Don’t be put off by the bees. Yes, there’s definitely a buzz at Morelia’s candy market, but not of the Hollywood celebrity sort. The bees are visiting the Mercado de Dulces for the same reason you are: to sample sesame bars, glazed papaya slices, bread pudding, and other Mexican sweets.  Unless you’ve dabbed on eau de caramel, you’re not going to enter their radar.

I’m on my second visit to Morelia, the bustling capital of central Mexico’s state of Michoacan. On a quick stopover a few months earlier, I’d been intrigued by my glimpses of the soaring cathedral, serpentine aqueduct, and other architectural treasures that earned downtown Morelia its UNESCO World Heritage Site status.  But all the museums were shuttered that late Sunday afternoon and — I admit it — I was afraid to venture into the candy market because of the bees.

This time, I’ve set aside a day and a half for exploring. After a quick sweet roll and coffee at my hotel, I cross the sprawling Plaza de Armas to the cathedral, a Mexican baroque confection made of cantera, the local pink limestone that lends downtown its rosy glow. I amble past pews of black shawled and business-suited parishioners in the airy main chapel, pausing to gape at devotional items like the gleaming silver baptismal font. I’m particularly riveted by a gargantuan pipe organ -  made in 18th-century Germany of 6,400 pipes, according to the leader of the British tour group I sidle over to with fake nonchalance. Organmaster Alfonso Vega has been presiding for more than 40 years over the internationally famed organ festival held here every May.

From the cathedral, I stride east past storefronts sporting brightly colored fabrics and notions to the former convent behind the San Francisco church that hosts the Casa de Artesenias. I climb a worn stone staircase to the small monks’ cells where craftspeople from all over Michoacan demonstrate their skills, stopping briefly to watch a flamenco guitar being strung before planting myself, fascinated, in front of a weathered man from Tócuaro who is carefully sanding a large wooden devil’s mask. Several finished samples, painted blood red and black, sit propped behind him. The maskmaker explains they’re for La Candelaria, a February festival where devils rampage merrily around town before being booted out by the angel Gabriel and other heavenly party poopers.

I’m tempted to buy one of the masks from him, but they’re too large to be taken home easily. Instead, I head downstairs to a series of bright, modern rooms where crafts are arrayed on open displays labeled by town. Eventually, I select a small ceramic devil straddling a motorcycle with his dog –  not nearly as scary as the satanic visages upstairs and far easier to stuff into a suitcase.

There’s nothing like a bit of acquisition to spur the appetite — for food and for more shopping. Fortunately, I can satisfy both urges at La Casa del Portal, back near the cathedral. According to his wife, Cecilia, who gives me a tour, furniture-maker Victor Alanis originally bought this three-story 16th-century home to serve as a studio and showroom. “Then he decided to sell the work of his friends and antiques that he liked and, next thing you know, we opened a restaurant,” she says. “It was so successful, we just finished putting in a rooftop bar.” Everything you see in the eclectic-chic dining rooms and overstuffed galleries flanking them is for sale.

Taking advantage of the balmy December day, I decide to dine on the rooftop patio, looking out over the cathedral’s twin spires. Because agricultural Michoacan is known for its maize,  I order corundas, similar to tamales but triangular and steamed in the lower leaves of the corn plant rather than the husks. Here they’re topped with a delicately spiced tomato sauce. While eating, I eye lacquered chairs painted with intricate landscapes and dishes boldly patterned with suns and moons but, sadly, nothing seems easily transportable. I buy a chunky silver bracelet before I leave.

Thus fortified, I’m ready to resume sightseeing. Strolling east again under the portales shading Avenida Madero, where outdoor cafes hum with families and work shirkers, I soon reach the Palacio de Gobierno, an18th-century neoclassical building that once served as the executive seat. Now it’s known for the central balcony’s vivid depictions of Michoacan history by revered Morelia resident Alfredo Zalce, a student of Diego Rivera and, at 95, the last of the great Mexican muralists. Gazing up at the powerful image of a loincloth-clad Indian peasant bound with ropes, I remember why Rivera lost his commission to decorate Rockefeller Plaza.

