Early morning on a quiet walk through our neighborhood is the best time to appreciate all the beautiful things along the way. While the sky is still transitioning from dark to light, the birds are just starting to welcome the day with songs and chirps that bring trees, cactus, roofs, and powerlines into focus. Some trees sound like hundreds of birds have been roosting overnight hidden amongst the foliage. Just this morning we spotted a cardinal, grackles, doves, pigeons, hummingbirds,  woodpeckers, some small, obviously non-native parrots, geese, and assorted other birds.

Speaking of the geese, their honking has only returned this week as they are heading to wherever it is the geese are going here at the beginning of spring. We often catch the call of hawks before we see them but haven’t seen any for a couple of weeks now. The mockingbirds have made themselves visible once more which is strange as they are not migratory, but over the past 5 or 6 months we couldn’t find hide nor feather of them and then today or maybe it was yesterday we saw (or rather, heard) that they are back. For that matter, we haven’t seen hummingbirds for a long time either, and then all of a sudden we’ll spot them darting about.

Then there was that coyote about a week ago that lept right over a 6-foot cinderblock wall and like an apparition from another dimension was gone in a flash. On the other hand, there’s this semi-obstinate donkey named Lucy that some days will bray at us as though it’s excited to see us, while on others it will throw a glance from the far corner and stand there sulking as by now it’s well aware that we don’t bring treats. When Lucy does trot over she gladly accepts head and ear scratches. One of the donkey’s neighbors is a horse that’s trying to be social but doesn’t seem to want to be petted and would prefer that we would accept some nibbling of our hands.

Depending on our walking route we can see upwards of a dozen cats, none who are responsive to our attempts to coax them into a nuzzle. Penny and Bella are a couple of dogs who by and large no longer bark at us and will even wag their tails as we walk by, but if I should walk directly towards them they let me know that the wagging tails are a trap that triggers wild, angry barking.

Now combine all of this life with the still cool morning air, half a dozen hot air balloons drifting across the sky with some pink and orange clouds catching the rising sun, while those aforementioned orange blossoms from an earlier blog post punctuate our first encounter with the new day and you too will hopefully understand our appreciation of all these beautiful things.

Years pass and we often fail to note just when it is that the smell of orange blossoms punctuates the air. The aromatic beauty far exceeds the appearance of the flowers that are often difficult to see when passing through a neighborhood, or maybe the scent is so intoxicating that with senses swirling, we simply can’t find the focus to identify where the smell is wafting in from. This is that week where, at least this year, the orange blossoms are making themselves known.

From walking in fields of lavender to strolling through rose gardens, nothing in the realm of fragrances has quite the same impact on us as this incredible sweet scent. Maybe if we lived among the sperm whales and could collect their discarded ambergris, we’d consider that to be the most amazing of bouquets within the environment we were living in, but being relegated to two-legged land-based creatures, I believe Caroline and I are mostly in agreement that orange blossoms rule the world of smells from our perspective. Okay, she did try to say the petrichor and creosote aroma that arises with Arizona’s summer rains might be equal in pleasure to orange blossoms, but I’m sticking with these citrus blooms as being one of the greatest olfactory stimulations that grace my senses every spring.

Missing from this blog entry is just what this smell is like, but I’ve never really figured out a viable language for conveying the various scents that would allow someone else to understand the aroma I was describing. Of course, if the fragrance I was attempting to encapsulate linguistically only required me to compare something to something else, such as we do with wine where we describe woodsy cinnamon notes with chocolatey overtones and a hint of citrus, maybe that would make this easier but orange blossoms are in a universe of perfection that is beyond simple comparisons.

Last year, we had hoped to visit the Musical Instrument Museum a few miles from home to take in an exhibit that traveled to the US across history from more than 8,700 miles away. The MIM, as it’s known, was featuring masks and some of the musical instruments that are used by the people of the Congo in Africa. The exhibit was supposed to end many months ago, but due to the pandemic, it was extended well into 2021.

As a matter of fact, we were supposed to head out of town this weekend, but Facebook caught my eye with a post from the MIM featuring the face of an old friend I used to work with over 20 years ago. His name is Frank Thompson, but more about him in a minute. We’ve been in the rest of the museum enough times that I didn’t really need to spend our morning in the main exhibit and wanted to linger checking out these artifacts from the Congo. You might recognize part of the instrument above as a finger piano, also known as a Kalimba which is from the Mbira family of instruments originating out of Zimbabwe. This particular piece is called a Kisantchi and was used by the Songye people; it’s made of a thin piece of wood as the foundation for the plucking element, while the gourd acts as a resonator.

These are some of the memories I’ve chosen to travel with me towards that day when I will have experienced my last moments as a human being in this form. Should I be so lucky, Caroline and I might one day, 20 years from now, go through some of these blog posts and have the chance to celebrate how fortunate we were to have witnessed these pieces of art with our own eyes, and so I continue to blog and share.

Short of being able to afford the time and money to visit the Congo for ourselves and arrive just as any particular celebration would be happening for us to see these types of costumes used in their native environment, this is the next best thing.

Let’s get back to Frank Thompson and his project AZ Rhythm Connection. Frank’s here today leading a socially distanced drumming session, and the idea of a group activity after our year mostly isolated had us coming to the MIM and skipping out on a weekend trip that would have taken us up near Sedona or down to Douglas, Arizona. Seeing Frank on a glorious sunny day and having him guide us through some drumming patterns was heartwarming. Caroline and I each had a drum supplied by Frank, as did the other 20 of us for the 11:30 session.

Everything to this point was perfect. While Caroline visited the gift shop, I dipped into the concert hall in which we have seen approximately 70 acts over the years since the MIM opened. This was the first time in a year of isolation that my emotions of loss hit so hard. I took seat number 10 in the fourth row, where we’ve sat on many occasions, and felt the solitude of a place that should be vibrating with life. While the player piano bleated out some crap renditions of pop standards to a weak accompanying track, I thought about the occasions we’d talked with fellow music enthusiasts seated around us. The spotlight illuminated emptiness that wasn’t to be filled with the gongs of some Gamelan music, the cello of Interpreti  Veneziani, or the modern classical sounds of Kronos Quartet. We’ve experienced Dick Dale here, had our first encounter with the throat singing of Huun-Huur-Tu, and enjoyed the Ukrainian folk music group DakhaBrakha, and the Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali known as Tinariwen.

Today, a bit of life is being had at the Musical Instrument Museum, but what it really shared with us today is how empty the void is. Like the masks in the exhibit, there is nobody behind them, and here in the museum, the general public is largely missing. The music echoes out of the past and might tease our memories, but the vibrancy of those who bring us into the ecstasy of rhythmic celebration is sadly not to be experienced right now. And while this has been true for the entirety of the past year, this was our first occasion to confront this reality with our own senses.