Ploughs in Tucson

The corn shucker. If you look inside, there are some really nasty
metal teeth. Maybe it makes corn flakes or corn meal.

The Binghamton area, by the Rillito River just below where we live, used to be farmed by Mormon settlers until the 1930's when the water table had dropped and Tucson was growing. The area where we live, on San Simeon Drive, used to be a cattle ranch named, oddly enough, San Simeon.

So it is apropos to have some reminders of those earlier, pioneer days. At least something more attractive than the ubiquitous broken bottles and other trash -- some of it possibly quite historic -- that one can find lying around.

That's also a part of Arizona tradition: chucking empty whiskey bottles from stage coaches. The local cowboys weren't very ecologically minded either. Their genes live on in the people who chuck trash by the side of the road. But I digress.

We lucked out. Our neighbors decided to move to Scottsdale and were willing to let go of some of the old, rusty, and really keen farm implements they had on display by their driveway.

Some sort of cultivator.

Shari thought we'd buy one and display it in the otherwise somewhat barren center of the roundabout at the dead-end of San Simeon Drive. I shouldn't describe it as barren. The ocotillo there is stunning. But since we neighbors got together and cleared it of chollas and trimmed the blue agave leaves, there's not much to catch the eye.

We got eight old relics: one corn shucker, three wheels, and three ploughs/cultivators and a potato harvester.

One of the big wheels is earmarked for the dead-end circle. The other seven are way too cute for me to leave them out-of-sight from the front door.

I started putting them by the driveway away from the house. But I liked them too much. I wanted to be able to see them sitting in front of the house. I moved them way closer.

Somehow, simply seeing some old farm implements on the property brings back a bit of the old settler culture. Or so I'd like to flatter myself. At minimum, they remind me of outside work, so they invite me to step outside and do some gardening.

I wonder where we can find more of these rusty rural relics.

Say, are we going native? Not if I have to keep a horse or a donkey to pull these things. Guns and horses are big in Arizona, but I'm not going there.

Winter

Well, I suppose it is a desert. It's not only hot, it's also cold. Come the cold of winter and we forget the heat of summer. Plus we get thirty or more degrees difference between daily highs and lows. By comparison, Seattle can be as low as eight.

We just got through some five nights of freezing weather. When it's thirty or twenty-eight degrees in "Tucson" (that mythical place designated by weather bureaus, usually near airports), it's several degrees colder a few hundred feet higher in elevation here in the Foothills. Plus, if you are near a wash, the temperatures drop even more from the cold air pushed down from the Catalina Mountains. So we've had a series of early mornings in the very low twenties.

Last year, 2012, overall was the warmest year on record in Tucson. We had forgotten about warm socks, thick pants, polypropylene sweaters, coats, and wool clothing. Come winter, we remember why we have such things. It's the swimming pool that seems out of place. It's down to 46 degrees. I have to do a polar bear dip -- just to say I did it.

The goldfish pond was covered with ice. Fish are fine.

We are more prepared than a couple of winters ago when it got down to seventeen and our palm trees lost their leaves. That winter, irrigation water lines burst around three faucets. This winter, I used a trick suggested by our good neighbor Denard -- put a trouble-light with an incandescent, soon-to-be-outlawed, heat-generating light bulb near the exposed water pipes, cover it with cloth, and leave the light on overnight. Plus we covered the plants that are more susceptible to frost. The one citrus tree we have is still small enough to cover, as is the Mexican salvia and our potted geranium and petunia collection.

Wednesday morning was the last of this stretch of freezing. The ten-day forecast has no freezing, and highs will be in the seventies. I took off the sheets yesterday afternoon. My god that was exhilarating to be outside in warmth. After highs reaching only the mid-forties, it got up to sixty. It was still a bright blue sky, but the iced chill was gone.

Citrus leaves are curled, plumeria doesn't like frost even if covered, and the Moses-in-the-cradle is almost as frost-intolerant, but the other covered plants did okay. Some we should have covered -- jade plant (duh) and a South African succulent should have been covered. They look wilted, but I'm hopeful.

The leaves on the two queen palm trees, way too high up to attempt a cover, are also shriveled, but I think they will survive. Queen palms are readily available at local nurseries, often on sale, but they don't tolerate the freezing we get in the Sonoran desert -- better to chose the California palm. Our two queens were planted a long time ago, and we almost lost them a couple of winters ago. They still haven't grown the lush foliage that they have in photos from before the Great Freeze. Smaller queens in the neighborhood didn't do so well.

We're still wearing mukluk boots and wool throws in the morning, and the air-conditioning system is still working in the "heat" direction, but layers get shed as the sun ascends. Snowbirds will be seen wearings shorts and T-shirts in the Safeway parking lot, but year-around locals like us have developed thinner blood. We'll still wear long sleeves.

I should take my polar bear dip before the swimming pool warms up.