Palo Verde Part 3, two left in my yard

the Palo Verde legacy goes on....I even wrote a poem about them awhile back. A man named Lucino Leon, who does landscaping, and was connected to me by my kind neighbor across the street, cut the tree down on Monday morning. I stepped out through the gate rather early, and was surprised by the open space, the grind of a chainsaw, the tree already mostly down, and high cumulus clouds with a dark, widespread underbelly....humidity and a rain possibility and filtering sun. He'd already consumed half a huge thermos of ice water. I was on coffee, barely, in the tall cat mug that's missing its handles. A bit hot. What....does it mean. About my formidable ability to love, and miss, my faux trees? About my capacity to handle an emergency? About the idea that it's time for me to clear my view and move move move? The trees are falling down and dying for me, except for one, front and center and damn strong. A trilogy, a triage nurse has come and gone, a sort of Father Son and Holy Ghost, a wholesome nature-kind of menage a trois, now down to menage a deux.


view looking northeast....new view...of the golf course and Little San Bernardino Mountains, which mark the transition zone-line of demarcation between the westernmost fringe of the Colorado-Sonoran desert where I live, and the start of the higher, northern reaching Mojave Desert

and there is actually a nuclear power plant called Palo Verde, west of Phoenix. Hmm. I used to get a shiver down my spine when I'd pass it, south of the I-10, Oz-Land apparition with domed....reactors? scaping out of the middle of nowhere. It's 2.5 hours of flat open brutal desert, that I-10 from the River to Phoenix. I used to do it without A/C in my Jeep, when I lived in Arizona, frozen bottles of water packed on my neck, melting at an unbelievably rapid pace. Now I can barely handle summer in the hottest desert where I live, even with high-cranked AC in home and car.


the stump....


view of the gated front yard - a dead palo verde - was healthy until this spring. I think some type of nasty winged termite got into it and it withered away. One down, maybe one more to go, and then maybe I'll get the ladder out and get Alex and Tarah back and trim the one in the frontyard so I can back out of the driveway without my car paint getting scraped. It's one thing to get scratched while doing tricky manuevers on desert dirt roads, a little closer, say, to some cool trailhead or a little farther from whatever is weighing me down, edging out and honing in on clarity and a view so quite you might, perhaps (is this cliche?) hear the sun coming up, or the moon talking to you--and another thing to get scratched by some dumb overwatered tree in your, sigh, boring old driveway. Going into the desert. All these years. Better than meds, and who's to know, or care? What of all those holy men, Jesus, having visions in the desert and sparking a new religion that's thrived and endured for 2k years? The best place in the world, to listen for God. In fact, I have a friend, R, who sold his house in El Cerrito hills with a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge and he went way out there, a few years ago, with his prayer beads and a small bedroll in a 1974 Toyota pickup with a shell that only goes 60 mph at best, and no one has heard from him since.


and a desert flower for you - in my very own yard. It loves water and leftover coffee grounds, and I think some of that broken ceramic cat mug handle, maybe some beads from a necklace that exploded in the front yard one night somehow, are in its nestly little watering trench, too. The tree comes down on me. It was.