water bottles for good

Here's a disheartening example of rational pro-people, pro-earth arguments being co-opted by conservatives. An Arizona immigration activist with the group No More Deaths has been charged with littering and banned from a wildlife refuge for leaving water jugs for migrants in the desert. Read the whole story here.

love the one you're with

I'm from the southwest. I like road trips in the car with the windows down listening to conjunto music, bakingly hot weather, sandals, javelinas and jackrabbits and roadrunners, cacti, swamp coolers, big skies filled with insane lightening, and walking really slow. That said, I've lived away from "home" longer than I lived there, making it so that I can't use where I'm from as an excuse for everything anymore.

It's warm enough to be rainy here in the Hudson Valley, but not really warm at all, and me and my stack of seed catalogs can't stop fantasizing about planting season. I've been following chatter about growing various fruit in southern California, and it's driving me a little crazy. As if I don't miss fresh pomegranates, kumquats, tangelos, and prickly pear tunas enough. Should I really be listening to people talk about their avocado, jujube, and meyer lemon trees? It hurts.

I have to focus here, what grows here. Past years have seen the beginning of my perennial fruit excitement: I've planted raspberries, elderberries, cranberries, wolfberries, ligonberries, hawthorne berries, black turkey figs, cherries, apples, a plum. Some of them have done swimmingly, some didn't make it through a season. Some aren't really meant to be perennials in this climate, and are angry with me for dragging them indoors for the winter. (Hang in there little goji!) I think it's spectacular that wild fruits and nuts were here in the yard before I came. Woohoo for mulberries, black walnuts, wild strawberries, and quince! And there's that one fruiting tree that I still haven't been able to identify after five full years.
I can't help searching for additional food perennials for this climate. I've found siberian kiwis which I'd love to give a go, and pawpaws, which seemingly would require hand pollination (alternatively fascinating and frightening, since I'm not that skilled a gardener). Maybe seaberries and honeyberries, too. Or an asian pear for the mini orchard.

Many of these plants won't produce anytime soon, but it is amazing to be learning about them, and turning this yard into a truly edible landscape. When considering planting a fruit tree in her yard but knowing she wouldn't be there anymore when the fruit came, my friend realized someone would live there, somebody would benefit. If I do someday run back to Arizona and go to work for Iskash*taa, may this yard feed whoever lives here well.

*The berries pictured aren't edible. They are cotoneasters, and just look dramatic in the snow. Especially with a cardinal sitting on the branch. The other picture is of black walnuts from my yard. No longer green, but with the fruit still "on."

tradition

I like a little ritual in my life, so on christmas I want to listen to Elvis records and eat tamales and bourbon balls. I can't help it. A nip of brandy doesn't hurt either.

Though I've lived away from the southwest longer than I lived there, my lust for tamales (and other foods local to AZ) stays.


It's sometimes hard to find vegetarian tamales, and definitely harder still to find vegan ones, so it's a good excuse to make up one's own big batch. When I'm already making masa, it only makes sense to make pamonha too, a Brazilian version of the sweet tamale made with coconut. Enjoy your own holiday rituals, and happy solstice to you.

tumbling weeds

Always homesick for the Sonoran Desert, but far, far away in the northeast, I consider myself a bit of a tumbleweed, blown far from home. The tumbleweeds pictured are by Patrick Dougherty and can be found at the Desert Botanical Garden. They are actually made of willows, not salsola. I often think of "tumbling" back to my beloved desert home, but can't justify doing so: The population there grows in leaps in bounds, far more people than the land and its aquafers can support.

I was thrilled to learn about Desert Harvesters, a grassroots organization that teaches Tucsonans to harvest rainwater; plant local food trees; and harvest, process, and store that food. Pictures of happy people eating mesquite pancakes with prickly pear syrup abound. My favorite grocery ever, the Food Conspiracy Coop is participating in the eat local challenge with other respectable groups like the Community Food Security Center, who help people learn to identify existing wild foods and how to "glean" them. These efforts make me want to be home to learn more about thriving (lightly) in the desert.

I'll be good, and instead go looking for lamb's quarters and burdock growing around my current home. As the temperatures drop, tonic teas have an allure of their very own. A good Leslie Marmon Silko or Barbara Kingsolver book can give me a taste of the Sonoran Desert, while I tune my senses to the specific smells and flavors of the Hudson Valley.

connected

Sunny Taylor was born in Tucson, Arizona, my hometown. She lived near Davis Monthan Air Force Base, which was the reason my military family was in Tucson. She was born with a muscle development condition that has her in an electric wheelchair. Many children in the neighborhood are born with disabilities, and people suffer from an increased rate of cancers.

The mostly Latino and Chicana neighborhood's drinking water is toxic because of military waste.

Sunny Taylor is a painter and writer. Her subject matter includes disability, environmental racism, the military's free pass to pollute, and factory farms. She is a disability rights activist, a vegan animal rights activist, an anti-military activist, an environmental and anti-racist activist. Though the media likes to focus on her painting with her mouth and toes, what is much more interesting is how she so easily connects the impacts of war and industry on human and other animal bodies.

I've never been much of a fan of classical oil painting, but Sunaura Taylor has proven that it can still be radical, and very moving. The painting pictured here is "Chicken Truck", from this year, and is a ten and a half foot wide glimpse of hundreds of broken bodies.

cooking without oil

Reading an article about solar cookers, recently, I caught myself being skeptical. Waiting 3 hours for food to cook? Would a well-angled box covered in tinfoil really get hot enough? I was sipping my tea and thinking "no way." My sun tea. Newsflash, self! Tea brewed in a jar in the sun is solar cooking.

Pause, challenge own assumptions, consider giving it a try.

If sunshine is strong enough to bring health, burn your skin, power your home, turn whole fields of sunflower faces toward itself, of course it can cook food. Forget police barriers, sometimes I have to get over my own.

*Picture courtesy of the fabulous You Grow Girl.

**Hearsay Warning: I grew up in the desert and always heard a story about a woman who was drunk from an all-nighter, and passed out by her pool. She was so dehydrated and her alcohol level so high that she essentially boiled, and died. Now, it may be a dusty urban myth, but you have to admit it's an awesome story, and a fine example of the power of the sun.

peckers

Nearly 20 years ago, when Hooters restaurant was causing a stir in Tucson, AZ, our little branch of Queer Nation produced these billboard-sized posters, and wallpapered the town with them.

I'm a little embarrassed by them, and a little proud of them. Our efforts did make the papers, though the bulk of the wheatpasted billboards disappeared quickly.

Note the *tofu* weenies!