Peace on Earth, Unless. . .

Christmas sends conflicting messages–peace v. purchases, light of wonder v. competitive house lighting. I write a lot about fear, and much of what I see about Christmas is fear based–will I give the right gift? Will I get what I want? Will my family show their love and appreciation or will there be another fight?

On my walk this morning, I saw houses decked out in full lights. I like the lights, but you can tell when someone is an overachiever. I walked in a different direction today, and then I saw this, not a Christmas decoration, just a warning that this family has had up for years:

In case you can’t see it, the stuffed man is hanging from a gallows (notice the “steps” and crossbeam). Wrapped in merry twinkling Christmas lights. Don’t strain to read the sign, I took a better photo of it. Here it is:

This is how these homeowners want to be known. The fading of the sign and the clothing on the dummy shows sun damage, so it’ s been up for awhile. For years I worked on a newspaper as a journalist. I believe in the First Amendment. And I still believe this qualifies as hate speech.

I was horrified, then sad. I haven’t moved from sad much since. I might add that they also had Christmas decorations up. Unless Baby Jesus was weeping in his manger, I just don’t understand how you can welcome Christmas and have this on your lawn, too.

There is much I don’t understand. This is one of those things.

–Quinn McDonald knows the season can be hard on people. She doesn’t think anger or fear do much to help.

Normal Reactions

In the years when I lived and worked in a cold climate, there was some sort of

Snow tree from mylovelypurplepearls.com

drive to master the weather. No matter how much snow or ice piled up and coated your windshield, you got to work on time. (I was not a surgeon or a firefighter, I worked in marketing departments.) There were pre-dawns I shoveled snow, panicky that I could not overcome nature. That I might be late for work. It wasn’t that many years ago that I walked to work in three feet of snow, to prove I was not afraid of weather. That I was not a slacker.

When we arrived at work, it was in 3-inch leather heels and stockings, wool-blend suits and other materials that were easily ruined by salt and water.

A certain level of success and wealth was implied by striding into work without an umbrella, without a canvas tote of boots and gloves. There were executives who had heated garages and even heated driveways. Proof that you were above the weather.

Arizona wildfire. Credit: AP Photo/ The Arizona Republic, Carlos Chavez

I think of those days when I hear about the wildfires in Colorado. The fires have no concern for wealth or status. One person’s house stands, another burns. Reconstruction will take years, souls will knit their cracks only with time and love–neither on sale at Walmart.  Or Barneys.

One of the reasons I love my new home state of Arizona is that the citizens (wild, strange, loving, caring and occasionally gun-totin’) pay attention to the weather. I wear sandals to teaching jobs. I wear linen and cotton clothing. Neat, pressed, but lightweight in deference to our 113-degree heat.

Dust storm (haboob) rolling over Phoenix from geek.com

In the evening, I’m in the pool. Not swimming laps, not using exercise tools. I’m in the pool because the weather is hot and the water is cooling. It’s sensible and sane.

I like living in step with nature. I like being realistic. It gives me a sensible outlook on life. And in a way, when our wildfires sweep across our Ponderosa pines (as they did just a few weeks ago), I might feel sorrow, or empathy, or even fear, but I don’t feel outrage. I don’t feel entitled to perfect weather. It feels like a real life.

--Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who keeps her house at 83 degrees during the day. Because that’s still 20 degrees cooler than outside.

Phoenix at 110 Degrees

It’s been hot early this year–while we generally hit 100 degrees for the first time in April, this year’s 106 and 107 in mid-May seems a bit early.

Frying an egg on the sidewalk–it works better in a pan. I’ve done it, and it does cook, but it doesn’t sizzle.

So how does one adjust to such high heat? If you live here, make the most of it. Toss your sweaty pillows out on the patio and let the sun bleach and freshen them. Don’t leave them outside for more than an hour, though, or they get dusty.

Have a desk chair mat? One of those plastic things that always turns up at the corners where it hits a desk or cabinet? Toss it out on the patio, and leave it for 15 minutes. The hard plastic softens and relaxes. Drag it to a shady spot before you bring it in. The heat makes it off-gas.

Dry your towels outside. OK, so they are a little stiff, but fabric softener makes towels resist absorbing water, and sun-dried towels smell great and dry you off better. It takes about 30 minutes for towels to dry completely. I once raced the dryer and with a light breeze before Monsoon Season starts (mid-June), the outdoor-dried towels win.

Still have plants in pots? You optimist, you. Starting now and going till September, water them twice a day, before dawn and after the sun is not longer directly on them. They’ll die otherwise, there just isn’t enough water-holding ability in potting soil. And if your plant pots are glazed and dark colors, they won’t make it past June 10. The roots cook if the pots are in the full sun.

While you are out early in the morning (after first light and before full dawn), change the food in the hummingbird feeders. Every day. At that heat, it sours in a day. The birds die quickly from consuming old hummingbird food, as it also grows mold.

