Summer stalk talk

And the cacti are parading their colors

I like the way the Ocotillo stalk offers it’s line of red orange blossoms up to the sky. And dances in the wind, singing come drink my nectar. I peel one off and suck on it: the base is sweet to the taste. A taste of sweetness in this desert. I need the distraction.

The saguaros have small black holes that make them look like upturned flutes, each an echo chamber for chicks, chip, chip, chipping before the season of drought and fire turns the desert silent.

I walk my familiar shaded path serenaded by a cacophony of cactus wrens, finches, sparrows and cooing doves. Squawks and hoos of owls and hawks remind all there are apex predators watching. The last of the cool breezes of spring gently nudge the creosote branches to bounce in the breeze, showing off their tiny fuzzy pearls of puffy white seed balls among thousands of waving daisy yellow blossoms.

Spring’s slide into summer dessicates the brittle bushes, air drying them into stems and sticks. My front porch is radiating heat and wafting the thick sweet fragrance of nearby Star Jasmine vines and Honeysuckle blossoms as bats swoop and the windblown dust of May paints another sunset red, peach and blue.

The dove over our doorway is on her third pair of hatchlings. There is always life at our hacienda. Javelina bandits ate one of my gorgeous timeless exquisite rainbow cactus blossoms to remind me everything is temporal in the desert.

It is time for the magenta and vermilion cacti flowers to wither and for the yellow cacti flowers to blossom. They offer themselves to traveling hummingbirds happy to hover and dab and chatter like rusty grocery cart wheels.

Summer is coming and I am reading Navalny’s autobiography on my porch my legs in the toasty sun, cats sleeping nearby.

On my porch today I am daydreaming of monsoon downpours. Soon I’ll be standing inside the back side of my private Niagara Falls watching it pour in cold sheets of slate grey off our flat roof in August.

And now I wonder what daydreams sustained Navalny in Siberia. Through it all. Are you a patriot? Willing to die alone to shame your nation’s descent into madness?

I had seen the documentary online about his anti-corruption campaign of Putin. I didn’t want to read the book. “Too sad”, I thought. I was wrong. I am a richer man having gotten to know you, Alexei Navalny. And a better patriot.

I read the first few chapters and met a worldly, funny, smart friend who likes Rick and Morty cartoons and making ballsy damning documentaries about Putin’s corruption. He is an army kid who is so good at organizing Putin had him poisoned with nerve gas.

His youth was affected by Gorbachev and the wall falling and Russia collapsing and the possibility of freedom, capitalism and liberty. Gorbachev was unpopular, with too few reforms too late. After Yeltsin it was Putin’s playground for the rich, famous and corrupt. And all the while Alexei Navalny, the patriot, dreams of transforming his Russia into a free, capitalist, democratic state.

In this grim moment in our occupied country, overtaken by oligarchs, and fascists out to destroy it, it is wise to learn from the front line patriots what tyrants fear.

The javelina will return. The rainbow cactus and the magenta hedgehog are replanted in my backyard, healing after being gnawed like corn on the cob by humgry peccaries. The cacti’s skin will dry and harden and they will look like they’ve survived tiny shark attacks. Tough cacti. And they’ll flower again because that is nature’s persistent way. Until the sun swallows our rock.

America will flower again. Study Navalny.