Before we crossed a few state lines we'd need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch. But we had more than two thousand miles to go. We did have a cooler in the back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and buy snacks for the road. We felt giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go market on the outside edge of Tucson. It hurt to think about everything at once: our friends, our desert, old home, new home. We were staring it in the face.Īway went our little family, like rats leaping off the burning ship. states came into a third consecutive year of drought, people elsewhere debated how seriously they should take global warming. Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings.

The tall, dehydrated saguaros stood around all teetery and sucked-in like very prickly supermodels. The prickly pears waved good-bye with puckered, grayish pads. The cacti, denizens of deprivation, looked ready to pull up roots and hitch a ride out if they could. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving had measured less than one inch. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat caught in a long, naked wince. We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot-like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair. This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal. Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking babies the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. It was our family's last day in Arizona, where I'd lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. By Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L.

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