I find myself in the desert more often these days. 

When I was younger, my mother would take me to Arizona. Her boyfriend at the time, Jon, was Hopi, and when I was a teenager, she let me travel with him to visit his family on the reservation. He took me to the Colorado River, and I remember falling in after stepping onto a narrow path he had warned me not to take, surrounded by arid desert landscape. He pulled me out before I drowned.

Lately, the desert has been a transformative place for me again. The recent superbloom in Death Valley—the first in nearly a decade—has brought fresh life to the area. Larvae sprawl across the dirt and flowers before the salt flats even come into view. The sphinx moth emerges there, an emblem of transformation and death.

Sometimes I think about Jon and what his life has been like since my mother left him. The desert can look lifeless until, suddenly, it does not. What looks barren from a distance may still be full of life.