Until 1984 when I left the insurance business and began writing full-time, I had never been a stay-at-home mother. After that, and long before it became a “thing,” I became a work-at-home mother. Now I’m a work-at-home caregiver which means I don’t get out much. Most of my social interactions happen online, by email or text. Snail mail? Not so much. That involves writing a letter on my computer, printing it, locating a stamp and envelope, and getting it in the mail. For someone with no secretarial help, that’s way too much work. But I digress.

These days I generally receive at least two AI-generated scam emails a day. They generally begin with something like, “I hope you’re having a pleasant day. My name is Something or Other, and I’m the “organizer, founder, or director of—take your pick—the Tea Drinker’s, Tequila Lovers, Mozambique Readers Club—take your pick again. For a small fee we would like to introduce, feature or present your wonderful your book, such and such, (usually one of my older titles), with its emotionally impactful, thrilling, and spellbinding storytelling to our countless members. Believe me, you need a tall pair of boots to make your way through that pile of BS. (Thank you, Andy Griffith for “What it Was, Was Football.”)

This week, I received an email that started in a similar fashion. Luckily, I read far enough to learn that it was a genuine invitation from a bookstore in Bremerton asking me to participate in an outdoor literary event in July, one which I’ve actually agreed to do. By the way, there was no charge for my agreeing to do so.

That’s the bad news in the email department. But this week, too, on a day when I received two of the above missives, I also received separate letters from two women—one in Arizona and one in California—telling me that my books had helped them through the process of negotiating some really tough losses. Those letters were like finding a lost diamond ring inside the debris of a commercial vacuum cleaner, which I did once in real life, but that’s another story.

As part of her note, the fan from Arizona mentioned liking how much my realistic descriptions of places in Arizona and of desert monsoons made the landscapes in my books come to life. One of the spots she mentioned in particular was Skeleton Canyon. As a result, in my response to her, I told her about my very real connection to Skeleton Canyon. And since I spent the better part of an hour of yesterday’s writing time describing it for her, I decided to include that essay in today’s blog. And here it is:

My folks loved picnics. Sometime in the fifties, my mother decided we should go on a Sunday picnic to Skeleton Canyon, and off we went in our 1953 DeSoto with my parents and baby sister in the front seat and my three younger brothers and me in the back, where we spent most of the time going duking it out over who got to sit by a window.

Skeleton Canyon is close to the border between Arizona and New Mexico. When it was time to head home, my mother said, “Let’s go home the long way.” So we did.

This was a time when news wasn’t 24/7. We knew what the weather had been like in our part of southern Arizona, but what was happening on the far side of the Chiricahuas in western New Mexico was a complete mystery. When we left our picnic area and started down the far side of the mountains on a dirt road, we began encountering running washes. The farther we went, the deeper they got. At some point I heard my dad say to my mom, “I don’t think we’ll be able to go back up.”

Once we finally exited the mountains, we found ourselves facing the Animas Playa which is a usually dry desert lakebed, only this time it wasn’t dry. Instead, it was a vast expanse of water. The road was completely invisible, and only the tops of fence posts sticking out of the water on each side suggested where the pavement might be, so my father set his jaw, drove us to a spot at the midpoint between the two sets of fenceposts, and away we went.

With most of his family in the car and his hands on the wheel, I’m sure it was a terrifying, white-knuckled drive for him. As for us kids? Having water coming in under the doors onto the floorboard was so exciting that we stopped fighting. I don’t know how long it took for us to reach the little burg of Animas, but by the time we got there, the whole town was standing on the railroad tracks watching because our DeSoto was the first vehicle to come that way in over a week. They must have been astonished when two adults, four kids, and a baby clambered out of the car. By the way, my father traded in the DeSoto for a new Plymouth a couple of months later. I suspect the wiring was pretty much done for.

So that’s how I can write about Arizona and make it seem real to my readers. It’s because those places are real to me.

I’ve been there, done that, and got the T-shirt.