Busy day? Core an apple, stuff it with bread drizzled with olive oil, a spoon of honey, a few raisins . Rub with flaxseed oil or olive oil, wrap in foil (shiny side in) and place in box in trunk of car when you leave for work. When you get home, you have a baked apple! (No cream or butter though. Hot car cooking requires some food-poisoning precautions.)

The Gladiator fire has decimated 10,000 acres of land that won’t come back for a generation.

Summers are tinder dry in the area, and brush fires easily get out of hand. The Gladiator fire has scorched 10,000 acres, and the land won’t be able to hold plants for 20 years. Unlike the East Coast, where a fire is good for the forest, our fires destroy landscapes. Please be careful with campfires and don’t play with fireworks, which are legal here. Legal and “good-idea” are two different issues. This fire was started by an unsupervised child.

–Quinn McDonald loves Phoenix any time of year, but not when it’s a dry hate. There is much healing to be done anyplace in the world, but she was called here.

Walking in Skunk Creek

Skunk Creek starts well North of Phoenix, somewhere Northeast of Black Canyon and then carves its way through Glendale, Peoria and South to Phoenix, joining other dry riverbeds along the way. These riverbeds show up as blue rivers on maps, but when you go there, they are dry. Arroyos. They can fill fast, even on a sunny day. If it’s raining upstream, the water will come.

No clouds, just puffy blossoms.

This is the time of year I love to hike along arroyos. They hold interesting wildlife (including rattlesnakes, road runners, red tail hawks, and the super-cute

Gambel's Quail

Gambel’s Quail (with the little bobbing feather on their heads). Starting around the end of the calendar year,  some trees start to bloom.

You also see some things that make you wonder.

We tie down our river rocks. When an arroyo fills up, the water rushes at amazing speeds.

Close up of river rocks held in place by wire mesh.

The round river rocks begin to roll, and pile up, creating water crests, street blocks (streets here run through arroyos), and rock damage. A fast-moving flood that rolls rocks can divert part of a river into a neighborhood.

You can see the wire edge at the lower left corner, and the end at the top third of the photo.

Wire mesh holds the rocks in place, sometimes for long stretches. It helps the water run in an even stream and directs it into the center of the arroyo, to keep it from crawling up the side and eroding sidewalks and roads.

Most of the big arroyos have packed dirt or sidewalks. This section has sidewalks, and they divide them for walking and biking. The sun breaks down the striping, and for all the world it looks like someone is trying to erase it.

Erasing the guidelines.

All I needed was a huge Sharpie to practice handwriting along the lines and guidelines.

You never know what you’ll find along the creek beds, and walking at this time of year is what we go through July and August for!

--Quinn McDonald lives in Valley of the Sun. She’s a naturalist and an art journaler who brings creative thinking into businesses.

Phoenix Close-Up

You’ve seen it every time you see a postcard of the desert: the giant Saguaro. Never mind that the Saguaro grows only in a small, defined area of the United States–the lower Sonoran Desert, which is in Arizona, a tiny bit of California, and Baja California and Mexico. Nope, if you see a cartoon about the hapless guy

Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert.

crawling across the desert, there’s a Saguaro letting you know it’s a desert. If he were in the Mojave, the hapless guy would have to have a Joshua Tree letting you know where it is. A Joshua Tree looks like a cross between a bunch of straws and a muppet.

You also probably know that the Saguaro sucks up water when it rains, expanding it’s accordion-like ribs to hold water. While the Saguaro holds about 40 gallons of water after a rainfall, you

Saguaro cactus. This one is well-watered.

cannot stick a straw into it and get a drink of water when you become the hapless guy crawling across the desert. (Incidenally, the cactus is not pronounced Sag-u-AH-Roh, it’s pronounced Suh-WAR-oh.)

Why not? Because a Saguaro isn’t hollow. Nope, it’s packed full of fibers and long stick-like structures, called the skeleton. When a Saguaro dies, the skeleton is harvested for wood–I have a walking stick made from one of the ribs. The Saguaro is endangered and protected, so you can’t go cutting one down for the ribs. Or the water, for that matter.

Here is a cross section of the brother of the above Saguaro. Same yard, right next to it, but it died. OK, so maybe the fact that it got struck by lightning might have had something to do with it.

Cross-section of a saguaro

The cross section shows the outside edge, the dark-brown ribs surrounding the tough-spongy middle (which feels a lot like a dry loofa sponge). You can’t poke a straw into it. When the saguaro dies, the skin and vascular tissue beneath it disintegrate, and the inside tough-spongy layer crumbles, leaving the tall spikes standing.

–Quinn McDonald is a naturalist and nature journaler who lives in The Valley. She had to take a ladder on her morning walk to get a good shot of the lightning-struck saguaro. Yes, she felt really dumb hauling a ladder on her morning walk.

Casa Grande Ruins

Half an hour East from I-10, in the town of Coolidge, AZ in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, are the Casa Grande ruins. Originally built by the Tohono O’odoham Indians in the 1200s, the “big house) (Casa grande) was a phenomenal structure. Most likely, it was built even earlier, and completed over time. It was built without architectural tools–no cranes, no digging machines, and no trees or cement to build with.

