Rainbow in the Desert

It doesn’t rain often, but when it does, it’s dramatic. This afternoon the sky turned charcoal gray, the mountains close to the house looked white instead of smokey brown, and a cold wind was followed by rain. Because it was late afternoon, the sun hit the drops just right and created a double rainbow.

The first one is easy enough to see, the second one looks like it is touching the street light closest to the front of the picture.

Rainbows in Phoenix

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and artist who teaches business communication.

Prescott, AZ–Found Art

Prescott was the original capitol of Arizona. It’s an old town that’s tucked into mountains high enough to support snow in the winter. This weekend there were broadleaf trees that had turned to bright, brittle yellow. The smell of autumn leaves was unmistakable; I haven’t smelled it since I left the East Coast.

Autum leaves, Prescott © Quinn McDonald, 2009

Prescott is a lovely town, a town that shows art to anyone who wanders into The Raven (either the cafe or the pen-and-paper shop) or Van Gogh’s Ear, one of the art shops that line Whiskey Row.

Prescott also puts out its own art, the town as it is, for anyone to enjoy.  Cortez Street is packed with antique shops that are stuffed with vintage, old, worn, odd, and delightful objects.

The Armadilla (yes, it ends with an ‘a’) Wax Works is a candle factory with a retail shop. It’s at the top of the hill that makes Cortez Street, before the antique shops take over.

This candle factory is in the building of a former bank. Arizona produced a lot of copper in the old days, still does,  so the entire front of the store is still home to the old vault and safe.

The detailed copper molding that is both bold and delicate,  and a sun-mirror that is rich and polished to match the older copper safe wall with the dentil and decorative molding. In some light, you can see the copper has taken a lot of polishing, but it’s thick and hefty and won’t wear out any time soon.

Antique copper moulding and mirror © Quinn McDonald, 2009

On the opposite wall was a grouping of candles and grasses with blossoms. The sun was at the right angle to make it a perfect photo all its own.

Candles from the Armadilla Candle Works, Prescott © Quinn McDonald, 2009

The Raven Cafe is a wonderful old building. I’m a fan of the collages that sprout in bathrooms, and this was no exception. This one seemed to be planned–it had originally been created, quilt-like, a block at a time, then mounted on the wall and continued with paint and pen.

The Raven's Cafe's artful bathroom © Quinn McDonald 2009

This garage was graffiti’d and then painted over unevenly. The resulting unfinished raw art is perfect the way it is.

Garage Mural © Quinn McDonald 2009

The next building was painted when it was too cold. Half the paint popped off in the dry air, leaving a great pattern that looks like an angel food cake.

Peeling Paint, © Quinn McDonald, 2009

Prescott has art around every corner, great weather to enjoy it, and astonishing rock formations around the town. A great place for a quick getaway. If you have time to drive up from Phoenix, don’t take the Freeway. Nothing against I-17, but the scenery is not spectacular. Take a bit longer, go through Wickenburg and Yarnell and see mountains and thumb buttes that will astonish you.

Out of Yarnell, don’t take the switchback road that 89 turns into. Turn left onto Kirkland Road and go through Skull Valley and into Prescott. It’s 10 miles longer and worth every inch.

–Quinn McDonald rides a motorcycle and takes pictures with her iPhone.

Migration: Birds in Trees

The Sonoran desert doesn’t seem a likely migratory path. After all, the desert is hot and bare, doesn’t seem like a food source, much less a water source. That was true before the Valley became a resort area and we built so many golf courses that, from the air, we must look like the land of 1,000 water traps.

And birds do migrate through the Sonoran. In the fall, there are seed pods, insects, small mammals for food. Last night I heard a Great Horned Owl. They are year-round residents, but there seem to be more of them in the fall.

Snowy egrets, photograph by Betty Heim, © 2009

My friend Betty lives next to the Aqua Fria River, not too far from the Gila River. Both of the water ways are often dusty rather than wet, but there are ponds that dot around them. The Gila River is the main waterway that egrets use to migrate from Northern states to Mexico.

Before Betty knew that, she saw proof. She came out of her house to see about a dozen or so sitting in her tall trees. When she sent me the photograph, I had to laugh. I think of long-legged birds stalking around water, not sitting in trees. Yet there they were–big, tall, long-legged–and sitting in the tree tops.

In the next few weeks, she’ll see a lot more–sandhill cranes travel through Tucson, hummingbirds travel in such numbers that you often hear the metallic whir of their wings before you see them. Small, colorful seed eaters, big swooping hawks all appear, use the bird bath, and continue on. Many birds fly at night, so while we are dreaming, they are overhead, honking. Yep, Canada geese (not Canadian geese, please, we aren’t taking citizenship), those big noisy birds with the chin-strap marking, fly at night, at heights that keep pilots in jetliners awake and worried.

