Appearing and receding like a visual Doppler effect. They began dotting the rocky hills beyond my car’s windshield. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a saguaro. When your web of roots no longer provides nourishment and the heat and wind peel away your skin, exposing woody ribs, a quiet changing of the guard takes place-you fall out of ranks, back to the earth, and the next sentinel breaches through. In spring lily-white morning blossoms soften your crown of thorns, in summer sweet fruits feed those winged tenants of your towering temple-the wren, woodpecker and owl. Proudly like great sculpted arms of a sleeping giant you burst through from the grave, fingers spreading on hands clawing for the sun’s warmth and grasping for the monsoon’s thirst quenching rain. Two hundred years or more your thorny head crowned through a gravelly birth in the protective shadow of a wetnurse mesquite. So many are elders, born after Kino and de Anza and before Geronimo and Cochise. Like ancient columns of Athens, a wisdom weathered and solid. The Saguaro They call you the people, spirits of ancestors standing as sentinels over this parched kingdom of sand and stone. Maybe people still see it and exclaim: “look-a perfect saguaro!” I still remember it, standing tall over an urban Phoenix intersection. When we found the perfect saguaro, it was indeed a cause for celebration. That perfect saguaro with precisely two arms, one perhaps a little higher than the other, or a bit longer. When I moved to Arizona as a child, my siblings and I would play a game: find the perfect saguaro. If they’re lucky, they might have a crown of flowers. Maybe they have no arms, or maybe they have twenty. Their arms aren’t always raised to the sky, aren’t always long and graceful. One thing you realize when you move to the Sonoran Desert, though, is that most saguaros don’t look quite like that. You’ve seen it drawn up as a cartoon, molded into a figurine, painted on postcards and pottery. One perhaps a little higher than the other, perhaps a little longer. Green, tall, and with precisely two arms. It’s what people around the world think of when they hear the word cactus.
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