The Whole Blooming Desert

For the Sun-Drunk, the Dazzled, and Easily Pleased

Photo by Jeff Goulden

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Oh, the desert in spring is a glorious thing, more colors than colors, a neon-drenched fling. The yellows, the reds! Oh, the purples and greens! The oranges! The golds! The impossible scenes!

The tree trunks are greener than green has a right, so green that the blue sky seems wrong to the sight. But the hue is so blue you can feel that it’s true. Your brain is on acid you cannot undo.

The air smells vanilla and clove and of honey, of orange and spice and a tad something funny. It smells so deliciously, gorgeously great that the sneeziest sneezers stand out in the heat with their noses tipped skyward and watering eyes. They don’t even care, for the smell is the prize.

It cannot be helped. It simply cannot. They stand there and sniff ‘til their sinuses rot.

Spring’s waving in summer, I think rather blankly. It’s already ninety and warming up, frankly. Your mind cannot fathom how anything lives through the six months of heat the desert will give.

And yet, and yet! We’re all celebrating. The lizards are sprinting. The flowers are mating. The humans are hiking and sweating and gazing and doing the things that the living are craving:

Showing off. Staying out. Upping heart rates. Eating and drinking. Going on dates.

And yes, oh my, yes, I must say this plainly: The whole blooming desert is fucking! Mainly.

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I was upping my heart rate, gazing my gaze, when I heard a new sound through the warm morning haze. A chirping, a singing, a trill and a tweet, so pleasing a sound that I stopped in the heat.

I turned and I scanned. I stood very still. Two fanned-out tails caught the light. What a thrill! Kicking sand into sparkles that glittered and gleamed like the desert was doing far more than it seemed.

Two Cactus Wrens, rolling around on the ground. A melodious feathery tumbling mound of brown and of red, of white and of yellow (one presumably lady, one presumably fellow).

Were they fighting? Nope, nope. Nor were they sad. The sound was too cheerful, too bright, and too glad. It was not the sound anything makes when it’s mad.

I crept closer to understand more of their clucking. By golly, those puffballs were on the ground fucking!

Did I mention the ground! I would not have assumed! I’d have guessed they went airborne or possibly zoomed through the branches and treetops in passionate flight. But no. On the ground. In the sand. In the light!

I thought about leaving. I didn’t. Oh, screw it. How often does one see two Cactus Wrens do it? The desert had handed me something quite rare: Sex on a trail in the warm spicy air.

So…three cheers for the spring while the spring’s still here! It’s the best kind of thing (but it soon disappears). The lizards, the wrens. The sneezers, the hikers. The flowers, the beetles, the casual bikers. All of us drunk, on the clove-scented air, all of us heated by nature’s affair.

In love with the desert. In love with the light. In love with our senses of smell and of sight!

In love for as long as the spring will allow. Which won’t be much longer.

But golly. Right Now!

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