A Garden in the Desert

The summer desert prickled with the anticipation of rain. Inside the living room, the dog slept like a comma on the rug. Afternoon sun forced its way through the blinds, casting the dog in ribbons of hot white and shadows. She resembled a fox, feathered tail and paws twitching.

Occasionally she threw a high-pitched dream-bark with the skill of a ventriloquist, the sound oddly distant, though it came from her throat. Perhaps she sensed wild — smelled the creosote resin, felt heat rising, accessed a memory of rabbit or quail. Meanwhile, my children left their balled-up socks in a halo around her head and made a constellation of Legos across the floor.

This was months before we knew anything about the virus, and yet everyone around me seemed underemployed, and broke, sick, exhausted by relentless bad news. The coasts were being ravaged — entire neighborhoods gobbled up by wildfire or flood — and, in between, walls of dust swept across the highways. Here in Arizona, steel slats were trucked in from some far-off place and arranged in a crude wall along the border, cutting through wildlife migratory corridors and bulldozing every sacred saguaro in its path.

Summer in the desert feels like sticking your face in an oven. Waiting for rain makes the world feel like a balloon about to burst. It is an untenable state. Emotions flare. There is definitely crying. The most normal of people will end up lying on a cool tile floor in their underwear and arguing with the sky. The heat brings a certain kind of come-to-Jesus clarity, demands that energy not be wasted on something with improbable odds.

I began digging the garden beds soon after we moved into