My mother goes to painting class—in groups sometimes, occasionally for a private lesson—several times a week. I’ve never before known her to pick up a pencil to sketch, never seen her with a box of paints, and suddenly we have irresistible boxes of opaque watercolors in tubes, blocks of textured paper, luscious-smelling linseed oil and turpentine, and more and more oils added to her wooden box: fat tubes of Titanium White, slender ones of Burnt Sienna, Cobalt, and my favorite name: Fugitive Lake.

In my mind, at least, there is some link between this sudden flowering of desire to fill page and canvas with form and color, and my mother’s new love, which is the desert itself: shift of light and shadow, blue and gold, the soft austerity of arroyo and foothill and mountain. The desert is sparse and intensely alive at once. Suddenly this vivid place, for which she has no precedent, has won her allegiance; for the first time she seems to have found a landscape that speaks to her deeply, that is in some inexplicable way hers. When you love a place enough, it seems almost to be inside you, as if it were the physical equivalent of an inner life.

And we’ve moved to a new house, on Priscilla Avenue, in a new development on the edge of town. It’s another world from the cinder-block and sandstorm grit of East Twenty-second Street, those squat houses painted yellow and pale green, tricycles and bikes tangled in the front yards, tumbleweeds and trash caught in chain-link fences. These houses have floor-to-ceiling strips of window that face the street, and the living rooms sport “cathedral ceilings,” a rather grand term for a space that does in fact feel lofty to us, a peaked room banded on the southern side with clerestory windows we fill with pieces of colored glass. “Cathedral” suits the house, for me, because from the back yard, where our plot of dry land surrounded by a fence of woven metal slats faces endless acres of desert, you can look right up into the smoke-blue heaven of the Santa Catalina mountains, where one notched peak looms, twin spires of rock in its cleft forming a cathedral infinitely more grand than our ceiling. I study it through my father’s binoculars.