Along the mountain's winding trail, Spring scatters blossoms on the breeze. Purple lupines sway and bow, While golden poppies light the leaves. The Santa Catalinas glow In shades of yellow, red, and blue. Each blossom is a mountain song, Brief, bright, and forever true.
A branch, a nest, a bird. Nothing more is needed. Spider silk binds the walls, lichen softens the edges. The Anna's hummingbird rests there, breathing with the rhythm of the desert morning.
A Desire to Hike In Sabino Canyon — Image by kenne
She was visiting from Eastern Europe and wanted to see the desert on foot. Sabino Canyon unfolded before her step by step— a landscape of stone, cactus, and sky— while friendship bridged the miles between our worlds.
A desert sentinel atop a desert giant— cactus wren and saguaro share the morning. The artistic background softens the edges of the world, leaving only the essentials: bird, cactus, sky, and wonder.
The mountains darken, but above them red, orange, and yellow gather like old spirits around a fire, warming the vast desert silence one final time before night.
Sabino Canyon at sunrise, stripped to monochrome— the saguaro becomes an old witness, arms raised through a hundred dawns, telling the mountains that silence is enough.
Broad-billed Hummingbird at Nector Feeder -- Image by kenne
The feeder swings lightly in morning air. A hummingbird hovers, tiny engine of wings and hunger, pausing just long enough to remind me that beauty rarely waits for permission to be noticed.
I’m eighty-five— though the number sits beside me more than inside me. Some mornings I rise feeling sixty, still curious, still willing to wander. At night I dream in the language of thirty, doors still opening, roads still unnamed. And sometimes—without apology— seventeen returns, grinning.
Saguaro Morning In Colored Pencil — Image by kenne
The mountains hold the background in cool blues and violets, while the sunrise burns softly at their edges. In the foreground, the saguaros stand rooted and calm, their forms rendered in layered greens and ochres. The whole image feels suspended between night and day— between observation and memory.
Along the trail, the desert wildflowers arrive quietly— yellow, violet, white— as if the desert, after months of restraint, has decided to speak in small bursts of color.
I can’t prove it— But these young Saguaro cactus stand there, steady in their twenties, as if the dead nurse tree still lingers in them— a memory of shade, a shelter that did its work and then let go.
Greater Earless Lizard in Sabino Canyon — Image by kenne
No ears to catch the wind, yet it listens— through heat, through shadow, through the tremble of ground beneath it. Balanced on rock, it belongs more completely than anything that passes.