Hawks soar in a stiff breeze, palm leaves flutter, bougainvilleas bloom, and palo verde trees dab the blue sky in tufts of green and yellow.
Out-performing them all, under the shade of a fig tree, an unassuming amaryllis reappears outdoors in April. She is the star of the show.
Are you missing your favorite monkey? Are you searching for a bridge to a higher plain? Do you need to be reminded that you are beautiful? You’ll find them all here along the Crosscut Canal between Scottsdale and Tempe.
Now that I have a little more distance from Good Friday, it’s clear how painful it was to witness Gary, my neighbor, die of congestive heart failure right outside my front door. Especially because Gary and I see/saw the same cardiologist. (In case you don’t know, I had my own heart trauma nearly four years ago. My husband Tom was the one watching the calamity unfold that day, rushing to get me to an emergency room in St. Louis on our sixtieth birthday.)
At any rate, if you’re like me, you’ve experienced the wide swings of life. Joy and sorrow. Victory and defeat. Jubilation and devastation. I think the secret to contentment is expecting and accepting both ends of the spectrum, then finding your balance somewhere between the two extremes.
On Palm Sunday, I found myself savoring an author’s dream come true. I was reading passages from my latest book to an attentive audience and signing copies in our community clubhouse. Five days later on Good Friday, Gary collapsed outside his and my condo. A few minutes later, he died in my grasp.
For the next two days–through Easter Sunday–I felt out of sorts and sick to my stomach. I was searching for my equilibrium, battling side effects of shock, and absorbing the protective properties of my second COVID-19 vaccination, as more requests for my book came via texts and front-door visits.
On Monday, I began to find some semblance of my equilibrium. I knocked on my neighbor Bob’s door. He and I had been there with Pat (Gary’s wife) when her world came crashing down. “Milwaukee Bob” (Pat calls him that because that’s where he and his wife Barb live most of the year) is adjusting to what he witnessed too.
Though it is the fig tree Bob and I stood beside, giving Gary and Pat comfort and support in the trauma of that Good Friday moment, he and Barb bought a copy of my book, I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree. They weren’t able to make it to the book signing and reading on Palm Sunday.
On Tuesday morning, I exchanged hugs with Gary’s daughter, Andrea. She had flown in from Chicago with her husband and three children to comfort her mother Pat. Through tears, Andrea thanked me for being there for her mother and father. Her family’s spring Arizona vacation (planned before her father’s demise) was transformed into a mix of grieving, coping, swimming, and horseback riding. Her dad’s remains will be interred in Illinois at a later date.
It is Wednesday night now. I feel stronger again. I realize the tender result of Gary’s sudden death … that, through care and happenstance, I will be bonded to Bob, Pat, Andrea, and her family for life. This morning Tom and I joined a handful of friends for yoga in the park. Between ten and eleven o’clock, we stretched and posed on our mats. I felt the caress of a cool southern breeze under the shade of a tall pine tree. I heard the needles of the pine whisper and the call of the mockingbirds above us. I assumed my tree pose. I felt nature cradle me. I swayed, but found my footing on uneven ground.
Gary was a fixture in our community. Nearly every day, through our kitchen window, Tom and I spotted him beyond our fig tree. He sat contentedly on the park bench in front of his condo, wearing his favorite cowboy hat, smoking a cigarette. Our neighbor–an eighty-six-year-old-man with a wry sense of humor and perpetual cough–died last week.
Over the past few years, Tom and I watched Gary’s slow slide and the constant care Pat (his devoted wife of fifty-three years) provided. In recent weeks, Gary’s decline had become more precipitous. We knew it was only a matter of time–days, hours, minutes, seconds–before he left. It happened on Good Friday right outside his front door and ours. He died under our fig tree.
On Friday afternoon, after receiving our second Pfizer vaccinations the day before, Tom was napping in the sunroom. I was feeling fine, writing in our den. Around three o’clock, I heard a thud followed closely by a shriek. Gary had fallen. Pat had just seen it happen. I raced outside. I found Gary crumpled on the ground in the ninety-degree heat next to his Chicago Bears cupholder.
Pat, Bob (another neighbor), and I did our best to lift Gary and situate him in a chair in the shade near the gnarly fig right outside our door. But the color in Gary’s face drained. His breathing stopped just as the Scottsdale paramedics and police arrived. They worked to resuscitate him, but Gary was gone.
