Growing up, I felt most at home in the desert. In our neighborhood in the foothills of Tucson, there were undeveloped tracts of Sonoran Desert around each house. I viewed all that land as my backyard and became as familiar with its thorny inhabitants as I was familiar with my bookshelves. There was the hook-headed saguaro by our garage, across the street, the Christmas cactus whose skeletal fingers bore red berries, the barrel cactuses with fruit like miniaturized pineapples, and the teddy bear cholla in our lot, whose needle-sharp pelt looked inviting only from far away.
Do all children grow up learning nature can kill you? In school, we learned survival skills. Everyone knows you can die of thirst in a desert (pro tip: split open a cactus and eat its flesh for moisture) but did you realize that the biggest danger is hypothermia at night? Turn a garbage bag into a DIY poncho, they told us, and carry a whistle.
I’d find scorpions in my bedroom, tarantulas in an enclosed porch. Rattlesnakes drifted past our sliding glass doors. Once, walking home from school, my friend and I spooked a horny toad. We ran, assuming it was poisonous, since practically everything else was.
I was scared of everything as a child—bees, roller-coasters, heights—but oddly enough, the desert did not frighten me…
I wrote a little ode to my home territory for SheLoves this month—and a meditation on how accepting where we’re rooted goes a long way to feeling at peace. Join me there?
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