TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
What's the best thing about living in Arizona? Opinion writers from azcentral.com count their blessings on Thanksgiving (and year-round)
What do you have to be grateful for? Our editorial team has come up with eight reasons to be thankful you live in Arizona.
You can’t beat Arizona on Thanksgiving.
It’s sunny. You can open a window while baking and eat a huge meal on the patio.
Go ahead. No one will blame you for gloating to family back east, those poor souls huddling next to a fire in the cold.
As this is the season for counting blessings, we asked azcentral’s opinion writers to share what they love best about living in Arizona. Chambers of commerce, take note: You might want to include some of this in your next marketing pamphlet.
What do you love most about this place? Let us know! Email thoughts to opinions@arizonarepublic.com.
All I know is, it feels like home
This is a deceptively hard question to answer.
It’s easy to say the landscape is the best part of Arizona. Or that I don’t freeze here, like I did growing up in Indiana. Both are true. But that’s not why I live here.
We love to visit faraway cities. And occasionally we go “home” to Indiana. We spend time with family and friends, buy Purdue gear and eat the creamfilled doughnuts no one seems to sell here.
But after a few days, I start yearning for the desert. For the life we’ve built and the friends who are like family here.
I can’t answer when or how it happened, but this beautiful, warm and sunny place became “home.”
That’s the best part — the magic — of Arizona. No matter who you are or where you came from, this place gets into your soul and becomes where you inevitably want to be.
— Joanna Allhands, digital opinions editor
Hohokam showed us how to thrive
A New York academic once called Phoenix the “world’s most unsustainable city” and argued that the ruins of the ancient Hohokam people who lived here are “a potent reminder of ecological collapse.”
He went on to say, “no other American city sits atop such an eloquent allegory.”
The Hohokam people dug hundreds of miles of canals and created a society that lasted from around the time of Christ to just before Columbus arrived. Their culture was sophisticated, with a trade economy and ball courts and homes arranged in almost town-home fashion. Their complex organization allowed them to water and cultivate perhaps as many as 250,000 acres of this Valley.
Classical Rome lasted 500 years. Hohokam civilization survived at least 1,000. As Phoenix faces new ecological challenges, the Hohokam are hardly our allegory of doom. They’re our inspiration. And, on this day, a blessing.
— Phil Boas, Editorial Page director
No love at 1st sight, but love came
Arizona didn’t make the cut the first time I flirted with it. Flagstaff was too cold, too isolated, too lonely. I left after a year. But everyone and everything deserves a second chance, right? My wandering spirit took me back to California, then Oregon and New Mexico before drifting back to Arizona.
I wasn’t in love with the Arizona the second time either, but by then I had a daughter who needed stability. I promised to stay through her high school. Plus, Phoenix had what I needed — an international airport and bearable weather.
Now, my heart aches every time I flirt with the idea of leaving, and that means I’ve fallen for this place. I’m in love with Arizona because it’s the place I’ve lived longer than Mexico. It’s the place where people constantly insult me just because I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in the United States, but it’s also the place where the spirit of love and generosity overshadows everything else. This is home, and I’m here to stay.
— Elvia Díaz, columnist
I’ll never forget the generosity
I moved here to work in 1980 and thought for the longest time that simply living in such a wild, beautiful, evolving place would forever be the thing I was most grateful for.
I was wrong.
Shortly before Christmas in 1997, my mother died. After the funeral in Pennsylvania, my brother and I brought our father to Phoenix, where he could spend time with our families.
When I returned to work, I wrote a column about my mom. The day it was published, my office voice mail filled up. And there were emails. And cards. And letters. And they continued to arrive for weeks. I collected them in binders and showed them to my father.
He read every one. Every one.
Hundreds of them. They lifted him from his deep well of sorrow. A few of them even made him smile.
I will never be able to repay what all of those letter writers did for him — and for me. And I will always be most grateful for having lived here, with all of you, during that time.
— EJ Montini, columnist
A treasure carefully protected
If the Grand Canyon impresses with its sheer immensity, Kartchner Caverns draws with quiet intimacy. It is no less an Arizona treasure.
The cave near Benson speaks of the state’s diverse biodiversity. It certainly belies the notion ours is all a dry heat: The caverns, shaped over millennia by mineral-depositing water, hover at near 99 percent humidity with temps in the high 60s.
Thousands of stalactites and stalagmites, some ivory white, others a deep red or brown, protrude from the ceiling and floor. Those with imagination are especially rewarded: Columns and other formations evoke shields and fangs and people. For those with food on the brain, sights of caramel walls, beets, carrots and fried eggs.
I’m thankful of the care the state took to plan Kartchner Caverns: The number of daily tours and visitors are capped, and the caves are climate-controlled. Thankful, too, that the spelunkers who made the discovery in 1974 — Tucson residents Gary Tenen and Randy Tuffs — took great measures, including a thorough vetting of the property owners and their commitment to the environment, before revealing their secret more than a decade later. — Abe Kwok, assistant opinions editor
Can’t beat Arizona’s can-do spirit
Despite our hand-wringers, Arizona has been quite a success story over the past half century or so.
Some of this is because of its scenic beauty and climate, once the summer was tamed by air conditioning. These are things to be thankful for.
But the larger reason is our spirit and ethos.
It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Arizona tick. Because it is not one or two big things in particular. Instead, it is the sum of a bunch of diffuse little things.
Some bemoan that we don’t seem to have a shared vision of what we want this place to be. Rather than having to share a vision, however, Arizona is a place where people can pursue their own vision and generally live into it to the extent their talents and effort permit.
I’m thankful for that. And year-round golf. — Robert Robb, columnist
A place of silence and refuge
The Valley is much like any other metropolitan area, filled with progress. But there’s a place in Scottsdale, just minutes away from all that progress, where I rediscover the real Arizona: timeless, ancient, eternal.
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve offers nearly 180 miles of trails that will lead you to places where you will be awed by panoramic views of this Valley.
To drawings etched in rock at a time too distant to measure and gouges worn smooth by the grinding stones of those who once called this land home.
To Tom’s Thumb, a giant boulder jutting hundreds of feet into the air, or to Cathedral Rock, where the wind seems to whisper.
There is something about this place and places like it all across Arizona. Something that will speak to your soul, if you listen. It’s there in the graceful lines of the saguaro and in the rugged cut of the canyons. It’s there in the mournful call of the white-wing dove and in the way the mountains reach for the sky.
And it’s there, in the silence.
— Laurie Roberts, columnist
More blessings than we can count
I woke up this morning in a bed I share with my husband of nearly 30 years. We’re still in love, and we still have our health. After that, it’s all gravy.
And there’s plenty of gravy to ladle over the deliciousness of our lives.
We have a roof over our heads and more (I do mean more) than enough to eat. Our daughter lives five minutes away with her new husband. They both enjoy spending time with us.
I only have to walk out the back door to see a fair impersonation of paradise. Southern Arizona is rich in beauty — from the ever-blue skies to the lizard darting between the rocks.
The politics of the day are unsustainably unpleasant, frighteningly divisive. But that is just a speck of sand in the oyster that is my life. I am blessed beyond deserving. But I am blessed.
My biggest challenge in life is remembering how many reasons I have to be thankful. — Linda Valdez, editorial writer and columnist