Suddenly we’re moving again, back to Tucson, for whose heat and clarity and light my mother’s been longing these years. End of cool; it’s been something new, to know the same kids for two years, to form an identity and then actually begin to change it. I have never before been able to blossom, or at least reinvent myself in a social light. But my parents are energized, their anticipation contagious, since there’s more news than just my father’s transfer: his doctor declares there is nothing untoward in his lymph system, nothing at all, which a second opinion confirms. Miracle cure? Or evidence of a misdiagnosis in the first place? Was it ever there? The burden of the diagnosis, the bodily costs of his therapy have wearied and taxed them, leaving them shaken, but that’s behind them now, maybe forever, and we’re all going back to the place where my mother was happiest, and this promises that the sunlight of her good spirits will warm us all.

8

Valley of the Moon

Our new house in Tucson, on East Rosewood, is built of burnt adobe, the facade completely covered in a variegated ivy my mother loves. A deep-yellow wall in the living room brightens an interior weighted by the dark bricks of the fireplace wall. Brighten is also what my mother seems to do, as if her will were rallying after a series of dim years. She decorates the house with a new sort of nostalgia: up goes the old print of the hunting dogs in their sepia field, as always, but now they’re joined by plates of a weepy transfer design called Flow Blue, and an antique clock whose pendulum measures out the minutes, filling the house, regular pulse of our days.

On weekend mornings before it’s too hot she haunts the Swap Meet, a flea market held in the sun-dazzled parking lot of an old drive-in: acres of chipped china, colored glass, musty books, Life magazines: evidence of history, in Arizona, where there isn’t much. She buys turquoise bracelets, their blue a bright watery sea color, more saturated and vibrant than the cool blue of the china, and wears them against her darkening wrist. She plants a plum tree and a feathery jacaranda, and commissions a wrought-iron gate for the garden, curlicues framing an old central panel of iron artfully scalloped like fish scales, an architectural fragment from a Spanish monastery.