One of the places I have added to my life list is to visit Saguaro National Park in Arizona.

(image by Todd & Barbara)

I want to go and feel the real heat, none of this 80-one-day-55-the-next Oregon summer. I want to see the giant Saguaro cacti and trip over a prickly pear, be paranoid about meeting a rattlesnake or a scorpion, visit pueblos and get sunburnt. Drink a diet cola and feel the ice condensing around the glass in a place that gets less than a quarter the amount of rain I consider the ‘norm’.

But this post isn’t about that eventual trip, really. I’ve realized in that last few months that I really, really, really like cacti. And succulents. Succulents are really neat, shaped like twisty-orby-jointed-creatures, bent over and leaning against each other like drunken friends or something out of a Doctor Seuss book.

My family thinks I am crazy. (This is not different than any other day of the week, just a fact.) I keep looking at all the cacti in stores or in stranger’s yards and talking about how I want some. I want an aloe vera plant, I want a theolocactus and a Arthrocerus rondonianous and many, many, many, Sempervivums!

I recently bought a little pot of assorted cacti. I love it. I named it Horatio and smile whenever I see it around my house.

I like to think of Horatio as “a collective”.

I just figured out that my favourite part of Horatio is actually an aloe aristata, and that makes me very happy. I don’t know why. I just love little cacti.

This week, I almost turned into one of my beloved cacti.

It started out with attending a class with a professor that set me off in any way and I immediately started growing prickles. My roots expanded, absorbing all available water during the three-hour-class that I ‘endured’ and when I left, I was prickly and puffed up with my frustrations and loathing.

I tried to let go of my irritations and my anger, but every day I walked into that classroom a giant bloom grew out of the side of my face and I lashed out sarcastically at everyone around me, a little prickly pear of hatred.

It culminated on Thursday. I called my Mom after class (like I had the last three days) and we ended up getting into a completely unrelated argument. I realized then, that a four-credit class isn’t worth turning into a cactus.

So I dropped the class, and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d like to think that there was some romantic image associated with this, the cactus revealing the true desert flower or something romantic and disgusting and cliche, but really, nothing happened. I’m still pretty prickly about the entire subject, but my prickles are smaller and more like feathers than jagged edges, and I’m letting go of my frustrations.

But I still like cacti, even though I don’t want to be one. I hope that next time I can recognize the cactus symptoms a little bit sooner, though.