Lost in a Cloud

Red Bird Ranch is located at 2750 ft. elevation. Occasionally, that puts us in a cloud! Although fog is not common in the desert, when it happens, it usually doesn’t hang around very long. In the meantime, the view can be quite limiting and we can only see for a few yards. When this phenomenon occurs, it always reminds me of a hymn that is dear to my heart.

In her 1988 book entitled, “Our Latter-day Hymns: The Stories and the Messages,” author Karen Lynn Davidson researched the origins hymns and their composers.

"Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy" was originally written by Philip Paul Bliss (1838-1876) and called “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning” in the old LDS hymnbook.

Bliss was raised in poor circumstances in Pennslyvania. At age 11, with little education, he left home to do farm and timber work. At age 12, he joined the Baptist Church. Later in life, he affiliated with both the Methodists and Congregationalists. For many years, Bliss worked as a traveling music teacher and a singing evangelist with a preacher named Dwight L. Moody while publishing at least 10 hymn collections. He is responsible for the lyrics and music of “More Holiness Give Me” (No. 131) and wrote the music for “Should You Feel Inclined to Censure” (No. 235).

There is an interesting link between Bliss and the LDS Church, Davidson said. Bliss and his wife were among more than a hundred people killed in an Ohio train disaster. His friend, James McGranahan, went to the scene of the accident and among his friend’s effects he found a new hymn text by Bliss. In his honor, McGranahan set it to music; it’s now the tune used for “O My Father.” —Deseret News

Enjoy listening to The Spoken Word and the beautiful narrative about this beloved hymn!

“A long time ago, noted preacher Dwight Moody told his congregation a story about a boat, helplessly rocking and plunging on a stormy, starless night near the Cleveland harbor. The mariners on board could see the lighthouse, but they needed to find their way through the narrow passage in the treacherous rocks that surrounded the harbor. Normally a light on the shore, aligned with the lighthouse, marked the passage to safety. But on this night, the lower lights had gone out.

Finally, the desperate captain decided they had no choice but to proceed into the harbor without the guidance of the lower lights. "With a strong hand and brave heart"—but in almost total darkness—"the old pilot turned the wheel." Tragically, he missed the channel, crashed the boat upon the rocks, and lost the lives of his sailors.

Moody then explained the lesson to be learned from his story: the Master will take care of the great lighthouse, but He depends on us to keep the lower lights burning. Philip Paul Bliss was directing the singing at the meeting that night and was so inspired by Moody's story that he wrote what would become one of his most popular hymns, "Brightly Beams Our Father's Mercy." He also composed the music, a hymn tune known as "Lower Lights," which was first published in 1871.

The storms of life put many around us in peril. They may long to approach the light of "our Father's mercy" but are unsure how to navigate the obstacles in their way. We all know how they feel, because each of us has been lost at sea from time to time.

Most often, God uses us to rescue them. If we can keep the light of faith burning in our hearts, if we align our light with the Light above, we can guide an exhausted mariner safely home. We can be the lower lights that "send a gleam across the wave. Some poor fainting, struggling seaman [we] may rescue, [we] may save."

Oranges and Nuts...and Horses, of course!

As a child, I always received an orange in the toe of my Christmas stocking on Christmas morning. My father had a successful plumbing business and although he worked long days in cold Colorado weather, we never wanted for good food, adequate clothing or a clean bed to rest in. So over the years, I never really understood why that very common orange was such an important item to include in our Christmas goodies.

Today, we can buy oranges whenever we want, but fresh oranges were once considered a genuine luxury. If you search online for “Great Depression Christmas,” you’ll find many histories and personal accounts of that December holiday when the US was in the depths of the longest and ugliest economic decline in its history.

Reading these narratives, many written by people who lived through the financial disaster or by their children, you’ll discover this ordinary fruit, the orange, mentioned over and over again.

Along with candy and nuts, an orange was the most common stocking treat given to children. It was a rare and costly treat indeed—in a household where the Christmas meal might only consist of soup and homemade bread.

This explains a great deal about getting an orange in the toe of my own stocking. My parents were children of the depression, from poor farming families in northeastern Utah. They knew exactly how scare treats were during those extremely difficult years. I certainly never connected these offerings with their implied history. I appreciate that ordinary, but very special fruit a little more now!