It’s fall in Arizona, and the very mark of autumn that I thought I left back East–bird migration–is here, too. I’m happy watching the birds I don’t recognize travel through.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer an naturalist who lives in Phoenix.

Four Seasons: Fall in Phoenix

Back East, it’s fall. Apple-picking time. Fields are plowed under, corn harvested, and fields are readied for fall fun: mazes for Halloween formed out of straw bales, pumpkins showing up in farmers’ markets. There are chilly days, and birdbaths may have that skim of ice on them. It’s definitely fall.

palm trees reflected in a swimming pool © Quinn McDonald, 2009

Here in Phoenix, it’s also fall. Our fall is a bit more subtle. The sun has now dropped far enough South so the pizza-oven heat is broken. We no longer have strings of more-than-110 degree days, and our nights drop into the 70s. The pool is no longer hot every time you get into it. It’s brisk.

RV’s come down out of the mountains and are parked in front and back yards. Some of these are big, and, frankly, I hate to see them looming over fences. I don’t own one, so it looks like jealousy if I complain.

Migrating birds start to show up. Birds we don’t see for most of the year suddenly are in the parks, at the bird bath and feeders. Except for pigeons, we don’t see many flocks of birds from April to September. Now they are back.

Oranges and lemons start to grow again. They stopped growing in May when it got too hot. The citrus trees drop their sun scorched leaves and put out some new, tentative leaves to make up for it.

House plants you took in to protect them from the heat can be put out again. It’s time to plant tomatoes and crops that burn up in the summer. Tomatoes, peppers, and flowers can go into containers now. They’ll be on the Thanksgiving table.

Sage, desert willow and Cape Honeysuckle start to bloom again. Most plants don’t bloom in the heat of summer. Some trees drop their leaves. They come back now, ready for milder days and using the water to produce lush flowers instead of simply survive.

Fall in the Southwest is a time of promise. Promise to start hiking and exploring again. Promise to invite people over for outdoor eating. It’s a surprising time of gratitude that outdoor life can start up and our utility bills head down.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She teaches business how to write clearly. She is also a journal writer who teaches people who can’t draw how to keep an art journal.

Just wondering

–More discoveries and inspirations have been fueled by “Huh, I wonder if. . .” than by, “I know I’m right about . . .”

– If you plant a seed in the ground and cover it up, how does the shoot know to grow up and the roots down?

–Do all rivers and streams run downhill to the ocean? What keeps them running?

– If love is blind, how can we have love at first sight?

–Do birds get unhappy or depressed?

–If lawyers are debarred, and clergymen defrocked, doesn’t it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked and dry cleaners depressed?

||Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

The Hummingbird and the Cat

This is a story that happened quickly and left me smiling. Like most good stories, no one asked for permission, and there was no time to prepare. So the photos are not the best quality. They are taken from my office out the window, with my iPhone.  One of the windows in my office has sun screens—a heavier version of bug screens, and they are visible as moire patterns in the photos. Here’s an excellent clip of how moire patterns happen.

The story is about a hummingbird—several of them, and one of my cats. No birds are harmed in this story, and none of the cats were either, although Buster is frustrated at the end.

Two hummingbirds rest during 115-degree heat.

My office is in a corner of the house. Through two windows I have a view of both the street and of a large vase on my porch filled with curly willow branches. The curly willow branches provide rest for the hummingbirds in the hottest part of the day. The branches are in the shade, and the hummingbirds will sit and preen for hours in the mid-afternoon, when the temperature tops 110. They’ll sit for a few minutes, go drink at the hummingbird feeder (off screen)  and come back.

At this time of year, we get the first migrating hummingbirds. Arizona has plenty of varieties, but in September through October, the migrators double the amount of birds at the feeders.

One of the year-round hummingbirds declared himself the protector of the feeder. When another bird comes to the feeder, he chirps angrily and dive bombs them until they leave. He is content to chase only other hummingbirds. The finches, juncos, albino woodpecker and golden-crowned kinglets, hardly bigger than hummingbirds, are left alone.

Hummingbird on windowsill, waiting for Buster

One recent afternoon, with the blinds open, the hummingbird watched me as I worked. One

Buster wants a snack. The hummingbird has no fear.

of my cats, the tuxedo-dressed Buster, was draped on my desk to pick up the breeze from the ceiling fan. The hummingbird left his perch and flew to the other window and sat down on the sill.  Buster is near-sighted and missed the temptation at first. Then he saw the bird, and began to make that yakking sound cats make when they can’t believe that a snack is so close and so unreachable.