Inside the Casa Grande

Underneath this part of the desert is a layer of caliche–a cement-like mud that was used at the building material. The timbers in the structure are pine and hardwood, and come from more than 50 miles away. Because the Hohokam (literally, “those who vanished,” belonging to the larger family of Tohono O’odham) didn’t have horses, no one knows how the trees were cut and hauled to this spot.

The building is about 30 feet high, and only a small part of it is left. The rest has been beaten back into dust under the sun, wind and rain of the desert. In the last 100 years, various roofs were built over the ruins to protect it from further weathering.

The ruins are about 30 feet tall and protected from sun, wind and rain by a roof.

Today,when we were there, we watched world-champion hoop dancer Tony Duncan in a series of amazing moves. His dance represents elements of nature–butterfly (seen in the video below), rattlesnake, and eagle. After each segment, Duncan dances out of the hoops and represents the entire world spinning by raising the connected hoops over his head. He danced intricate dances with grace and ease–only when I saw how hard he was sweating afterward could I appreciate the effort and concentration that goes into this complicated dance.

There is a bit of irony in Duncan, who belongs to the Apache clan, dancing on the Tohono O’odoham ruins. The Tohono O’odoham word for Apache is “Ohb,” which is also their word for “evil.” The two tribes were rivals for water, travel space, cooler mountain land and food for centuries.

--Quinn McDonald is a writer, artist, and life- and creativity coach. She is learning how to make videos. She needs to work plenty to get it right.

I’m participating in WordPress’s Postaday2011 challenge. Having posted more than 1,000 posts in three years, I will commit to posting 5 times a week. That’s plenty.

In the heart of the city

There is a busy intersection three blocks from my house. A gas station, strip mall, big box store, car wash, and two restaurants fight for visibility. In the early morning, when I walk, I can hear the white noise of traffic as thousands of cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses take turns crossing the intersection.

Less than half a mile from this traffic-frantic spot is a bridle trail. Unpaved and seldom used, it’s a two-mile long enclave of country in the city. I don’t often walk it early in the morning, because the crunching gravel sets off the many dogs that live along the trail, and I don’t want to disturb the people who forgot to train their dogs. After the first house, the dogs bark at each other, not me, but it’s still a lot of noise. The wonderful part of this walk is that between sections of path, you cross busy city streets. Then it’s back to the country.

But the walk is amazing for its solitude and country appeal.

Bridle path half a mile from a busy city intersection

There is a tree house whose tree has worked its way through and around the house:

Treehouse with windows cut in for the branches

Fresh dates hang over a stucco wall, tempting passersby. But just once. Fresh dates don’t taste anything like the ones you buy.

Fresh dates, ready to pick. Don't eat 'em before drying.

Close up of the date bunch.

Dates grow in bunches

Spring Color in the Desert

Flowers along the trail

When I tell people I live in the Sonoran Desert, they often say, “How dull, I could never live there. It’s all brown and tan.” Not always. Here’s what Spring looks like in the desert.

The orange flowers are Desert Globemallow, the red are Easton Penstemon, the pink are Desert Pennyroyal, and the yellow are Desert Marigold.

Wildflower on Thunderbird Mountain

Wildflower bush

Living Sunshine

Red wildflowers

Pink wildflower

Christmas for All

Merry Christmas to everyone who is happy, who is holding a baby for the first time, who is in mourning, who has said goodbye for the last time. Merry Christmas whether you are in the midst of a big family and love it, or whether you are counting the minutes for it to be over. Merry Christmas if you are alone, lonely, or happy to be alone. Merry Christmas if this is not your holiday, but it is the holiday of someone you love.

May every day be precious to you, and may you see golden ornaments sparkling before your eyes.

golden ornament

–Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach. She is a writer who pays attention to the details and carries an iPhone with a camera to make sure she catches them all. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Migration Through Phoenix

We who live in the West Valley are right in the migration path. It starts in October, when the first frail ones arrive from a long, hot stay in the rugged mountains, where they have had to provide shelter and food through the busy Spring and Summer. They come into driveways and yards, protected by familiar surroundings.

Protected by friend

It is not unusual to see them stop in the streets, exhausted from the trip. They need some water and care before they can take off again.

Safe in the backyard

Some who come through our migration path are aquatic. They often travel in pairs, although it’s unlikely they stay together for life. It’s more of a lifestyle, one more casual, one for speed and grace.

Aquatic dwellers

Some of the travelers are exhausted when they arrive. They hide in backyards, keeping their age hidden. It is amazing to think that they have been making the trip for 30 years or more, back and forth each Spring and Autumn.

hiding behind the fence

There are small ones, too, on their first trip. They are bright and colorful, still to feel the push of adventure.

Small, but tough

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and coach who helps people see different perspectives. See her work at QuinnCreative.com