In the Netherlands, children stuff their wooden shoes with carrots and hay for the horses of St. Nicholas. Photo Credit by Rosina Huber

Things Aren't Aways As They Appear

Cherry Mash

A couple of years ago, we repainted our home, here on Red Bird Ranch. It was a long overdue project that we’d been putting off while our many other renovations were in progress. After a number of Cantera stone additions and repairs to the stucco, landscaping and roof, we knew that it was time to get rid of the old “pinkish” paint that the previous owners had used. We’re not sure why they were so enamored with pink, but even the trim inside our home was painted a soft pinky white, which was repainted within a few months of moving in. As far as we could tell, they were into a color scheme that looked like a Cherry Mash candy bar.

We opted to paint the main exterior a light gray, which changed the whole look of the house to something more along the style of Spanish Colonial or Santa Barbara. This was exactly what we were looking for to accentuate the meandering elevation and the complex roofline. We added a gorgeous chimney, which was woefully missing from the top of the house. At last the pinkish problem was remedied and our home had a new stately appearance!

One day as I was on the back patio tidying up, I noticed a piece of grass that was stuck to the Cantera stone window sill. Living on acreage with horses, it wasn’t unusual to find pieces of grass hay strewn about here and there. I went to brush off the “grass” when I noticed that it didn’t seem to be actually stuck on the stone.

On close inspection, I realized that the fragment of “grass” wasn’t any type of flora after all. It was a Walkingstick, an insect with long thin body and legs, holding perfectly still. It didn’t appear to be alive at all!

Henry David Thoreau once said, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see” Thoreau's journal entry for August 5, 1851

Many vertebrate predators, particularly birds, like to eat insects, so natural selection has favored various schemes that help insects avoid being devoured. Stick and leaf insects belong to the family Phasmatidae, a group of predominantly tropical plant-eating insects closely related to cockroaches, grasshoppers, crickets, and mantids, and they are survivalists extraordinaire. Usually long and slender (some species grow up to 30 centimeters (12 inches) in length) Walkingsticks bear remarkable resemblance in both structure and color to twigs and leaves of the woody plants they eat. Many of the stick mimics are wingless, but some have added leaves to their twig disguises in the form of shortened wings and elaborate legs that look like foliage.

https://www.desertmuseum.org/books/nhsd_walkingstick.php

As visual beings, we trust that looking with our eyes lets see truth.  But, can we be deceived by what we see? It actually happens every day. 

What looks like a leaf sometimes turns out to be a well-camouflaged insect. A shadow on the wall can make a harmless tree branch look like something much more menacing. And the objects in a rearview mirror are often closer than they appear.

Those are usually harmless mistakes. But what about our perceptions when we look at a person? We might think we can easily discern a person’s intelligence, moral character, and abilities. But are our eyes deceiving us?

A newspaper reporter was covering the story of a soup kitchen that served the homeless. She chose a patron to interview, a middle-aged woman, and asked what she thought of the facility. The woman gave an articulate, detailed analysis and expressed her gratitude, stunning the reporter with her poise and confidence. It was a lesson learned not to judge someone by appearances.

We’ve all been misjudged and labeled based on nothing but a brief first impression. Sadly, we sometimes even misjudge ourselves. Self-judgment is often the most unmerciful kind of all. We have witnessed how sweeping generalizations based on race, culture, politics, or religion can prevent us from seeing that we have more in common with one another than it may appear.

We must not let our eyes—or our prejudices—deceive us. If we are willing to see past the superficial and treasure the very heart of those we meet, as Jesus Christ did, we’ll realize that each human being we meet is one of God’s precious children. That is the difference between looking and actually seeing.

Watercolor Sunset

Someone up in heaven had their watercolors out this evening!

Who's Afraid of a Red Bird Coywolf?

Here at Red Bird Ranch, we are almost 3000 feet elevation. And because we live quite a ways out from the general population, we get all sorts of fauna that either live here or pass through our acreage continually. Not long after we took the photo of the young buck, we noticed a canine creature underneath a jojoba bush in the backyard. I say canine creature because, although he would be described as a coyote, these guys are much larger than the coyotes that we are used to in other parts of the desert. They seem to be heavier and taller than the skinny, scrawny coyotes that we’ve seen for many years.

Are they a hybrid of a wolf and coyote or do they just get fed much better out here, where the jackrabbits and cottontails are so plentiful? I don’t know the answer, but I’m always a bit shocked at their size when they casually stroll across our patio, as if they really do own the place. They consider it a shortcut with a bit of shade, I’m sure, but never seem too concerned with a human structure or our human awareness of them.

