Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | J | Journal of the Southwest

Senses of place--y de placer--in Baja Arizona.

Article Excerpt
I am out before dawn on a late August morn, chaotically wandering around like a senile naturalist lost in the midst of a city. But Tucson doesn't exactly seem like a metropolis to me; it feels more like a patchwork of neighborhoods, barrios and colonias packed tightly into the same desert valley like so many sardines jammed into a greasy tin.

The more I walk the summer streets of Armory Park Neighborhood, Barrio Viejo and Barrio Anita--their quelites and Bermuda grass and verdolagas growing out of every sidewalk crack and every pothole--the more I feel like I am crawling around the aging, disheveled body of a former lover, a woman I have not seen since her youth, but whose exaggerated curves, dimples, and curls I vaguely remember.

And yet it is not her shape so much as her fragrance that I remember more deeply than words can call forth. Even before I turn a corner onto a pathway I have not trod for decades, I inhale her aroma. There is a faint but lingering perfume emanating from a night-blooming cactus down the pathway, which I could smell even before I could see the thorny succulent itself, its limbs all akimbo from years of homeowners building fences of different heights to serve as its props. After spotting the source of the nearly spent fragrance, I stand on my tiptoes to take a good gaze at its still-withering blossom. It is luminously pale and at this hour, sort of ragged, like an old nightgown that has endured far too many midnight frolics. And yet it remains so sensuous--I dare say, erotic--that the whole lot of negligee designers working for Victoria's Secret could never surpass its skimpy elegance. The mere sight of a night-blooming cereus flower is enough to send me off into those pollination dreams that punctuated...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!