When You Need to Witness a Promise

When You Need To WitnessA Promise

Saguaro fruit

Saguaro

White winged dove on fruited saguaro

We had hit the trail early that June day on South Mountain, just minutes after the gate opened at 5 a.m. We wanted to finish our 6-mile hike before the temps hit the expected 112 degrees as Phoenix contended as a record-breaker for the most consecutive days over 110 degrees.

Some records should be left alone. Just saying.

As author Roger Naylor wrote, "The desert can unleash a withering, angry heat, a heat that blowtorches the rocks and sand. It is a heat that will make you weep just so it can harvest your tears."

From the bare landscape, I felt the first simmering burn issue a threat and a promise for things to come later in the day. As we jog-shuffled on the mile service road to the trailhead, I felt a continuous drip of sweat collect in the band of my shorts like a salty reservoir.

It was a day to get in, get out, and go home.

But the promise drew us. In the early summer the creamy-white blossoms of the saguaro give way to scarlet fruit, each the size of a child's fist and containing thousands of tiny black seeds. Ripening on the top of the saguaro's fluted columns and arms -- six to forty feet in the air -- the delicacies are only accessible to winged creatures -- mainly bees, curved-bill thatchers, and white-winged doves. The birds perform an important role in the life cycle of the saguaro as the future cacti are digested as seeds and deposited elsewhere in the desert surrounded by the birds' droppings.**

So important was this event, that the desert-dwelling Tohono O'odham's new year began with the ripening of the fruit. The fruit was knocked down with long poles, collected, and used to make sweet wine as part of the important Nawait I'i (Rain Ceremony).

We came to bear witness of the fruiting.

"I think we are too late," I said, as we passed saguaro after saguaro. The bases were surrounded by the empty husks of already digested fruit. The tops of the columns were bare, with the exception of thousands of pointed spines, like a giant child sporting a new summer buzz-cut. "We should have come last week."

I thought back to our over-crowded calendars. Church business. City business. Directing a children's music camp. I sighed. We had missed our opportunity.

I was disappointed. The month before -- May -- had surprised me with its difficulty.

Mother's Day. The 2-year anniversary of Dad's death. A trip to a nephew's graduation with two generations, but not three. 

Too many stirrings of the missing.

My nephew had sat at the table and opened the gift prepared by his grandmother before her death, more than a year before, while my sister and I had passed Kleenex all around at the difficult beauty of it all.

And now, the event I had anticipated on the desert trail. Missed. Lost. Gone.

Some losses blindside us.

My husband and I picked up the pace, no longer concerned with capturing on camera the hope of future life. We pushed on toward Fat Man's Pass, going around several other hikers, as the sun burned a hole in the steel-blue sky.

As we turned a corner of the trail, I stopped. Still.

"Look!" I pointed. "A white-winged dove."

The saguaro in front of us wore a full ring of ripened fruit, almost like a lady's hat -- the dove an added adornment.

We were not too late for the fruiting after all.

And after the fruiting comes the hope of the monsoons. The promise of rain.

"This desolation will continue until new life is poured out on us from heaven. Then the desert will become an orchard and the orchard will be considered a forest." Isaiah 32:15 (NET Bible)

Today

on your journey of faith,

I pray you will discover fruit in your desert places, so much that you consider it an orchard,

and you will collect each one as you prepare for the promise of rain.

And then. Oh then. We will dance. 

** from Seasons in the Desert: A Naturalist's Notebook by Susan J Tweit. Page 56.