I’m not sure if one of those coywolves could take down a small buck, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they would consider a new fawn to be potential prey. We hear the phrase, “It’s a jungle out there..” Maybe here in Arizona we should say, “It’s a desert out there...” with the very same awareness of potential danger!

The Yearling

The summer of 2018 was dry and hot in the Sonoran Desert and many plants and animals around our ranch were showing the effects.

Early one morning, I looked out our kitchen window and noticed a young mule deer with his nose to one of our planters that rested on a patio column. He seemed to be waiting for something. And then I realized his motivation: As our watering system came on at regular intervals, the emitter often over-sprayed and sent a cooling, refreshing mist over the side of the planter and down the column. The young buck was obviously waiting for this spray—or the drip that ran down the column afterward.

At the time, I had the irrigation timer set for every third day—but, because of the small size of the planter, it ran each time for only about three minutes. And, of course, in the desert heat the over-spray quickly evaporated. So…Was the buck waiting patiently for the cooling mist to come on? Had he learned its sequence and come at the right time on the right day? Was he really that smart?

In the end, because we had spent a good deal of that summer away at our cabin in the Arizona White Mountains (away from the Valley heat), and this photo was taken in September, we surmised that the buck had indeed made it a regular practice to come to our unused patio for a short, but refreshing, drink and a cool off. He seemed quite tame and obviously knew what he was doing.

In the desert, man and beast search diligently for any sign of water and a life-sustaining drink. The young buck had found his cooling oasis at the planter on our patio!

September 21, 2018

The Big Snow

When most people think of a big snowfall, they rarely think of Arizona—and particularly of Scottsdale. However, on February 21, 2019, we experienced such a record-setting event here at Red Bird Ranch.

That evening, about 5:30 pm, I returned home from a meeting at our church. By that time it was raining steadily in the Valley. As I approached the corner of Pima and Happy Valley Road, I noticed the outside temperature displayed on my truck dashboard showed 34 degrees Fahrenheit—quite cold for here, but still above freezing. As I approached the corner of Alma School Road and Jomax, the temperature had dropped to 32 degrees and a few snowflakes were forming in the rain. As I continued the two miles to our ranch near 118th and Jomax, the temperature decreased to 29 degrees, the rain had turned completely to snow and the roadway was turning white.

The climb to our ranch from the Valley seems imperceptible as you drive along the road, but this evening supplied indisputable proof that the steady increase in elevation creates a dramatic change in weather!

All that night, while a good deal of the Valley was receiving rain and some scattered areas experienced snow, the white stuff kept coming down and piling up at our place. In the morning we awoke to a winter wonderland and an amazing 10 inches!

Nicknamed the Valley of the Sun, this area hardly ever receives such weather. This was by far the biggest snowfall that I had seen at this elevation in my many years in Arizona. It reminded me of my childhood back in Arbon Valley, Idaho, where it really knows how to snow.

As always happens, the night of the snow, one of the heat pumps in our house went out and we were without heat that night in our bedroom wing. I called a good friend in our church who runs a heating/ac company and he generously agreed to come out early the next morning to take a look at the expired heat pump. However, he got stuck and could not get up the incline to our driveway due to the snow. And, before he got to work, he was so enthralled by the snow that he had to take photos with his camera to send back to his wife—since they only received a few inches at their place, which is only about five miles away.

About that same time we discovered that one of our large, beautiful Texas ebony trees in the front yard was split and a number of branches were laying on the ground. These trees do not lose their leaves in the winter and the heavy blanket of snow was too much for this dear old fellow. So, as my friend was working on the heat for the house, I was using my Sawz-All to cut fallen branches and haul them away.

However, things began to look up later that day. Thanks to our friend a new heat pump was installed and the house was soon warm again. Our Texas ebony tree was not as bad as it looked at first sight and could be saved. And Alene’s daughter and her kids arrived to enjoy the snow. So, far from tragic, the rest of the day was spent throwing snowballs and making snowmen.

The folks up north may not enjoy long winters or heavy snowfalls, but here in Arizona—especially at Red Bird Ranch—such an aberration of Nature is cause for celebration and lots of horseplay in the rarely seen snow!

The View Through Two Pointed Ears

How often do we, as stewards of our animals, really appreciate the time spent with them while we still have them around? The tragedy of loving an animal is knowing that someday you will have to part with them.

My mare, Amber, had some sassy qualities that were uniquely hers, but I loved her a lot and considered her my sixth kid. Purchased as a 4-year-old, I was responsible for much of her early training. She helped me through some rough patches in my life by being a diversion from personal woes. There were times I didn’t get on her for a month at a time, but she always remained consistently soft in the mouth and easy for me to hop on and go whenever I was able to ride.

