Thanksgiving in the Desert

I don’t know whether you’d call what we are doing a commune. We are five people with a history, living in separate dwellings on a large piece of property in the desert. All of this is thanks to Pen who inherited a lot of money from her parents and had the will and perseverance to make this dream come true. The rest of us are like a lot of older gay people, especially lesbians. We lack resources and family. And to be honest, have very few regrets about that.

It has taken two years to build the 5 tiny-ish houses—one 900-square-foot home for each of us. There is a common space we call the bunk house that has a large kitchen/dining area and a family room that, through a bank of folding doors, opens onto a screen porch. (We were told that you don’t need a screen porch in the desert because there are no bugs. The fact that there are thousands of bats who roost in every corner and poop the millions of bugs they consume every single night doesn’t count.)

Anyway, this is the first Thanksgiving we spent in our new digs. Because we’re friends, we made no plans of how to spend the day or even if we would spend it together. Because we’re family, most of us assumed we would. And those of us who didn’t (meaning me) were chastized until we came round. So the day dawned with a few bruised feelings that vanished as we pulled together a communal picnic and headed to my favorite canyon.

The wonderful thing about southern Arizona is that it is surrounded by mountain ranges. It takes very little effort to drive up into a forested canyon, noisy with birds and javelina, wild turkeys and families of deer. And of course people. There were lots of human families being loud and joyful. 

But we managed to find a picnic table. Once we set everything out and sat down, we could hear a stream trickling along the canyon floor. Blue Jays gathered in the trees that flanked our spot, waiting for us to do what I guess all humans do—toss them a crust. Which Harriet did and we all quickly regretted it. 

Did you know Blue Jays are mean little buggers?