Winter in the Desert
This picture fulfills two purposes 1 - to show winter in the desert in order to contrast with the winter image of Michigan earlier. The white patches on the mountains are snow. 2 - The Saguaro cactus have a great meaning for me in terms of history. The history we studied in Tucson was of Plymouth Rock and the thirteen colonies etc...Those places seemed like a different country to me. What I was surrounded with were these cactus and these people with dark skin and a different language. That was the history I wanted to know about. Learning about these cactus was one of the first things I discovered about the desert that made me realize how incredibly different this place was from the rest of the country the books talked about.
Saguaros are indigenous to the southwestern American desert. It takes 75 years for a Saguaro to grown one arm. They can reach up to 50 feet tall. An average size arm takes approximately 50 years to grow (depending on the length). I lived next to the Saguaro National Monument and felt these sentinels of the desert watching every move I made growing up....
To me they are a tangible representation of the respect that I learned to have for the desert after I grew up and left.