Learning more about an earlier Morelia icon  — in fact, the city’s namesake — is my next goal. I walk south to the quiet residential neighborhood where, in Casa Natal Morelos, yet another graceful neoclassical building, Jose Maria Morelos was born — though not, I learn, in a bed. Morelos’s mother was out shopping when she went into labor and couldn’t make it back to her own house, so the revolutionary hero entered the world in a neighborbor’s vestibule. The site of Mama Morelos’s embarrassment is marked with a plaque and flags.

After a short room rest, I grab a cab to San Miguelito, on the city’s modern south side. I’ve heard at my hotel that the house specialty steak, pounded thin and cooked with lemon, is tasty — and that I should check out the restaurant’s “special room.” I wander beyond a bar designed to look like a bullring and through two casual elegant dining rooms into a small space where nearly 250 images of Saint Anthony — made out of everything from corn husks to silver, and ranging from about ½ inch to 2½ feet high — hang upside down. San Miguelito owner Cynthia Martinez explains, “Saint Anthony is the patron saint of single women. If you pray to him, he’ll bring you a husband.” She laughs, “My father started collecting these saints for me, before I got married.” Why is he upside down, I wonder? To pressure him to act quickly, of course.

At lunch, Cecilia Alanis had mentioned that, of the many live music clubs springing up near La Casa del Portal, the oldest but still liveliest is La PeΖa del Colíbri. “It may look closed,” she’d warned, “but just knock on the narrow wooden door.” Having looked forward to a speakeasy-style adventure after dinner, I am now disappointed to find the nightclub’s door flung wide open. Nevertheless, I edge through a narrow corridor into a dimly lit, cavernous room and sit down at a long table.  After several tequilas chased by sangrita, a spicy tomato juice mix, I join the chorus of locals singing along with the baritone folk guitarist; I think we’re calling for a revolution, but I’m not entirely certain. It also seems to me that the lifesize Day of the Dead figures behind the stage are moving to the rhythms of the young neuvo flamenco trio who come on next, but I can’t get anyone at my table to verify this.

I’m so taken with Morelia by now that, next morning, I’m ready to brave the candy market bees. Sure enough, half an hour later, I’m in sugar shock but completely stinger free. I feel a rush of ardor for a city that has a market devoted to sweets, a one-stop folk art shopping center, restaurants that dish out crafts and topsy-turvy romance, offbeat live music venues — plus abundant cultural monuments you can claim as your reason for visiting. Guilty pleasures and a good cover story: Morelia is definitely my kind of town.

It’s a clear, sunny afternoon in the San Pedro National Conservation Area in southern Arizona, weepy cottonwoods barely stirring, just a few wispy clouds in the sky. Gazing toward trees and clouds is generally a major activity at this popular bird-watching spot just east of Sierra Vista, but the group gathered around a shaded picnic table is staring raptly downward. “That’s a big guy,” declares Sheri Williamson, the genial co-founder of the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory (SABO). She is sitting next to a miniature set of scales. “We don’t see many male rufouses his size.”

“Big,” of course, is a relative term: The bird’s weight—carefully recorded by volunteer Rachael Brantley, along with characteristics such as beak length and coloration of throat and tail feathers—is 4.5 grams. We’re talking a creature about the size of a thumb, being held aloft in a sling no longer than a Band-Aid.

But in the hummingbird world, this fella’s a pig.

My friend Bernadette and I are outside the preserve’s San Pedro House to take part in SABO’s hummingbird band-and-release program. Flitting between their tropical winter retreats in Mexico and central America and their nesting grounds in the upper United States and Canada—a journey that can span as many as 2,700 miles—almost a dozen different species of hummingbird stop off along the San Pedro River for a rest, a drink and a nosh. By tracking their annual migration patterns, SABO is trying to determine whether the birds—and by association, their habitats—are being threatened.

I grew up in Brooklyn, where migrating birds meant pigeons visiting from New Jersey. I have no patience for standing around and staring at branches, trying to see something I’m not going to be able to identify—and why I would want to? Birding hasn’t exactly been at the top of my try-before-I-die list. But Bernadette, who’s done this before, swears it’s a lot of fun. I’m going along because hummingbirds are easy to recognize, and anything that can eat twice its body weight in food each day has got my attention.