For the past few days, I’ve been feeling the trauma of that moment and the side effects of the second vaccine. I remember telling Pat to call 911. I remember my heart racing. I remember consoling Pat briefly, then–after the EMTs arrived–reaching out to hug Danny, a long-time friend of Gary’s who had heard the commotion and looked on in amazement. I cried in his arms. Danny and I don’t know each other well, but I am certain we both needed to feel comfort in that frightening moment.
Until Good Friday 2021, no one–not even my mother or father–had died in my arms. It’s going to take a while before I can process the meaning behind all of this. But, of course, writing about it helps.
I think Pat, Bob, and I did what many people would do. We tried to ease the pain of a husband, a neighbor, a friend, a dying man. As a result, we will be bonded forever by the personal gravity and trauma of the experience.
I love sharing the company of friends and devouring the sweet, creamy goodness of a wedge of cake. When they appear in the same space at the same time–in this case celebrating the launch of my latest book on Sunday, March 28–that’s a perfect day.
One of the Polynesian Paradise board members invited me to talk about I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree and sell and sign copies of my book. He even picked and gathered a half dozen lemons from the tree near our front door and placed them in a bowl on a table in the front of the condo clubhouse.
So there I was, seated at the front of the room, at the table with the lemons and copies of my books at two o’clock on Palm Sunday. Outside, through the glass, I could see children and adults splashing and playing in the pool, framed by palm trees. Inside about thirty-five neighbors and friends sat and stood, fanned across the room before me.
With my husband Tom, older son Nick, and his girlfriend Aida observing in the front row, I had that moment every writer dreams of. I had the rare opportunity to read a few stories from my latest book out loud. I had the chance to talk about why I love to write about the things I do: nature, family, community, and life’s serendipitous moments.
It was a remarkable and unexpected thrill, made possible by the acceleration of vaccinations across the country and in our condo community. Those in attendance even signed and gave me a bottle of bubbly to mark the occasion. Tom and I will pop the cork on that at a later date, just to remember the moment once again.
Without question, we have come a long way in one year. We’ve felt the pain, the losses, and the sadness. We’ve done our best to endure the social retreat. I know this pandemic isn’t over, but the numbers of cases and deaths have diminished. Life is better now. Thanks to science and the availability of vaccines, we’ve begun to reemerge.
It sure feels great to see friends and to socialize again … and to eat cake.
What have I missed most over the past year? The spontaneous moments that spring from nowhere. And, let’s face it, going nowhere pretty much describes what we have all experienced from last March to this one.
But, like the daffodils of March which I imagine are aching to bloom again in Illinois, the feeling of going nowhere is turning into the possibility of going somewhere as flickers of normalcy return.
My cousin Phyllis, who lives in Missouri, texted me a fun Happy St. Patrick’s Day message yesterday afternoon. It always brightens my day to hear from Phyllis. Her mother and my father were twins. We share lots of fond, long-ago, St. Louis memories.
Over the past nearly-four years, Phyllis and I have stayed in touch (via text mostly) since Tom and I last saw her and her family in person in St. Louis. Strangely, I suffered a heart attack in St. Louis the day after we dined with my cousin and her family. Tom and I were on our way west to our new home in Scottsdale when our entire world turned upside down.
Anyway, the texts back and forth between Phyllis and me are bursts of positive energy: wellness check-ins; holiday greetings; news and photos of her adorable granddaughters; snippets of stories about our beloved St. Louis Cardinals; exchanges about the weather in the St. Louis area and Scottsdale; and anecdotes about the latest developments in my writing universe. But, over the past four years, we have rarely spoken on the phone.
Yesterday, after our latest text exchange began, I decided to change things up a bit. I needed more. I needed to hear Phyllis’ voice. So I called her. We shared stories of our recent vaccinations and our grown sons. We laughed a little. We also complained about the state of the world that worries us. Our conversation felt deeper and more complete than the text exchanges. I realized after the fact how much I’ve been missing these kinds of conversations.
As all of us have retreated during twelve months of a global pandemic for our own protection, perhaps we have retreated too much. Perhaps, though we live in a world where we have the ability to text each other, we have created too much social distance between us and those we love. After all, we are human beings. We are social creatures. Even if we can’t touch each other, we need to feel as if we can. Our voices are instruments for making that happen.
A second example of me trying to recapture some spontaneity in my life happened this morning. I drove to Eldorado Pool for my morning swim. The pool was rather busy, but I spotted my friend Frank. He offered to share his lane. I thanked him and jumped in.
