Poppies Everywhere

Yesterday morning we drove a short distance to Catalina State Park.  This is a beautiful place with many hiking trails, mountains quite close, up and down terrain, and a stream at the bottom running fast with snowmelt.  We walked about a mile and a half with the midpoint being fields of yellow poppies with orange centers, all waving on their thin stalks  on a windy day.  This area has had an unusually wet winter so the green leaves and groundcover and the number of wildflowers are all unusual.  There were a lot of people out on this Saturday.  Many had brought their dogs.  The sky was a brilliant blue.  You couldn't ask for a better day.  We forded the stream three times and the cold water felt good - about ankle high - on a day that was getting pretty warm.  When we got back to the parking lot, volunteer naturalists had set up displays of snakes, gila monsters, and a coatlmundi (have to check this spelling) who looked like a small fox.  We could pet the snakes - a nice variety of cool and warm, different size scales, one felt extremely soft like a baby's skin.

In the afternoon, we were on the University of Arizona campus which is beautiful and very different from other schools I have seen.  It is a mixture of original buildings in a soft gray-rose brick with new, futuristic buildings for optic science and other fields often connected with astronomy or space.  We visited the archeology and anthropology museum where Sally is a volunteer in the gift shop.  There were two special exhibits.  The first was works by Corona, a Mexican artist in the '30s and '40s who painted the Tucson area but preferred the dress of the previous century. All his subjects wore what looked like 18th century dress. He worked in oils, decorating trays and furniture as well as painting daily life on canvas.  Naive and charming, his pictures of animals were wonderful.  All the horses pranced with curving proud necks.  His flowers were especially fine and reminded me of those I had seen at Catalina that morning.  We also saw a showcasing of eleven of the local Indian tribes.  Their creation stories were varied and interesting but all were firmly based in the visible world they knew just as their tools, pottery, and baskets made brilliant use of the scant materials in their world.

Such an interesting day.