Getting these itty-bitty critters—which are not only speedy but also smarter than your average bird—into a position where tiny bands can be put on their tiny legs is challenging, to say the least. But the three SABO staff members—along with Williamson, her husband, Tom Wood; and naturalist Ron Hunt—have got it sussed. They use sugar-water-filled feeders (“Forget the coloring and the pricey commercial stuff,” says Williamson, “clear sugar water works just as well”) to lure the birds into fine nylon mist nets, which they and the SABO volunteers watch vigilantly. As soon as a bird takes the bait, it’s chased to the back of the net, placed into a mesh bag, and carefully carried over to the table, where the weighing in and measuring commence.

Hunt, who’s on net watch, waxes rhapsodic when asked about Southeastern Arizona and the “sky islands” formed by the many mountains and rivers crisscrossing the region. It seems that features of the lower Rockies and the upper Sierra Madres, as well as of the Mojave, Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, all converge here. “It’s one of the world’s great bio-diverse regions,” he enthuses, “as interesting to many naturalists as the Serengeti Plains or the Galapagos Islands.” You won’t find huge animals anymore, although mammoths and mastodons used to roam the area, but there are more than 450 different species of birds and almost 300 types of butterflies.

The small group surrounding Williamson is now watching her measure an Anna’s hummingbird, slightly larger than the rufous and green with patches of black and gray. Seeing the bird at close range, I’m amazed at its iridescent throat colors, flaming pink shading into psychedelic red and orange. According to Williamson, these flashy feathers indicate that the bird is an adult male. He uses them not only to attract females but also to frighten off other males—“kind of like gang colors,” she says, adding that the male birds tend to do a lot of mouthing off but little follow up. “You do see them body-slamming each other on occasion, but most of the time, one of them punks out and just flits away.”

Although the aluminum band that Williamson twists into place on the Anna’s leg is tiny—about the diameter of an eyeglass screw—she contends that hummingbirds are actually easier to deal with than many larger birds. They’re not as dangerous to handle as, say, birds of prey, and not as vulnerable in many ways as shorebirds and songbirds that have long, fragile legs. The hummingbird’s intelligence—it’s got quite a large brain relative to its body size—and its fearlessness also keep it from getting overly stressed during the banding process.

Still, the poor little things are bound to be traumatized after being manhandled by various featherless giants. As soon as Williamson completes her measurements, each bird is handed over to 8-year-old Erin Hodges, who holds it up to a feeder for a shot of sugar water—a parting energy boost, as well as a reward for being poked and prodded. Then the bird is gently passed along to another volunteer, whose open, outstretched hand serves as a bird-launching pad. It usually takes a hummingbird about half a minute to realize it’s finally free to flee.

Now it’s my turn. Oy. I’ve been enjoying myself, but I haven’t been channeling Dr. Doolittle. What if my nervousness somehow makes the bird even more agitated. But the Anna’s doesn’t seem to be aware that I’m obsessing. He just settles in on my hand, making a sound that feels like purring (that’s his rapid heart beat, I’m told). Some of the others come over to stroke him, including a small boy who seems a bit aggressive in his pokings—OK, so I’m starting to feel protective—but most of the group just looks on, amazed. By the time my cutie finally flies away, it’s a clocked 10 minutes later. According to Erin, who’s been helping out at SABO bandings since she was 5, I’ve broken some kind of hummingbird-lingering record.

“Maybe your hand was sticky,” little Poking Boy suggests.

I don’t care. I’m thrilled, and I know the truth, although it flies—or, should I say, rests—in the face of my Brooklyn-bred cynicism. That hummingbird liked me. He really liked me.

It’s a balmy day in mid-September, par for the meteorological course in Palm Springs, where my friend Nikki and I are vacationing. We’re sitting near a dazzlingly blue resort pool, reading magazines, making conversation, applying sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen. No, Nikki and I aren’t particularly light-skinned, nor do we hail from sun-free cities: She lives in Phoenix, I in Tucson. But exposure is definitely an issue.

We’re nude, you see, lounging around a pool at Desert Shadows, an upscale nudist resort.

