From time to time, it’s important to take stock of where we’ve been and how we’ve grown. In that spirit, as December’s light wanes, I look back over the fence at 2023.
Here are ten important things–in no particular order–I’ve learned (or been reminded of) this year. Each is connected to one or more blog posts I wrote in the past twelve months.
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#1: Creative opportunities are rare butterflies; grabthem when they appear.
#2: Music transforms the human heart with joy and hope.
#3: Cats are resourceful, cuddly, and conniving characters.
#5: Trees keep us rooted to the places we love most.
#6: Good poetry simply IS; no explanations are required.
#7: My husband is a sweet guy, who really knows his movies.
#8: Carol Burnett is a national treasure and a kind human being.
#9: You can’t replace your mother or father, but you can remember them fondly.
#10: We all need a sense of community to connect and nourish our souls.
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Nature’s mid-century palms rose early without caffeine’s jolt. The quartet whisked breakfast into curls of golden cotton candy best consumed in a wondrous hush.
Perched on sprinkled pavement and slanted roofs, a mix of mourning doves, misplaced pigeons, and I marveled at December’s delight beyond distant flurries.
Today in the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving. It is easy to become consumed by the preparations for this holiday. To focus on the feast we will consume, while many in the world aren’t as fortunate.
But there is greater meaning–in our bodies, hearts, and minds–when we pause and recount what makes life satisfying beyond the things that adorn our days.
I am thankful every day for the love of family past and present, friends and neighbors near and far, good health and the ability to write and sing, gorgeous trees and furry critters that grace our lives, and most definitely the world Tom and I have discovered and created together inside and outside our Arizona home.
Wherever you live, thank you for joining me on this journey. I am thankful for the ability to connect with you–for this opportunity to share my voice through words, images, ideas and memories–every day.
The longer, hotter summer of 2023 in the Valley of the Sun claimed countless trees and plants–not to mention hundreds of human lives.
Now that November has settled in, we are reminded that cooler mornings and evenings–with warm, sunny afternoons sandwiched in between–actually exist in central Arizona from October through May. This is why we live here.
Unlike most of the United States, fall is a time of renewal in the Sonoran Desert. It is more like spring with an autumnal twist–minus the crunch of rotting leaves underfoot.
We desert rats can now focus on revitalizing our gardens and spirits. Perhaps a Barbara Karst or Torch Glow bougainvillea here–or a crested cactus there–to dress up the back patio in time for Thanksgiving.
Whatever your potting preference, it is growing season despite the advancing darkness. While old plants and trees lick their wounds, new ones pose with the promise of buds to endure winter–a foreign concept for most of the Northern Hemisphere reconciled to the shiver of ice and cold.
Trees connect us to the earth and sky. They adorn our natural spaces with character, continuity, and shade. Though they never speak, trees–if we listen–whisper wisdom in the wind.
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Tom and I have missed the presence of a tree in front of our Scottsdale home for nearly six months.
In May, carpenter bees sawed our fifty-year-old fig tree, selected and planted by Tom’s grandfather in the early 1970s.
Sadly, it split in two and tumbled down in the darkness. Only a stump remained for nearly six months.
During the long, hot summer of 2023, I missed the solitude and protection of a tree outside our north-facing window.
Each time I walked past our fig tree’s stump, it reminded me of other recent losses: our friend Dave last December; Frances (my mother’s sister) in July; then another friend Chad … suddenly in September.
Strange as it sounds, the space where our fig tree once stood felt like an open wound or incomplete canvas. But that changed in September when Tom and I shopped for a new tree.
I felt the exuberance of nature’s possibilities as we walked through Moon Valley Nursery in Phoenix–sizing up the options: Hong Kong Orchid (flowers in the spring); Chinese Elm (strong shade tree); Ficus (evergreen and can be trimmed to stay small); and Red Push Pistache (drought-resilient with a pop of color in the late fall).
Jonnie was our escort and sales rep. She helped us compare and contrast the leading candidates. By the end of September, the choice was clear for Tom and me.
We picked the new tree of our dreams, a hearty Red Push Pistache. It is best known for the vivid red color it produces in late November.
In that sense, it will remind us of the Burning Bush we planted in the front yard of our home in Mount Prospect, Illinois in the summer of 2013.
It turned blood red every October (and still provides a splash of color though we left in 2017), after the Blue Spruce that preceded it died in the spring of 2013 … a few months after my mother left this earth.
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On November 1, a crew from Moon Valley Nursery arrived to remove our fig tree stump. As they dug up the remaining gnarly and decaying roots and hollowed out the hole, Tom and I could feel relief pour in.
The following afternoon, our new, mature, Red Push Pistache tree arrived on the back of a long, flatbed truck. A team of five men from Moon Valley maneuvered it through the gate and down the sidewalk. Moments later, the crew enlarged the hole to accommodate our new tree’s three-foot ball of roots.
By five o’clock they had anchored our durable-and-drought-resistant shade tree in the ground in front of our condo. Soon after, they left to deposit another tree for another customer.
I imagine, in a few weeks–as Tom and I prepare to sit down at our kitchen table and give thanks on a Thursday–our new tree will lavish us with a blaze of red leaves.
But even before the redness appears, it feels as though some semblance of balance, normality, and renewal has returned to reveal our new view in south Scottsdale outside our north-facing window.
The quietest slices keep us whole and hopeful. If we let the snippets slip past without noticing, we are missing the moments, the essence, the connecting tissue, the story of life itself.
In October 2019, I puttered in my garden as I often do.
I had already begun to assemble tongue-in-cheek and serious stories about life in the Grand Canyon State. But I needed a creative hook to link the essays and my desert fantasies to the wide-open experience of living in Arizona.
Strangely, sagging citrus tree branches provided the stimulus for my book title. While they impeded our sidewalk, identifying the obstacle cleared a path in my brain. Tom stood by as seven words flew from my mouth and tumbled into the arid Arizona air: “I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree.”
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Nearly four years have passed. In early 2021, I completed and published my book. Folks near and far have told me how much they’ve enjoyed reading it.
Of course, I hope more will discover it and find meaning in the essays, including those I wrote about living in a global community we never imagined–a place I call Coronaville.
This afternoon I found myself in the same space outside my front door, examining the same tree, realizing it needed another haircut. I grabbed the loppers, pulled on my gardening gloves, and pruned only the most problematic branches that hung low.
Sadly, there were a few lemon casualties that fell to the earth looking more like green limes than the fully matured lemons they might have become in December.
Still, I think I did a good thing for Tom and me … and our neighbors and delivery people, who pass daily on the sidewalk of our mid-twentieth-century condo community and go about their lives under the radar.
And the lemon tree? It’s now shapelier than before and has inspired me to write yet another story about the possibilities at play in nature.
In a world of distractions, scoundrels and deceit, nature casts a sliver of shade away from the heat.
On August 16, 2023, Poly–our community cat–reappeared and inspired this brief verse and montage. To read more of my poetry, purchase A Path I Might Have Missed on Amazon.
Mark Johnson Stories 