Before March 2020, Frank is someone I saw two or three times a week at the pool. We always traded random stories. This usually consisted of our favorite Scottsdale restaurants or our past lives on different trajectories in the Chicago area. Frank and I frequently connected on the fly in the stream of life. It was never planned. If it were, I think it would have felt less human, less important.
Of course, when our world shrank in 2020, there were no Frank-and-Mark encounters. When the pool was closed and the winter weather lingered longer than expected, that passing-friendship aspect of my life evaporated. Now that the weather is warming up, I expect to see Frank more regularly. We will share more of our foodie stories, pounds we need to relinquish from our pandemic doldrums, and the burgeoning construction activity in south Scottsdale that is growing up around us.
Yes, the thousands of lives lost due to COVID-19 are the worst of all. But the little moments, which comprise the mosaic of our lives, have been missing for far too long.
While we continue to wear our masks and shout with joy at the realization that the pace of vaccinations is increasing rapidly, it’s time we paused, breathed deeply, and began to recapture the texture of our lives.
In March, most of the United States springs forward, switches to Daylight Savings Time, and loses an hour until fall. But not here in Arizona. Time stands still in the Grand Canyon State.
I like the continuity of our steady clock. It’s one less adjustment to make in a world of constant change. This morning, I grabbed my digital camera and took a one-hour walk–the same amount of time lost elsewhere last Sunday–and photographed south Scottsdale.
These are the best images I captured in my community on Tuesday, March 16, 2021. It was a cool, quiet stroll along the Crosscut Canal. The pictures tell the story. There is plenty to love about Arizona. This is where time stands still, but life goes on.
Like clockwork, the wildflowers are blooming again in Arizona. Daisies and poppies are beginning to soak up the sun in fields, on yards, and along roadways. Pandemic or not, this burst of color and continuity occurs every February and March in the Sonoran Desert.
I think Mother Nature is trying to show us something astounding and reassuring about the power of her regularity. She’s at her best when she delivers beauty on her own terms and schedule, unimpeded by the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It is simply our job to notice her actions, absorb her displays, and allow them to calm our spirits as we wait for pieces of our pre-pandemic lives to appear.
On Tuesday, I wrote about returning to swim at Eldorado Pool after a year-long, COVID-19-induced hiatus. I swam again on Thursday. In the past week, there have been other hopeful signs. Blooming like Arizona wildflowers, a series of separate occasions outdoors with friends–all uplifting–have renewed my spirits.
Last Saturday night, Tom and I drove to Glendale to watch a movie under the stars with Danny, Shea, and Michael. It was a cool, windy night for Arizona. We bundled up to watch an action flick under individual blankets.
On Monday, Tom and I dined on a restaurant patio with Pavel and Rick. On Wednesday, we consumed a potluck meal under a gazebo with Adele, Len, Carolyn, and John. All four comrades in our condo community continue to support my writing addiction.
On Thursday evening, Tom and I ventured back to a nearly empty indoor movie theatre for the first time in a year. Behind masks, we watched Nomadland, a stirring story of loss and hope set against the grand landscape of the American west. On Friday, we reconnected with Paul, another friend from a different strand of life. Like the wildflowers, he has just reappeared.
This morning we laughed and joked with Garry, a chorus friend, and his partner James. Together we polished off four doughnuts under our recently pruned fig tree. I’ve missed Garry’s raucous sense of humor and positive energy. He bought three of my books.
More safe social steps are coming in the next week to carry us further down the path of healing: a movie with John and Carolyn tonight; a stroll with Brian and Bernadette at the Desert Botanical Garden tomorrow; a visit with George on Monday evening. Tom and I have grown close to him. He’s bringing steaks for the three of us to grill. Then, later in the week, another dinner outside with Len and Adele at one of our favorite Scottsdale restaurants.
Suffice it to say, Tom and I are lucky to have all of these friends in our lives. I didn’t intend for this to sound like a reemerging social calendar. More than that, it’s my latest batch of evidence concerning how important in-person human connections are, how much we need each other to survive and be happy. Zoom interactions and text messages aren’t enough to sustain us.
Yes, it’s been a week of many happy returns, a flurry of book sales, and several steps and strokes in the right direction. I’m thankful for them all and the opportunities ahead.
As Tom and I wait to be fully vaccinated (Garry and James already are), I feel an inoculation of hope. We’re finally beginning to rediscover the friendship strands of our lives. We’re poised to bloom again in the Arizona sun.