The hummingbird must have known what a window and screen are, because he simply sat while Buster tried to get through the window. The hummingbird loves this fun, so he repeats it every afternoon, like a bad soap opera. And it always ends the same way–the bird gets bored and flies off, Buster retreats, grumbling, and I clean the windowpane.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and watcher of nature.

The hummingbird does not fly off. He just watches the cat.

Phoenix’s Winter in Summer

If you live in a place where winter lasts from October to April, you know the symptoms of deep winter–that period from mid-January to mid-March. You spend more time indoors, eyeing the thermostat. Special clothing keeps you warm, you eat heartier meals, play more board games.

Bird feeder with ant moat.

In winter, you carry a few things in the car in case you get stuck–maybe it’s kitty litter that will add traction if you slide into a snow bank. You may carry flares and one of those blankets that help you retain heat.

Well, here in the Valley of the Sun, which sound much nicer than “Sonoran Desert Floor” we take protective action, too. Except ours is in July and August, all the way into September.

We bring plants in for the summer. Those tropicals hate 115-degree heat and full sun. So in they come. We put out extra bird feeders and bird baths so the birds don’t die. My hummingbird feeders have ant moats around the top. Ant moats keep the ants from marching hundreds of yards up the tree (or feeder pole), down to the feeder and then into the feeder to reach the sugar water. Before ant moats I had to clean the feeders daily, to get the ants out of the drinking spouts. After moats, I have to refill the moats two and three times a day because the finches who drink sugar water will also drink the moat empty.

Birds do die from excessive heat here, I’ve seen two Mexican doves do exactly that,  particularly if the highs stay above 110 every day and the lows don’t go below 90. Which is much of July and August.

Some animals even go through aestivation–a sort of summer hibernation. They don’t gear up for it, but they do go into a stage of inaction during the hottest part of the day. Aestivation is more for amphibians and insects whose ponds dry up, but I’ve seen birds stay in the shade without moving for hours at a time.

Some trees drop their leaves in July and August, and there are almost no flowers on trees on

Ocotillo without leaves.

cacti, either. Octotillo, a thorn bush, will get leaves back quickly if it rains, but for the rest of the summer, it’s a bare thorn tree.

You can’t plant a vegetable garden in summer because the heat simply wilts veggies, no matter how much you water them.

You carry water in the car, and a hat and long-sleeved shirt in case you have to abandon the car for some reason. Visitors who go hiking, thinking themselves fine athletes, often have to be rescued because of heat stroke. Last week, two hikers died from over-exposure to the sun.

You can’t walk barefoot; even flip-flops get very hot if the walk from the car to the mall is more than a short sprint.

There are places that close in July and August–petting zoos, balloon rides, desert exploration hikes won’t risk their clients’ lives.

So we stay indoors, glad for pools (you wear a hat and sunglasses in the pool) and board games. In September, the night time temperature begin to drop, although we generally have triple-digit days till early October.

Which is when life becomes the envy of the rest of the nation again.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She teaches communication skills, including writing and giving presentations as well as how to make and use an art journal, even if you can’t draw.

Re-Inventing Yourself: Learn from the Lizard

One of our cats was paying rapt attention to something on the rug. He had that ears-cupped-parallel-to-the-floor look, and was holding absolutely still, eyes wide open. He does this only when there is something of great interest to him, and that is almost always something that is about to become dead.

Lizard image: phoenix.about.com

I got up, and looked at the spot on the rug. It looked like a stick. Suddenly, almost all of the spot on the rug shot across the room, leaving a wiggling piece behind. Nature works really well. The thing was a lizard, and it had dropped its tail, which wriggled appealingly, allowing my cat to focus on it, while the rest of the lizard scrambled across the room.

Picking up the now-tailless lizard with a paper towel, I stepped out the door, and shook it out gently, close to the ground. The limp lizard body tumbled out.
icked up the lizard with the paper towel I still had in my hand.I stepped out the door and shook the paper towel out gently, close to the ground. The little lizard body tumbled out.”Must have picked it up too hard,” I thought, feeling sorry. Just as I thought it, the lizard pulled out of its frozen position, and shot, tailless, up the lemon tree to safety.

“Must have scared it to death,” I thought. But the lizard quickly recovered and scuttled up the lemon tree to safety.

