Into The Desert

It was full dark in the desert when I saw the sign for Tucson, Arizona. We had crossed over from the plains a while before this moment, and I had watched the sun set over the mountains of New Mexico earlier that day. But the sign made everything somehow real, realer than real. The Inter-Michigan was finally over. Here I was, packed in a car with two others and many bags and boxes, heading to my new home, heading into the desert.

"When I took your mother and aunt camping, as children," my grandfather told me by crackly phone a day later, "I looked around the desert and I thought, why would anyone want to live here? And a few days later, when I was packing up to go home, I thought, why would anyone want to leave?"

Well, we won't be leaving for some time. With Jack's father, aunt, and uncle, we already packed up a little moving truck and our trusty car, and drove two full days across the plains and into the desert. I'm putting my feet up for a while; I am very tired of being in a car!

But it was worth it. Two days ago we arrived in Tucson, Arizona, where some of the cacti are taller than the buildings and birds sing in the morning. I was not prepared for birds to sing in the desert, yet sing they do; and it is quite chilly in these mornings. The mountains rise in the distance, always within sight.

"In Hebrew," a friend told me, "the word for desert is the same as speak. There is a reason the prophets took to the desert, the land speaks."

The land does speak. The scrublands and mountains reach out to the eye and to the heart, and invite speculation, thought, poetry. Already I feel moved by the stars at night, which are different, somehow, than the stars of the forest and the plains. In the desert all things acquire a severe loveliness, an intensity that outshines the beautiful fog of my stormy Massachusetts.

I miss my wooded home. I miss the rain on the leaves. But I am here, fully here, in the desert, and I hope to make this my home.

#moving