The Fruit That Won the West

Hot, hot, hot, hot as I crawl forward on my belly across the Death Valley sands toward the mirage...

My magnetic material is melting in the heat of another North Texas August day. My mental disks are feeling fragile and desensitized, too. Thank heaven I'm not riding the trail behind a herd of cattle, rounding up the stray dogies.

Maybe I'm anemic, my fevered imagination worries. The heat zaps me more than it used to. Maybe I need dried apricots. My mom was a big believer in the benefits of consuming dried apricots. She made sure they were one of my four basic food groups when I lived in the dorm in college (along with Triscuits, machine-dispensed coffee (fifteen cents/cup), and yogurt).

Mom convinced my little brother that all cowboys ate dried apricots to stay regular when they were riding the range. When I bite into a dried apricot, I still hear the Sons of the Pioneers singing, "All day I face the barren waste without the taste of water, Cool water." That was my brother's cowboy music album, and pretty enjoyable still.

The taste of water is foul these days in the Metroplex, due to the annual algae bloom. This is the only time of the year anyone really needs to buy bottled water. I'm all for taxing bottled water, if nothing else to pay the expense of cleaning up the littered bottles along every sports field, trail, park, parking lot, and roadway in the state. But I would request the tax not apply in August!

We take so much for granted here. In much of the world tap water is unsafe to drink without boiling, if there's even a tap at all.


My mail art first attempt.