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Tumbleweed

There was an early morning when it bowled across the freeway, somewhere outside of Reno, and before I could tell the little kids in the backseat, it was already gone. Fleetingly the scribbly plants from Road Runner cartoons were made real. I never saw a running bird and it was days before I saw a sad faced coyote, but early that morning, I saw tumbleweed, tumbling.

If you were raised in the Southwest desert then I guess tumbleweed was as commonplace to you, as daisies and dandelions were to me. You might have marvelled at the adaptive genius of a plant that can relocate, but I expect you were far too busy being awed by canyons, and cacti, and caverns.

When you look at this you can tell that Stephanie was not raised taking tumbleweed for granted. She frames it with the respect a curator might give a challenging sculpture. She shows that the dirt which surrounds it has Fortuny pleating, and the plant itself looks like a backlit snarl of pale gold floss. She was an outsider finding beauty in an alien place. A kid who watched the Road Runner cartoons seeing the scribble plants made real.

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