![]() 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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