Mind you, Nikki and I aren’t nudists. Far from it. An occasional bout of youthful skinny dipping aside, we’re not prone to disrobing in public – and we’ve definitely never paid for the privilege.  And until a few hours ago, the two of us had not been on textile-free terms.  Nikki and I had gotten acquainted about five years earlier because we both write about food, among other topics. After a year or so of consulting with each other about restaurants in our respective Arizona culinary territories, we’d started dining together whenever one of us visited the other’s city. Eventually, we began gabbing on the phone about other shared interests: We’re both divorcees – she with a teenage son, I without children – who have a tendency to look for love in all the wrong places.

It was during one of these long-distance therapy sessions that we got into our fateful disrobing discussion. As usual, we were complaining about how it used to be a lot easier to bounce back from our restaurant-reviewing duties. Time was when a few days of dieting and some extra hours on the StairMaster would rid us of any added heft fairly easily. But lately, without changing any of our habits, weight reduction had become a major struggle. Wouldn’t it be nice, we agreed, if we could just relax and accept our estrogen-challenged bodies, flab and all? Half-laughing, I proposed going to a nudist resort. If we saw women of all sizes feeling at ease with themselves, I said, it might put our distorted self-images into perspective.

I never imagined that Nikki would take me up on my semi-serious suggestion. But there she was, agreeing that a nudist retreat might be just the thing to rid us of our shared obsession with perfection. My reputation as a New York City-bred sophisticate was on the line. I couldn’t let Nikki know that my proposal to lounge around in the buff was just a bluff.

The idea hadn’t exactly come to me from out of the blue. Nude recreation has been all over the news, and I’d secretly become intrigued with the notion of a naked vacation. A nudist flight to Mexico last year had gotten major, uh, coverage, and I’d read a piece on CNN.com about how baring it all had moved from the hippie fringes into the mainstream, with clothing-optional activities contribute some $400 million to the U.S. economy annually. I got my letting-go-of-perfection notion from the web sites of two major U. S.  nudist organizations, The Naturist Society (“Body acceptance is the idea – nude recreation is the way”) and the American Association of Nude Recreation West (“Clothing optional living is about freedom, joy, recreation, self-assurance and body acceptance.”)

I found  “freedom” an interesting choice of buzzword, too. I started thinking about how attitudes towards nudity had changed since “Hair” and “Oh, Calcutta,” where the act of clothes-shedding had been used to make a political statement about liberation. The recent crop of bare-it-all theatrical productions – including the “Full Monty,” “The Graduate,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire du Lune” and “Take Me Out” – as well as such HBO shows such as “Sex in the City” and “Oz,” which regularly include nude scenes, use nudity for its realistic, comic, or shock value, but not as a metaphor for anything more profound.

It was the media blitz about counter-culture nudism in the 1960s that paved the way for the current mainstreaming of nude recreation, according to Stephen Payne, one of the owners of Desert Shadows, who said his clientele was now beginning to get younger. “We didn’t originally market to young people,” he said, “because we didn’t think they could afford to stay here. But now it seems like we were behind the trend. Nude beaches like Hollover in South Florida are being mobbed by people under 30. ”

Boomers though we are, Nikki and I had missed out on the nudism part of the counter-culture the first time around; neither of us had naked commune stays in our pasts. We wondered if we would feel liberated now –  or merely as embarrassed as we’d be if we tried to wear bell-bottoms again.

Our search for a take-it-off spot nevertheless took off. We didn’t want to go too far away – what if we needed to escape? — or stay too close – what if we ran into someone we knew? — which eliminated Cap D’Age, an entirely naked city in the south of France, and Shangri-La, a nudist ranch near Phoenix. We weren’t interested in a singles pick-up scene like Hedonism II in Jamaica, nor a totally family-oriented retreat like Cypress Cove near Orlando — Nikki needed a break from contact with teenage angst.  We finally hit upon Desert Shadows Inn Resort in Palm Springs, opened in 1992. It was a four-hour drive from Phoenix, it billed itself as family-friendly — and it had a spa.

