This morning my maroon-headed humming bird friend with the inch long beak was sitting on the oleander outside my window waiting for me to say hello. For a month before he was following me on morning walks in North Phoenix. I purchased two nectar feeders and I think that’s what he wanted from me? Now, it’s his turf and pesters me when the syrup gets too thick or runs out. In the same area, I have over thirty columnar cacti, mostly Trichocereus types; Bridgesii, Cuzcoensis, Peruvianus, Pachanoi; growing near the window. In my room I have three grow lights with 50-60 cactus plants and succulents from all over the Americas; Ariocarpus & Turbinicarpus plants to Saguaro seedlings growing at 2-3 inches in hight. The goal is to secure some land or find a way to get it and get my cactus friends a permanent home in the beautiful earth somewhere where I can look up at see the Milky Way at night. Obviously, that wouldn’t be the city, correct?
Times have been rough. I’m living in Phoenix Metropolitan Area right now and we are now four months into the Covid-19 Pandemic (Dystopia) which shelved my job as an Arizona based tour guide to the local parks and monuments and I’m currently rethinking that line of work. Coronavirus killed Tourism in Southern Arizona for the time being.
The weather has been paradise in what locals call The Valley. I’ve been in Arizona for about a year and acquired more plants than I ever intended to collect when I moved here. I mention metaphysical in the title of this post because intuition led me here. This is the next step after a period of healing in my former life in Utah. I’m supposed to be collecting cactus now and my ambitions have changed since moving deeper into the American Southwest leaving the Beehive State in the dust. If I move once again, it will be New Mexico; probably the Southern end because this collection of plant nation ‘friends’ have to go with me wherever I wind up because they count on me for their survival. I would not want to build a great big greenhouse at higher elevations, so the goal is land and finding the money to buy it.