On Noticing

Recently we teamed up with Terrain.org to find new ways to share our journals’ unique take on place-based writing. Below you’ll find our first effort: blog swapping. Visit Terrain.org to find out who swapped with Ms. Kimble. You’ll find more provocative writing and art there, too.

I had gone for a run along the dry Rialto Riverbed late in the afternoon. I started late enough that when I turned back west, the Catalina Mountains hummed with red on brown, glowing stubbornly against the dissipating colors of a desert sunset. It had been a long run, and I was relieved to see the lights of Trader Joe’s approach as I jogged along the blackening path towards my car waiting in the parking lot.

Trader Joe’s sucked me in for forty minutes (with its bright displays of bounty and sugar), and by the time I walked back to my car, the salicylic acid had settled in my legs and the sweat on my t-shirt had dried into a cold clamminess. The three canvas totes went into the trunk, and as I eased back into the front seat of the Civic, I saw the moon crest over the ridge of the Catalinas: a full moon, or close to it.

I don’t know if it’s the change of place—paved-over Los Angeles to scrappy Tucson, where the desert can’t help but poke through—or the change of daily curriculum—part-time mailroom assistant at a dying newspaper to a full-time reader-learner at a thriving university—but I notice that I’m “noticing” more. Even as I groan under the pile of books on my desk, I’m learning how to read my landscape as one of these books. The narrative has sucked me in: How do people live in the desert? This is the first place I’ve lived where I understand the vocabulary of place as it extends beyond street signs and buildings. I acquire this new vocabulary, and the landscape shifts to reveal the objects behind these words.

I learn slowly, but the slowness with which I un-layer the landscape doesn’t diminish the delight of its revelations. After weeks of riding my bike through the University of Arizona campus, I look up and notice the pods on the trees covering the bike path outside the Modern Languages Building, and I remember buying mesquite tortillas from a woman at the Santa Cruz farmer’s market. Now I see that these pods look similar to those pods, and I realize, seeing a complete image of leaves and trunk and branches, that these shady things are not just trees but mesquite trees. I am embarrassed to discover this because surely everyone knows a mesquite tree when they see one, but the embarrassment disappears because my discovery is private. It’s thrilling.

Two weeks before I saw the moon from a Trader Joe’s parking lot, I had gone with a group of graduate students to the Mt. Lemmon Observatory, where we looked through a 32-inch telescope at half of a waxing moon. None of us had brought enough clothes for a surprising 25-degree mountaintop, and the moon had been the first thing we looked at. It seemed perfunctory, this gaze at the moon, as something that must be done before the real stargazing could begin—before the Andromeda galaxy or the Ring Nebula would be revealed—and I queued up to look at it quickly: It could only get colder from here. No explanation was given, and probably none of us needed one: Who doesn’t know that the moon exists?

But, shivering, I looked into the telescope’s eyepiece and it was the moon. “The sound is truer than the echo,” writes Salman Rushdie of the Taj Mahal, and it is as true of the moon as well: “Announcing itself as itself, insisting with absolute force on its sovereign authority, it simply obliterated the million million counterfeits of it and glowingly filled, once and forever, the place in the mind previously occupied by its simulacra.” This glance at the moon—a moon that filled my entire eye, blindingly bright with detail and texture—was all the more powerful to me because it is so often replicated. The thing itself is visible most any night I’m willing to look for it, and here was the source of its sound.

I didn’t see the moon in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s until I had shifted the car into reverse and was twisting my neck around to the left to look for passing pedestrians or errant vehicles. The coast was clear, and as I turned back to steering wheel, I saw half of its whiteness poised at the edge of the Catalinas. It was too bright, too big, and I turned away, ready to drive home to dinner, but then I had to turn back. I watched the moon, knowing that I would watch it for only a moment longer before my foot would release the break pedal and I would allow the car to roll in reverse. In the single moment that I allowed myself to gaze—even in the presence of a full moon hovering, a to-do list hovered in my mind—the moon moved. I allowed myself five more moments, and the half circle floated towards a full circle. The full circle—too white and too big—lingered at the edge of the black ridgeline, paused, wavering. Then, within another ten moments, the circle became a whole moon, breaking free and floating like a white lily pad on a black pond. It happened so fast that my foot was still on the brake pedal, the car still in reverse, the brake lights still illuminated red.

Megan Kimble grew up in the mountains above Los Angeles, but has since lived in Denver, Nicaragua, Santa Monica, and Brazil. She loves breakfast and chocolate chip cookies and biking around Tucson, where she’s a student in the University of Arizona’s MFA program for creative nonfiction. You can visit her blog here.