With its swaying palm trees and soothing pink buildings poised against a dramatic mountain backdrop, Desert Shadows looked great on line, but we wanted to be sure we wouldn’t feel out of place there.  I phoned and explained that this was our first venture into “naturism,” as the website termed it, and that we were two single women just looking to relax. The friendly front desk manager assured me that the place had a strict policy: If anyone said or did anything that made us feel uncomfortable, we had only to report it and the guest would be asked to leave. He explained that many areas of the resort were not clothing optional – you were expected to be nude in the main public areas, such as the pools, though you weren’t required to rip off your clothes immediately if you were coming in from the outside – but in other parts of the property, like the dining room, your attire was up to you.  I was dying to know what the dress code was at reception, but asking the manager what he was – or wasn’t – wearing seemed like a question you’d ask on a 900-number phone call. I didn’t want to get asked to leave before I even arrived.

We booked a two-bedroom villa –  we would get to know a lot more than we might want about each other, so separate sleeping spaces were an agreed-upon requirement –  for two nights, Sunday and Monday, only. Our budgets were tight – the accommodations cost $295 a night, off season – and our chutzpah had a limited shelf life.

The reaction from friends was mixed. Many of the women laughed and exclaimed, “You’re brave. I wish I had the nerve to do that.” Others snorted, “I could never…” Some — including two who don’t even like to appear in public in bathing suits – contended they would have come along had they been asked. The men? One of Nikki’s friends accused her of being an exhibitionist. Another, with whom a romance was brewing, seemed partly amused, mostly turned on.

“Bring back pictures,” nearly everyone said, regardless of gender.

And so, one Sunday morning in mid-September, we bade goodbye to the two people Nikki couldn’t bring herself to tell, her mother (“She doesn’t need to know what type of vacation we’re taking. It would only worry her”) and her 13-year-old son (“He’s just becoming a sexual creature. I didn’t want him to be thinking of his mother in that way, to have to wonder about  men looking at me naked. Ick.” ).  Then –  all too quickly it seemed –  we found ourselves ringing the bell of a large wooden door in Palm Springs, and getting buzzed in. The two people at the reception desk were indeed dressed. But just beyond a glass door, hanging out by the pool, there they were: naked people. I found it hard not to giggle nervously during our tour of the beautifully landscaped grounds, and when Nikki and I got into our  villa –  more upscale motel than luxury resort style, but immaculate and featuring a large kitchen, Jacuzzi tub, and wonderful outdoor shower  –  we let out a few tension-releasing laughs.

But we knew that we couldn’t hide indoors indefinitely. Besides, it was a beautiful day. So we scuttled off to our respective rooms and came out dressed for the occasion: Not.  After going through a litany of complaints about our bodies – “Look at my huge stomach!”; “See how my breasts are sagging!” –  and mutual assurances that the other’s flaws were imagined, we ventured out, carrying only the large towels that doubled as security blankets and sanitation guards.

The al fresco walk to the pool and search for lounge chairs was easier than expected. It’s not that nobody looked at us, but the reception was no different than the one I get when I show up at the pool at my health club.  Sitting under a tree, several yards back from the main activities pool, we surveyed the scene. As expected, we saw a wide range of shapes –  from totally toned to way overweight –  and ages, from teenagers to septuagenarians.  I observed that the men seemed to care less about their appearance than the women — at least a far larger proportion of them had larger proportions. But mostly – I admit it – I was fascinated by the array of male genitalia on display. I felt like I was in the produce section of an exotic supermarket: no poking or squeezing, please.

The nudity novelty wore off quickly, however, and we soon turned to the light reading we’d brought – and to applying sunscreen. A few relaxing hours later, we went back to our room. The evening’s scheduled dinner was a buffet, so we decided to get dressed and head to downtown Palm Springs.We’d had enough nudity for one day – and we weren’t quite ready for any close encounters with chafing dishes.  As we sat on the fairy light-draped terrace of a seafood restaurant, we rehashed our reactions. We agreed that our relatively  blase attitude about lying out in the altogether might have been attributable to the fact that we were hiding a few rows back from the pool action.

The next morning, determined to mingle, we took the plunge. Wow – the cool water felt wonderful against my unencumbered skin! And the natives were friendly. Nikki and I easily fell into conversation with a number of people throughout the day: a sales manager at Costco who was wearing only a boater (hats were big at Desert Shadows); a neatly-coiffed real estate agent from Connecticut who looked like Harriet of “Ozzie and Harriet”; and a handsome financier from Pebble Beach, California, by way of Russia…. There was no one nudist “type,” no way to profile those who chose to go without clothes. So much for my assumption that this would be an aging-hippie fest.

