Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat

Taylor’s new friends in Tucson provide a safe house for political refugees from Central America, and this association opens her eyes to more of the suffering in the world: “I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God.” There were bushes and trees and weeds here, exactly the same as anywhere else, except that the colors were different, and everything alive had thorns.” She watches an approaching storm: “A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. Later, after living in Tucson for a while, Taylor says: “What still amazed me about the desert was all the life it had in it. “Arizona.”Įven the citizens of Tucson were different: “Standing in line at the lunch counters and coffeeshops would rub the backs of each other’s necks and say, ‘You’re holding a lot of tension here.'” Rocks stacked on top of one another like piles of copulating potato bugs.” It was a kind of forest, except that in place of trees there were all these puffy-looking rocks shaped like roundish animals and roundish people. The road took us through a place called Texas Canyon that looked nothing like Texas, heaven be praised for that, but looked like nothing else I had ever seen either.

The clouds were pink and fat and hilarious - looking like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie. “We crossed the Arizona state line at sunup. Here is a description of the Arizona landscape through Taylor’s eyes: Taylor names the girl, Turtle, and together they end up in Tucson. While passing through the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma, she is handed a baby girl for safekeeping, abandoned by a woman in obviously dire straits. In this novel, Taylor, a young woman from Kentucky, sets out west for a fresh start in life. Now let me take you on a whirlwind trip to Arizona through the books I actually read: Is it no wonder I can’t stay ahead of my reading? So I added those titles to my request list as well. So I searched the library’s online catalogue for “signs of the seasons.” I did find the book I was looking for, but some other intriguing titles, too - Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: from Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh Iambics of Newfoundland The Road is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire, and Soul and Nature-Speak. By the time I got home and went online to place the book on hold, I couldn’t remember the exact title. A couple of days ago, I shelved a book called The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs by Tristan Gooley. I can’t keep up with all the tantalizing titles that pass through my hands at work.

Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat