the indigo bushes in violet blue and delicacy leaving purple pools of spent petals at their base as their blossoming finishes. Creosote flowers seem to reflect the sun and morph into little fuzzy balls that, despite my criticism of this pedestrian naming convention, I can’t help but call “desert pussy-willows”.

Both plants endure the onslaught of howling desert gales, frigid winters, and scorching summers. Yet you are hard pressed to raise them from seed or, worse, try to transplant one. They are masters of their destiny and woe to the human who tries to give them “optimal” conditions in order to control where they live in a manicured landscape.

We spent seven glorious years feeding rose blossoms to the chuckwallas, building a covey of quail that reached into the 100s, delighting in watching baby quail pop about, catching snakes, swimming naked in our seclusion, watching the bats come to drink in the evenings, getting up in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers, walking with our dog to the mailbox, listening to the mockingbird sing all night, and rescuing bees from the pool. Until he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

The eight months of treatment were a blur of hospital visits and savoring our desert home together. The deep stillness of the ancient rocks was a fitting audience for our personal drama. Each morning’s awakening to the daily business of all the creatures and plants grounded us in the realities of the unending cycle of life.

He died last spring. This spring seems to be trying extra hard to keep me focused on moving forward. My mother and sister moved in with me and watching them discover the desert has reawakened me to its abundance. They are just developing their “desert eyes” and I delight in showing them my favorite little treasures.

We’d heard that this year was expected to be a great year for wildflowers and it has come to pass. We toyed with the idea of going to Death Valley but suddenly realized that we were in the middle of our own amazing bloom. Why would we leave?

The Indigo bushes exploded with trillions of their impossibly deep blue buds leaving even the old-timers in jaw-dropping wonder. For years these bushes have been non-descript clumps of dreary sticks waiting to be transformed into vibrating violet blue blobs sagging under the weight of the blossoms. Accompanied by an equally abundant blossoming of brilliant yellow brittlebush and golden creosote, the desert triumphantly displayed Easter colors signaling a renewal that mirrored my own internal climate.

There was no record amount of rain to explain this immense fecundity. It seemed as if, after years of want, the little moisture we got above average was enough of a trigger to unleash many years’ worth of reproductive effort in the desert’s version of making hay while the sun shines!

I’m taking it all in as a giant bouquet given to me on this anniversary of his death. Each blossom and emerging leaf reminds me to ride our memories into the future.