ALL WHO WANDER

Why Do I Dream of Purple Hillsides and Last Year's Poppies?

SET OFF FOR THE SUPERSTITION MOUNTAINS in the flush of a Sonoran Desert spring, impelled by a familiar seasonal urge of still mysterious portent. I do not know why the uncertain promise of desert wildflowers every spring draws me as helplessly as a hummingbird mainlining nectar. Why do I scan the November skies for rain, thinking always of the blooms of March? Why do I dream of purple hillsides? Why do thousands of people troop through Picacho Peak State Park in a good flower year? Why can I still recall every good patch of flowers 10 years later? Why does the mere thought of seeds waiting in the stony soil excite me? I can't tell you. I only know that every March I must seek out the capricious gifts of spring. So I call in sick and head for the front slopes of the Superstitions as soon as the Desert Botanical Garden's wildflower hotline puts out a poppy alert. I park at the Lost Dutchman State Park and hurry up the trail, festooned with camera gear, driven by some frivolous version of the gold fever optimism that has long drawn prospectors to these contorted slopes. It's an apt metaphor-since these volcanic formations have no more business harboring gold than they have hiding tiny poppy seeds. I hike on up the slope, drawn by a hallucinatory shimmer of color ahead of me. Rounding a boulder with my eyes fixed on the slope ahead, I nearly trip over the old woman sitting on an igneous stool jutting into the trail. I stumble; she stands, steps back and reaches out for my elbow. She starts the gesture to steady me, but then sways forward off balance so we prop up one another. We sway awkwardly together, then right ourselves. "Sorry," I blurt, "I wasn't watching where I was going. It's the flowers." "Darn flowers," she says. "They're very distracting," I say. "They do take your mind away," she agrees, wistfully. We fall easily into conversation, for we sense our common purpose. Besides, she reminds me of my mother. She looks to be in her early 70s, neatly dressed with shoes too nice for the trail and her silver-white hair sprayed into respectful decorum. She has mild, kind, deep-brown eyes, the patient eyes of a woman who has kept everyone tucked in and pulled together without taking more than a crust of credit. She had lived a loving and ordinary life. She was raised in a little Ohio town and met the love of her life during World War II just before he was shipped off to the Pacific. He managed to return safely to her, so they married, bought a little house and started having kids. He used to have bad dreams about those Pacific islands, but she would sit and soothe him back to sleep. They grew together like cottonwood roots. He liked action movies, she liked romances so they traded off choosing the movie. He liked hunting and she let him go off and do it because men are odd and you have to let them be sometimes. She was baffled by his desire to shoot deer until she realized it was just his excuse for going out into the woods. She came to understand that their differences linked them as surely as their similarities and perhaps explained why they never got bored with one another. They stayed married for 51 years and raised four children before the cancer took him. Now she has come out to visit her boy, who lives in Phoenix. Her son, a computer engineer, went off to work and she read in the newspaper that the wildflowers were blooming in the Superstitions, so she had set out to have a look. Ever since her husband died, she's been doing little things like this, seeking out some scratchy, bouldery, wild place. She feels close to him in such places, although sometimes it gives her a sharp pang of regret that she didn't go with him on his hunting tripseven if it was just to sit in camp and wait for him. Of course, there's nothing more useless than regret, she says. At length, I leave her to her memories and the flowers, and head on up the slope, thinking about my mother and how much she would have liked the woman and the cockeyed optimism of the wildflowers now waving in the warm breeze on every hand. I turn off the trail in a Wizard of Oz patch, hopping from boulder to boulder across the pond of poppies. I come to rest finally on a twist of lava in an orange inflorescence. I understand now. I seek out the flowers because they die, but return. I seek out the flowers because they persist, despite the harvester ants and the terrible droughts. I seek out the flowers because they glory in the light for their translucent moment, then set seed as an act of faith. I seek out the flowers because my mother loved them, as I love them, as my children love them. And I laid flowers on my mother's grave not in mourning but in hope of spring. As the light fades, I go back down the trail to thank the old woman. But she is gone. I hope she reads this.