The Furious Spinner

Scottsdale, Arizona

On Sunday, we had dinner again with my sister, Michelle; her sweetie, Guy; and his mother, Hazel. We made quinoa, peas, veggies (yes, just like at home). As Mario and I cooked in my parents’ tiny kitchen, Mario remarked (with good humor) on how small everything is. Everyone in my family is small, so my parents home is filled, quite naturally, with things comfortable for small people. Mario has already had the misfortune of sitting on a chair and falling through. When he got into my parents’ bed, he said he felt a bit like Gulliver in Lilliput.

I like being in my parents’ home. (They have stayed in Michigan this year because of my mother’s illness.) I feel quite tender about them as I move amongst the things they live with. My father has made most of the furniture. He built the wooden night stands, then painted them with bright colors, adding zig-zag lines with an artistic flourish.

I think of the wooden box he made me some years ago to house my collection of tarot cards. He went to the Scottsdale library and asked the librarian for books on the tarot and the goddess. Then he painted a goddess on the front of the box and put symbols from various tarot decks all around the beautiful box. He told me later, “I didn’t know if I was concocting something good or bad with those symbols.” And I laughed, because of course he knew. In this case, it was all good.

Hanging on the walls in the living room are reproductions of a Renoir (I think), and a painting of a woman with her children. I wonder if my mother picked them out or if my father did, hoping to please her and lift her spirits. Over the light switch to the kitchen my father has put a colorful cover that depicts an outdoor scene of two pots of flowers on a bench outside a window with a branch from an unseen tree leaning toward it all. I gaze at this for a long while. In Michigan, my father has flower gardens he dedicatedly tends to when there. I think sometimes he misses his gardens when he is in Arizona. I wonder if he got this cover to remind him of home.

Quilts are all over the townhouse. My mother taught my father to quilt some time ago, and he took to it. I now own four quilts my father made, and I am always jealous for more. In Washington, I sleep under a quilt he made and here, too—although when I see one of the quilts, I don’t think only of my father. I think of them as creative gifts from both my parents, only my father has been gifted with more energy than my mother, so he does the actual physical work on the quilts.

In every room of the townhouse, including the hallways, are small clocks. They’re all alike, except for the colors. I’m sure my father must have bought them at the same time, for a bargain. On a shelf in the living room are three clocks in a row, each set to different time zones. My dad has them set at Michigan time, Arizona time, and Washington time. Yet whenever he phones, he wants to know what time it is where I am. (I get confused, too, actually, because Arizona doesn’t go on daylight savings time, so sometimes they are at the same time we are and sometimes they’re not.)

But, quilts aside, the five of us sat at the tiny table for dinner Sunday. My sister and Guy brought pork chops, tortelinis, salad, stewed tomatoes, and pumpkin pie. It all looked delicious, but I stuck to my quinoa and veggies since I was still wobbly from the vertigo.

We talked a long time, as we had the night before. I especially enjoyed Hazel’s stories. She’s in her eighties and sharp as a tack, as they say. We were asking her about the depression, and she told us they lived out in the country and had a garden, so they didn’t suffer too much. “And my mother canned everything,” she said. “Some people claimed my mother even canned the pig’s squeal.” Or later she was remarking on someone being annoyed about her spending money, and she said, “But it doesn’t matter. She’ll get over it in the same shoes she’s wearing.”

Mario and I took a walk after everyone left. It is remarkably quiet here, even though it’s a busy city. The streets are wide and the blocks are spread out. Most buildings are one story high. The street lights are low to the ground, too, so the night light isn’t harsh. We walked in shadows more than we walked in the subdued light. Hardly anyone else was out walking—probably branded us as touristas. Ah well.

I had vertigo all night, but I was still able to sleep.

We talked away half the morning with Hazel, which was nice. Then we drove out east of town to the Tonto National Forest. The city disappeared quickly as we followed the road out. We drove under several partially finished expressway overpasses—it was rather surreal, like some kind of art piece entitled: Going Nowhere.

Something about the desert is very compelling and repellent at the same time. You can’t hide much in the desert. If someone throws out their garbage, it’s there for all to see. Plastic bags get caught in the scrub, cans and cups roll around in the dirt. Yet if you can get away from that, the desert has a pristine, primordial feel like no other place.

Mario and I stopped at a trailhead near the Superstition Mountains and began to walk. I breathed deeply for the first time in days and felt my body quiver with anticipation of relaxation, bird exhales, and coyote tales (tails?). Later, when Mario and I sat in an Indian restaurant eating abu gobi and lentil soup, I wrote this about our walk:

Ahhhh

Took a deep breath
Finally, gazing out at the Superstitions
Tall redrock, snake curves created by age.
Kundalini expressed in rock?
A mother sits on the kitty litter dirt,
Pale pink, the earth; brown, the mother.
One of the children asks, “What’s the trail?”
“It’s where people walk,” the father says.
Buried treasure somewhere in this serpent
Mound. Of course, of course. Treasure
Everywhere, right beneath your feet.

Cholla, prickly pear, saguaro:
Not huggers, even the ones with arms.
A jumping cholla imitates a Kachina,
Covered in pale yellow burrs, frozen
In dance position. The trail tips,
Turns. Horse, coyote, and dog prints are
Cemented into the Earth, temporary
Petroglyphs. The hooves tell of metal.
Will that frighten away the desert
Fairies? Or just piss them off?
Swallows skim the air for food.
A Gila woodpecker walks along the ground,
Waddling as she searches for her own treasure.
Dead cactus bones are poised on the
Desert floor, like singed pieces of
Art work, or shed snake skins, only
More substantial: shed snake bones.
Ah wilderness, is all I can say.
Until a hawk—creamy with feathers
And flight—flies over us, becoming the
End of the exclamation.


After dark, we walked around the Scottsdale Mall, which is similar to the plazas in New Mexican towns. It was dark and cool. Tiny white lights hung in clumps on most of the trees so that they looked like fruits made of light. And more white lights were strung from one side of the street to the other. Everywhere we walked, it seemed, we encountered some kind of artwork: horses made from strips of metal, steel Kachinas, tin cactuses. On the way home again, the moon lit the clouds from behind, reminding me of someone trying not to laugh by putting her hand over her mouth, only the laugh spills out anyway, just as the moonlight did.

Ahhhh beauty!

May You Giggle in Beauty!

Labels: Arizona, travel

0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.