Last week I traveled the back roads of Western Arizona, through what remains of the town of Poston. It was named for “the Father of Arizona,” Charles Debrille Poston, whose efforts contributed to the creation of the Arizona Territory. Poston laid out the Colorado River Reservation and the irrigation system that distributed water from the […]
Memorial Day 2023
Like many Arizonans, I spent a few of the last days of spring last week in Southern California. As it happens, some of those days were spent in Oceanside, just south of USMC Base Camp Pendleton. Our lodging was adjacent to an old city cemetery, placarded as the “I.O.O.F. Cemetery.” I.O.O.F. is an abbreviation for […]
The Thorny Bougainvillea
The beautiful-but-thorny bougainvillea is ubiquitous throughout the Southwest, so much so that I almost never notice them. The bright “bracts” (specialized colored leaves) surround and visually overwhelm tiny flowers that are so small as to require magnification to fully appreciate. The always-hard-to-spell (at least for me) name derives from French Navy admiral Louis Antoine de […]