nature

Last week my Texas niece, her husband, and their children came to Phoenix for a whirlwind fifty-five hour visit. Since their kids had never been to Arizona, we crammed an Arizona experience into a very tight time frame, including a dip in my 68-degree swimming pool, a hike in the Mountain Preserve, dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and a trip to the zoo.

Now, the zoo trip did not focus on primarily on the lions, tigers, and monkeys, but on the fauna indigenous to the desert. My five-year-old great nephew, D-Dog, particularly enjoyed the creepy crawly exhibit of snakes, lizards, scorpions, and such, which he explained to me in great detail. (I wouldn’t have known, since I refuse to look at those creatures.) His sister liked the roadrunner who was munching on a white mouse and the Mexican wolves who were devouring rabbit entrails.

I was dawdling along attempting to avoid being caught in the midst of an elementary school trip when I saw it. At first, I thought it was a submerged black bear when it suddenly rose out of the man-made creek and took to the air, flapping its wings and dousing me with water. WTH is that? A freaking California Condor with an over eight-foot wing span. Now even though this massive bird was in a netted habitat I ducked. I flashed back to my terror of watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Admittedly, I was less worried about having my eyes pecked out than I was of it snatching me in his talons and carrying me off to Papago Buttes.

Of course, D-Dog was most amused by his great aunt’s fear, and he even had the audacity to label me a fraidy cat. I’m okay with that; I’m just happy to have survived and lived to write about my condor encounter. In fact, this old gal is happy to have survived their whirlwind visit.

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The news runs rampant with stories of building a wall between Mexico and the United States. While the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China ultimately did little to prevent infiltration by the “enemy,” the proposed Trump Wall seems to many to be the answer. I find it curious, though, that Canada is not being walled out also. Guess it’s long forgotten that some of the perpetrators of 911 entered that way.

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Yesterday, I was leafing through my ancient English 101 anthology and reread Robert Frost’s Mending Wall. It begins: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” In New England, the spring ritual for many landowners was to mend the wall that nature damaged throughout the winter. Though often a laborious task it was a necessary, annual tradition because “Good fences make good neighbors.” Hmm. I find it paradoxical. Nature battles against the wall. Tradition battles against nature to keep us and even countries apart.

When I moved to Phoenix, I was amazed that most houses had walled backyards. Unlike my Ohio upbringing, where I often roamed through three or four backyards to my friend’s house. We neighborhood kids sledded down our neighbors’ hill every winter; we weren’t walled out.

Unfortunately, I’ve met people with walls. Folk devoid of humor and zest. Folk who prefer to remain within their cramped life without friends and a sense of community spirit. Their self-imposed isolationism boggles me.

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True, I live in a walled community; it keeps my dogs off the street. Some of us with small children fence our pools to prevent child drowning. But my ‘hood has not walled out each other. We socialize, work collaboratively together, and even borrow a cup of sugar when the need arises.

Frost asks: “Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.”

Robert Frost penned this poem 103 years ago. Hmm. Our world is no longer a simple fence on a New England acre. What are we mending? Another paradox….

Dr. Suze Espouses

WTH Is That?

The Wall