I knew that some lizards dropped their tails, but I’d never seen it work so well. The cat was perfectly happy to let the business part of the prey escape if he got to keep the  funy, wiggly part.

It seems like such a good idea to be able to drop a non-vital body part to save the important working parts. We don’t come equipped with convenient tails, but we do drag around burdensome “tales”–the stories we drag around as baggage. The sad story of how our parents didn’t give us what we needed. The mean roommate in college who was so thoughtless. The boss who wasn’t a mentor we’d hoped for, but gave us all the drudge jobs.

All those stories pile up and slow us down. They make us prey for anger, stress, decisions based on revenge and stored-up resentment. We can drop our “tales” of hurt and pity, leave them wiggling for someone else to become fascinated with. Because they aren’t helping us. No doubt, it’s hard to give up the story we live, the perspective we have on them, how we make choices based on past hurts and injustice.

Recasting our past is hard work and not appealing. The work of letting go the past means admitting that our perspective isn’t working and deliberately looking for a new perspective, one that allows us to live a less-burdened, less blame-riddled life. It won’t be done in a single day, but the small steps and work is certainly worthwhile. My clients have experienced it, and not a single client regrets the work of re-invention.

We can’t change how our story began, but we can change how it continues and build for a happen ending.

Note: this post was originally written for Jobing.com’s blog.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and certified creativity coach. She has a coaching practice for people in transitions and those undergoing changes in thier lives. See her business site at QuinnCreative.com and journaling site at raw-art-journals.com

Fiddleheads and Fireflies

The desert is a lovely thing, a land alive with adaptable creatures and plants. A landscape of color and vibrancy I’ve seen no place else.

I love living here, but there are a few things that I miss more than I can describe. The tender green of a fiddlehead fern as it unfolds in the spring, always close to running water. The smell of damp spring smells like the first day of Creation. Or at least, the way I imagine it.

Image from http://www.jpgmag.com/photos/120294 via lilidonnelly.com

Years ago, I lived in rural Maryland. Two apple trees grew in the yard. They were old, and had never been trimmed. We scheduled a trimming, and the men came while I was gone. When I came back, the stumps of trees greeted me. They look struck by lightning, and in the February gloom, I sat on the porch and cried.

But the men who pruned them knew what they were doing. A few weeks’ later the trees were shot through with new green branches, all pushing out apple-green leaves, tiny at first, then unfurling to grass-green leaves the size of playing cards.

One spring night it rained. Fireflies filled the trees. They looked like tiny Christmas lights, blinking in the dark. I dreamed about it a few nights ago, and I remember that I miss fireflies. We don’t have them here, and it makes me miss them more.

–Quinn McDonald moved from the East Coast to the Sonoran Desert in 2008. She’s a writer and a life- and creativity coach.

Figs, I Want Figs!

How do you know your figs are ripe? Well, about a week before they get to the point where you enjoy eating them, right before perfection, exactly at the point where the juice and sugar content soar, the birds will descend on the tree and eat holes in all of them. Figs are ripe when the fruit stops hanging out from the branch and droops downward. I’ll never see it happen if these birds continue with their voracious habits.

Almost-ripe figs

Now I wouldn’t mind if they ate half the figs, and left me half. Birds aren’t like that. Birds will drill holes in all of the figs. I’m amazed at how tiny finches, barely out of the nest, are bold enough to ignore my cats, ignore me, in fact, even when I’m wielding a broom. These birds, with brains the size of a shelled pea, outsmart me with ease. They stay three inches beyond the reach of my broom, pooping with abandon, and creating a huge mess on my walkway.

There is no rubber snake, pinwheel, pieces of mylar that scares these birds. Huge, aggressive grackles, tiny finches, spotty starlings, rattling doves, curved-beak thrashers and yes, busy hummingbirds, all snack on the figs.

Netting is not the answer, either. The tree is 15-feet high, and between the side of the house and the

Two still-untouched figs

block fence. Part of the tree hangs over into the neighbors yard. It’s overhung by a palo verde and shares space with a grapefruit. To cover the tree with a net, I’d need a lot of netting, a very tall ladder, another person and the ability to affix the next like a hairnet around the whole tree top.

I’ve seen nets in trees and I’ve seen birds fly under them with ease. The trouble is you then have a bird that can’t easily find its way out from under the net. I don’t want broken-winged birds, and I don’t want panicky birds. Panicky birds are destructive, and I’m losing enough figs.

Quinn McDonald is a nature lover who loves fresh fig preserves. She may not get them this season. Quinn has two websites: one for professional training at QuinnCreative.com and her art journaling site at raw-art-journals.com