Weather Man

The weather man was on this morning talking about warm, dry heat coming up from the southwest. Those desert winds coming up to whisper in my ear and smile at me. She says she remembers me, that desert. I remember her, too. So well,  like it was yesterday. Sharp plants embedded in all my clothes, great pink mountains to the North, the tall wise Saguaros all around us consulting about old Indian magic, consulting about the white man slowly but surely bringing about their doom. 

I was pregnant in Tuscon, riding five miles each way on a glassblower's bike to go downtown, carrying sweet injured dogs through unforgiving terrain sometime around the new year. I saw my daughter for the first time, there in Tuscon. Her sweet, barely human figure, ankles crossed, waving her one arm as if to say "Hey, HEY, hey MOM, here I am, hey, look at me in here!" Already so glad to be here, so happy to be alive and becoming. She is the same now,  nearly three months old and utterly joyful. 

The day she was born, after we met and she got all cleaned up the nurses brought her into that room, the room with the windows that  all the visitors look into to ooh and ah at all the new humans. I was rolled passed in a wheelchair to go to another room where I would spend the next few days meeting my daughter, becoming a mother. They stopped the wheelchair outside that room, next to the window where some of my family was admiring her. There she was, laying under a lamp, most content, waving the one arm again. "Hi MOM, here I am! I'm here! I finally made it. Nice to meet you!". I am astounded, still. I am astounded all the time by her, by all of it, by how it all came to be.