On this Monday morning, only boomer and beyond-age nudists were around. (My sense that the younger people we’d seen when we arrived must have gone back to work or college was later confirmed by owner Stephen Payne, who said summer and college breaks were – no surprise – the peak times for that demographic.) Most of the people we spoke to had been doing the nudist circuit for years, and said that they’d found Desert Shadows to be the nicest,  most upscale of the naturist retreats.

Which didn’t mean you couldn’t let loose here. We learned that we’d arrived too late on the previous day to catch the pool volleyball game (darn!), and that we’d missed naked karaoke on Saturday night (double darn!). Whenever we told people we were nudism newbies – on this quiet weekday, we were apparently the only ones –  they were very solicitous. We heard several variations on the theme of “You’ll never want to go back to wearing clothes again.” The “L” word – liberated – came up a number of times, as did the notion that nudism just felt, well, natural. And nearly everyone said, “You meet the nicest people in these places.”

Most of them were nice, anyway. I thought that the glances of a couple of men I talked to lingered a bit too long on my breasts. It never reached the point where I  felt uncomfortable, however, in part because I had equal visual access to their assets. And there was no one I considered reporting to the front desk propriety police. Nikki, citing the incident of the dangling genitalia – a man who leaned down to talk to us at the pool positioned himself so that his tender bits were, literally, in our faces – contended that some guys seemed pretty happy to be exposing themselves. She nevertheless agreed that everyone made a conscious effort not to be overtly sexual.

Although we’d missed naked karaoke, Nikki and I got to enjoy another unique experience –  walking over Desert Shadows’  nudist bridge, the world’s first such span when it debuted in February 13, 2003, and immediately became the brunt of jokes by comedians such as Jay Leno. Officially named the Lee R. Baxandall Bridge for one of the foremost champions of nude recreation in America but called everything from the “naked bridge” – its usual designation –  to the “bridge of thighs,” it links the resort with the affiliated nudist condo complex on the other side of Chaparral Road, a main Palm Springs artery. It was initially considered a traffic hazard because it was draped in not-quite-opaque material, causing motorists to look up in the hope of catching a shadowy glimpse of some nudes, but by the time Nikki and I walked across it, the bridge was safely covered in completely nontransparent canvas. As we looked down at the traffic below,  we both got a kick of the  “Nyah, nyah, I see you but you don’t see me” kind.  It was the only time during our stay when we felt mildly exhibitionist.

By dinner time, there was no question of getting dressed to enter the casual dining room. It would have seemed weird, somehow. Anyway, being food critics, we were far more interested in discussing what was on our plates – nothing terribly exciting –  than in looking at what people in the restaurant weren’t wearing (not a single diner was clothed, but the servers all were).

All in all, it had been an interesting day. But when we returned to our rooms, we discovered that, notwithstanding all our attempts to keep up with our sunscreen applications. we’d been overexposed. Nikki was sore in a spot where no sun had ever gone before. “Look,” she cried. “I have a burning bush!” I clearly hadn’t applied sufficient sunscreen to my hidden regions either. “Just call me Robin red breast,” I countered.

The last morning was fairly low-key, as we stuck mostly to the shade, catching up on our recreational reading. Moreover, our heads were already back in the world of work – and clothing.  Our final assessment? Nude swimming felt fantastic, and walking around without clothes wasn’t the major deal we thought it would be — you get used to it surprisingly quickly. But nudism seems to involve a lot of sun worshipping, and we’d both put our baby-oil-and-iodine days behind us. There were many, many things about which we hadn’t yet achieved wisdom, but we knew better than to be turning our skin into shoe leather.

Moreover, neither Nikki nor I felt liberated by our experience.  Shedding our clothes had not returned us to a more natural, prelapsarian state or transformed us, even temporarily, into free spirits. In fact,  Nikki felt more self-conscious when she left than she had before she came.  “I don’t consider myself a prude,” she said, “but nudity 24/7 is not for me. I don’t want to be thinking about my gut. I would much rather cover it up, and delude myself that I’m slim and beautiful.”  Fixating on the young, hard-bodied women who’d been there our first afternoon, she left Desert Shadows determined to lose some weight.

