Desert Magic
Originally published by Distinct Magazine, October 2019
I can still see her standing there. Right in the middle of the world. Nothing surrounding her but her beloved red-brown dirt, graced with thousands of the tiniest rocks worn smooth by weather and time.
Arizona isn’t known for trees, but the junipers are there. They sway in the cool breeze as the sky fills with darkened blue clouds. Her multicolored patchwork skirt twirls and dances around her thin ankles, her turquoise bracelet a stark contrast to the warm desert palette. Her small piercing blue eyes take in the dirt, trees, and she deeply inhales the wet smell of the wind, cool and clear. I was thirteen when I just saw her standing there. I’d been visiting her and her land every summer since I can remember, but it was that moment, that particular moment, I realized she was a spirit. I’d always suspected, but now I finally knew.
Forty acres. Twenty minutes to the nearest town, Snowflake, AZ. Thirty years. Grandma knows it all like the back of her hand. And the land knows her. There’s a mutual love and respect between the two of them. Her face is a well written page, tanned and lined, the harshness of weather and time holding the pen. “Let go and let God,” she’s always saying to me, “let go and let God.”
When I was younger, she’d walk me through her acres. She wanted me to know them like she did. To let the land know me. Taking my hand, we’d pass the scraps of food she’d leave every morning for the jack rabbits and squirrels, the snake made out of rocks to protect her home, to the Magic Tree. It leans to one side, three fourths of its roots uprooted. It’s stayed almost completely horizontal for as long as I can remember. For as long as my grandma remembers. Some of my grandpa’s ashes are beneath that Magic Tree. Sometimes I could hear him strumming his old guitar, the first few chords of Willie Nelson. There’s the once-overflowing dried out riverbed, home to many pieces of petrified wood. Grandma could sell them if she wanted - petrified wood can go for hundreds of dollars outside of Arizona - but she knows when to let things be. “This is where we choose to be,” she’d say to me, “it’s one thing to keep something for love and remembrance, it’s another to disrupt the land for monetary gain.” To this day, when I see the remnants of chopped forests or petrified wood polished in shops, tears sting my eyes. Something feels ripped out of me.
She has not had an easy life. A divorce. An early, unmarried pregnancy that resulted in having to give up the baby. Abuse. Assault. A horrid rattlesnake bite. Still she sings. She dances as she cooks. She’s the happiest and most physically fit 83-year-old I’ve ever seen. The land has taken care of her. Sure, it’s thrown shit her way, frozen pipes, leaking generators ... but it also gave her what she needed. We’d reach the top of the hill, the one hill within her acres, where you could see just miles and miles of untouched land and double rainbows when the conditions were just right, and she’d say: “Oh sweetheart, isn’t this magic?”
To anyone else, it’s just desert. But when you know the land you walk on, when you take the time to learn its behaviors, its rhythms, you know spirit. You know magic. Some people call it God, this energy of love and belonging. Comfort and warmth. But they see Him as well, a ‘him’, a separate entity. Her God is the energy itself. Something beyond the physical realm.
Two years ago, my dad and I helped her move to California so she could be closer. Her short-term memory is going, and she could no longer sustain herself out there alone. It was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life to see her removed from her land. It had become a part of me too. I thought I was losing it, I thought without my grandma, we had lost our claim to what had been so sacred to us for so long. On the final day of the move, I decided to take one final walk. I’d walked with my grandma thorough the acres the day before, but something told me this time I needed to be on my own. Just me and the land. I followed the scraps of food, the stone snake, the Magic Tree, and the river bed, to the top of the hill. I closed my eyes and started to take a deep, deep breath when it suddenly caught in my throat. I heard Grandma sing. She was no one near, she was back at the house packing. But I heard her voice. It was in the air, lifted by the wind. I felt her spirit in the dirt and the junipers, in the rocks and the darkened blue clouds that petaled the sky. As it resonated within me, the wind swept up in a sudden burst. Joyful. Alive. I knew the land would remember. I knew she would always be there. I knew I would always be there.
To this day, whenever I feel my spirit start to ebb, when my mind starts down the staircase of darkness, denying this energy field exists and that there’s nothing bigger out there, I close my eyes and remember. I’m on the hill, feeling the gust of wind dance around me, carrying her song. I’ve since deepened my spiritual path, studying the stars and meditating when I can to connect with myself, with the energy. But that land was my foundation. Where it all began. When I first believed. My grandma and her land.