Though the title might lead you to believe otherwise, this is not one of those dusty western stories. You know, where the good guy returns to the scene of the crime for revenge against the villain and they duel it out in front of a saloon?
Instead, this is a much simpler, quieter tale about one man–me–beginning to take his shrunken life back a day after the United States surpassed half a million COVID-19-related deaths. (Incidentally, if you are like me, you are wondering if the decline in new cases and hospitalizations are harbingers of the waning days of a global pandemic or a mere lull, a mirage in the desert that has seduced us to believe some of us may actually escape after all.)
It had been nearly a year since I swam laps at Eldorado Pool in south Scottsdale. It exists about a mile from our condo. Before March 2020, it was a place I frequented three or four times a week. Of course, COVID-19 was the villain or at least the culprit that has kept me from going there for nearly twelve months.
Today, on Tuesday, February 23, 2021 I returned to this place that soothes and energizes my body and spirit. I wrote a new chapter gliding in the water. That consisted of thirty minutes in lane eleven of our thirteen-lane, Olympic-size, community pool.
I was one of about a dozen swimmers in the pool at ten o’clock this morning. We were a lucky twelve, cupping our hands to push through cool water under sixty-five-degree blue skies, far from the snow and bluster that has consumed most of the United States recently.
There were a few familiar faces, like Frank’s. He smiled, asked how my winter has been, and if I’d been working on a new book. His question reminded me how long it had been since we had talked, how much we hadn’t discussed, how little he knew of I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree, and how much I had missed the connected pieces of my life … like swimming in a community pool, trading stories face-to-face with friends, realizing that the few added pounds around my middle can be shed easily by recapturing this strand of my life a few times a week. One lap at a time.
My swimming is over for the day. Now, outside the pool, I hold my breath–like most of the rest of the world–and wait. I am one of those under sixty-fivers (just barely) ready to be vaccinated, ready to schedule it as soon as I can, ready to recapture more strands of my life, ready to return to a world that once felt familiar.
With all the energy and enthusiasm I’ve bestowed upon my latest book, I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree, Tom and I are certain our middle-aged fig tree has been feeling sad and neglected.
We first observed signs of this in the fall as I labored to complete my manuscript. Tears began to appear on the trunk. (Actually, the moisture was wetwood-causing bacteria and/or sap leaking from several spots.) This was likely a byproduct of messy sewer-related digging outside our front door that disrupted the roots in the July of 2020. It was one more irritant provided by a despicable year that was supposed to offer us perfect clarity.
Fortunately, the oozing didn’t deter our beloved fig from bearing fruit or producing its typical canopy of green and welcome shade from the Sonoran sun. Even so, we were worried. So, in the fall, I bought some fruit tree spikes and planted them at various places around the circumference of the tree. This deep-root nourishment–along with more frequent watering and an occasional bath of bleach (which Tom has provided on the leaky spots)–seems to have solved the leakage problem.
Pruning the gnarly fig tree is another matter. It’s something that must be attended to every winter. In previous years, a few of our neighbors (Mario and Yolanda, who winter here from their home in Italy) have supervised and completed this task. Not in 2021. COVID-19 travel restrictions have prevented them from returning this year.
To fill the gardening void, Tom and I decided to step in and offer our services. If you read my book, you’ll discover this isn’t the first time we’ve trimmed fruit trees. We researched the best way to prune fig trees and paired that with our previous gardening knowledge and the love of plants and flowers that runs through my DNA.
On the morning of Thursday, February 4, we gathered our gardening gloves, two ladders, and three pairs of clippers. We cleared the area of potted plants beneath the tree. We pruned the fig tree.
This was a big job that involved climbing on a ladder, trimming the smallest branches first, and sawing off or lopping the medium-sized ones. The goal? To trim the fig down to a stump of its previous likeness, so that it will return with gusto and a new crop of branches, leaves and delectable fruits–remarkably all within six months.
After reaching, snipping, and sawing for two hours, we gathered the debris from the ground, deposited it in our condo community dumpster, guzzled a few bottles of water, and stretched our sore back and neck muscles.
Now, a mere skeleton of the fig remains. In a month or less, new growth will appear. That will be followed by longer branches, dozens of ripe figs in July, and a bouquet of green stretching toward the Sonoran sky.
Never fear, this annual haircut was just what the tree doctor ordered. It’s all for the sake of the fig tree. I don’t want its sense of neglect to intensify and become full-blown jealousy when that avalanche of I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree sales I fantasize about starts rolling in.
Mark Johnson Stories 