One thing that I learned from having horses for 26 years is that they aren’t capable of lying. They may have a day where they are ornery, or feisty, or in need of attention. They may be sore, have tummy aches, or fail to understand what you are feebly trying to teach them. But they are always truthful—no matter what. How many of us can say the same of ourselves?

Allan Hamilton said, “I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know.” (Allan J. Hamilton, Zen Mind, Zen Horse: The Science and Spirituality of Working with Horses)

I’ve heard it said that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a woman. For me, it’s been very true. I was born a horse woman and I’ll die with the same moniker. I make no excuses for my passion for them.

A Few Still Standing

“The Rio Fire was a child of the weather.

It started with a bolt from the sky and exploded on the winds of a storm’s microburst to become the largest desert wildfire the state had seen up to that date.

It was a weekend, July 7-9, 1995, that few who lived in Fountain Hills or Rio Verde at the time will ever forget – watching and waiting for a possible order to evacuate or stay put. Seeing the flames against a night sky would mean no sleep for many.

A police blockade was set up at Golden Eagle Blvd. and Boulder Drive to allow only homeowners into their neighborhoods.

Others were told to turn around.

Some homeowners in northwest Fountain Hills did evacuate on their own, packing prized possessions into their cars.

Planes and helicopters were used to fight the fire. Water was sucked out of the small SunRidge Canyon pond across from Golden Eagle Park by helicopters to dump on the blaze.

The Rio Fire would burn 23,000 acres, most of that within McDowell Mountain Regional Park, sandwiched between Fountain Hills and Rio Verde.

The fire would challenge the resources of the Rural/Metro Fire Department, State Forestry Department and Forest Service.

While the blaze devastated the desert, especially in the county park, the scorecard at the end showed a win for firefighters – no deaths, no injuries and no structures lost.”

Bob Burns Jul 8, 2015 - The Fountain Hills Times

Living in Cave Creek in 1995, I remember driving to the Rio Verde area to see the aftermath of burned rubble and being quite shocked at the extent of the damage. I also remember thinking that it would be decades before the desert would come back. Twenty years later, when we moved to Red Bird Ranch, the resilient desert had been reborn from a panorama of charcoal and dirt.

Lacking much of the cholla, most of the large trees and all but a very few of the giant saguaros, the desert is once again teeming with life and vitality. The black, stubby skeletal remnants of centuries old saguaros still dot the landscape—a reminder of the true cost of the Rio Fire. The return of the numerous majestic saguaros will take longer than a few decades to be replaced. It won’t happen in my lifetime...

When a fire is man-caused, it’s always very difficult to accept the loss. If it’s Mother Nature’s doing—in this case her hurling electricity from the sky—we want to believe that the eventual outcome will somehow make up for the devastation. For us at Red Bird Ranch, the silver lining was to have an area that is near perfect for trail riding on our horses. Without the obstructing large trees and menacing cholla, the land has been perfectly prepared for scenic views for people, safe passage for the animals and trails leading in all directions.

Occasionally, we come across a saguaro (like that in the photo) that somehow survived the fire—when so many of its siblings have long since perished. Their badly charred trunks serve as a reminder that in spite of the constant threat from the harsh, dry climate of the Sonoran Desert, life finds a way.

The Barn With The Golden Walls

Our barn is actually a nice rust color, but early one morning I noticed that in the sunlight of dawn, it appears quite golden in color. It reminded me of a story that I heard many times in church as a child.

There is a story called “The Golden Windows,” by Laura E. Richards. Every morning, a boy sees a house across the valley from his own home with shining windows made of lustrous gold. One morning, he decides to head out to find the house. After many hours and miles, he reaches the house only to be very disappointed that it really had normal windows after all. As he turns to go home, he discovers from this new perspective that his own house across the valley has also been adorned by the setting sun with windows of shiny gold. He is filled with happiness, and contentedly ventures back home.

It is often easier to see others’ golden windows, assuming that we have none of our own. We may feel envious of people who have some talent, ability or attribute that we find especially alluring, and fret about how much that person has something we believe we lack. Is it difficult to imagine that we also have admirable, sought-after traits? If we find ourselves focusing on feelings of inferiority when we see another person’s “shine,” perhaps we can change our perspective. This person isn’t shining instead of us, but is shining as well as us, only from a different vantage point.