I went hiking in the desert today for the first time in almost three months, and I finally feel like I made it back home.

The desert is as green as I’ve ever seen it, deeply so. The prickly pear are ripe. Fishhook barrel cactus are blooming. Creosote blossoms are turning to their woolly fruit. The whiptail lizards, even the spotted whiptails, are huge—12 inches and longer—and more numerous than I’ve ever seen. No bobcat or deer or javelina tracks along the trail, but in the underbrush, cottontails and chipmunks and round-tail ground squirrels and white-wing doves.

The summer monsoons must have been heavy. Not only is everything deeply green and lush, but half of one of our usual trails has been erased by a new flood, and other trails are overgrown. Sabino Canyon Creek is running strong. A fecund season. So much life to come home to.

A poem from before I left:

Ocotillo aflame

Blooms lick the sky.
Limbs stretch and sway,
lit,
longing.