Me, I was glad that society had progressed to the point where nudity was no longer a big deal. Lounging around with your clothes off was just another recreation choice that, like skiing, younger women could take or leave. And, unlike Nikki, I’d achieved my goal of getting over my self-consciousness – when I remembered my age, of course. I may not look like I did when I was 25, but I went home feeling reasonably satisfied with the shape I’m in.

Besides, I’d learned that my body wasn’t necessarily my key asset. As I was leaving the pool on the final morning, still in full undress, a man with whom I’d chatted on the previous day approached me and said, “I hope you won’t be offended by my saying this, but you have a really nice smile.”

As this summer of our discontent dragged slowly to a close, swamp coolers whirring uselessly against endless days of record heat, time was, I thought, to reconsider why I moved to Tucson. I recently appalled an East Coast friend by telling him that little lizards often crawl up through my kitchen drain. Pressed for details and wanting to shock further, I regaled him with creepy tales of rattlesnakes, spiders, and scorpions among the saguaros.

So, he wondered, after a stunned pause, what’s a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing in a desert like this? What on earth had possessed me to leave behind my co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue for such a hostile place?

There’s no hostility shortage in New York, needless to say, but I wasn’t just looking to trade in one unwelcoming environment for another. The quick answer to my friend’s questions was that I wanted to try my luck as a freelance writer – a luxury I couldn’t afford while paying a king’s ransom of mortgage and maintenance on my tiny piece of the Manhattan rock. So, I said, I wanted to buy some time and space in a less expensive city.

That’s the superficial story. The truth, as usual, is more complex. Another friend came closer when she suggested that 40 years of wandering by my ancestors in the Sinai might still be lingering in my soul. I’m not greatly given to mysticism, but the green cramped history of New England never did feel much like my own.

Since I came here, I’ve been granted another vision of America, one I only vaguely recollect learning about back East. The English must have had a terrific PR team – how else can you explain the absence of the Spanish conquistadors and padres from my early classrooms? I knew more than I ever wanted to about those New England Puritan father-and-son preachers, Cotton and Increase Mather, but until I settled in the Southwest I had never heard of Junipero Serra or Eusebio Kino, Jesuit missionaries who traveled a whole lot more and had less peculiar names.

Oh, I know the Spaniards could be a cruel bunch, ruthless in their destruction of ancient Indian civilizations, not to mention my own ancestors’ heritage in the Spanish Inquisition. Still, I can’t help but feel a kinship with a people who headed south to warm climes when they crossed a great ocean instead of just substituting one cold shore for an equally unyielding one. Who could relate to a bunch of guys who took Saskatchewan when they might have had Acapulco?

The myths of New English tell of harsh winters; in New Spain, it was relentless summers that had to be overcome. If, to paraphrase the poet, the world must end in fire or ice, I say let me burn. Let me die like Don Quixote, from an excess of imagination, rather than mired down in details like Hamlet.

Do I distort and exaggerate, arrange unfair juxtapositions? So be it. Back East, I was a Ph.D. without portfolio, a literature instructor with no inclination to teach. I edited travel guides to make ends meet. Out West, I have learned how to drive – and how to get paid for reporting what I observe along the way.

My vistas have literally expanded. The space in New York is vertical, massed buildings blocking out the sky. In Tucson, you learn the derivation of the word “horizon-tal.” Much of the time you’re boundaried only by the flaws in your own vision.

And by the city’s encircling mountains. Each time I go to the supermarket, I see the Santa Catalinas rising up before me. In late summer, before the monsoon rains bring relief from the heat, they’re often edged by grandly billowing clouds. The night of my talk with my New York friend, storm warnings bleeping across my TV screen sent me scurrying to my back yard. There I stood looking at the lightning, flash after flash illuminating an ink-black sky. Clashes of thunder drawing ever closer made me wonder whether I should head back inside. But I didn’t.

Call it an ancient Semitic desert yearning or a hearkening back to lazy, youthful summers spent baking on Brighton Beach; I can’t say for certain what makes this often-searing town seem like home. I only know that Tucson gives its pilgrims something far more precious than affordable real estate, that I’ve arrived at a place where you can let your mind roam.

– from “The Naked Truth“

– from “A Bird in Hand“

– from “Mexico’s Sweet Spot“

– from “Of Vistas and Visions“