A shadow sweeps over the ground in your peripheral vision, over dry earth and asphalt. Too fast to discern the outline of wings, but you know it’s Raven because of the speed and the silence. As a child you might have looked up, searching, but by midlife you know too well the searing brightness of the Arizona sky, the ache in the knees.

Spring is happening slowly this time. Sticky bud scales loosen carefully, lobbied by opposing voices: the lengthening hours of sunlight, the cold night air. Reluctantly, they reveal embryonic leaves that have lain dormant for seven frozen months: implausible, exposed primordia. You can never feel certain, never fully commit. And then they survive.

Sitting in a sunny, sheltered place next to a dog who doesn’t ask anything more than proximity, you will not break the silence, will not interrupt the susurrus of wind in the tall pines, will keep your hand perfectly still on her flank, a pocket of warmth between palm and fur. She lifts her head to sample the information in the air: jet fuel, pine sap, cooking smells, the char of a distant wildfire. Ground squirrel, exhaust fumes, a pair of sparrows, the exhale of softening earth.

These are Pinus ponderosa, giant yellow-bellies. July monsoons will draw the syrup smell out through their fissured bark, but one must wait for a dark, humid summer night and then stand perfectly still and breathe and think of nothing else. Until that night, you’ll make do with rising dough, leaf mold, crushed grass, deep sleep.

May demands endurance in high, arid places. Songbirds cover their precious eggs, constantly losing moisture to the dry air outside the shell, racing to hatch and fledge. The smallest cache of water attracts life from great distances. In the backyard you fill a shallow basin with three, then four cups and wait while it announces itself in glints of light high in the air, SOS flashes from a signal mirror.

On Day Six you fry two eggs, slice a banana, and slide the food on a paper plate through the cracked door into the quarantine room. You communicate in texts: How are you feeling today? Do you still have a fever? Outside, you check again for sprouting vegetables where you pushed seeds into the dark soil, but find nothing. Coughing issues from the upstairs window.

A cold breeze tosses clusters of white choke cherry blossoms, sweet and familiar. Ten thousand new aspen leaves tremble in the thin air. Spinach and lettuce cotyledons weave uneven rows in the garden beds, brave and mute, but lesser goldfinches have found your offering. In exchange, they fill the long silence with stanzas of rapid sounds, incorporating the songs of other birds sometimes, and today they speak for everyone: We are here now. We are here.

Jamie Nielsen is an ecologist and returned U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. She lives and writes in Flagstaff, Arizona with her husband, two children and their rescue dog, Rainy. Her essays appear in The Sunlight Press, the Arizona Authors’ Association Arizona Literary Magazine 2021, and Cleaver Magazine.