Place a wager for best description of a desert rain on chapter twelve of Barbara Kingsolver's book The Bean Trees and there's a good chance you'd win. She crescendos over the course of some 800 words just to build up to her description of the subtle and therefore easily dismissed scent that rises in the air before a desert summer rain. It's a remarkable and realistic chapter. So why would I bother writing about it?

To hear my wife tell it, I present no shortage of difficulty when it comes to Christmas trees. She's probably right. Before our second Christmas I barnstormed with fury that we forget a tree and get a cactus instead, because that was something we could plant in the yard after making a spectacle of it. Well, that unfestive suggestion grew no wings and did not fly. We still found ourselves at a tree lot, looking for something perfectly triangular and uniform and just tall enough and something more or less out of a storybook and everything else that just doesn't come naturally to things that are, well, natural.

We bought one. Probably for 60 bucks. The whole experience left me dissatisfied . . .

The two little girls hiking in front of me are far from bumming. They're beaming. For the moment, I'm just here to silently supervise and swat the flies and watch for snakes. My own flesh-and-blood daughter has discovered a short piece of a cottonwood branch and declares that this new hiking stick makes her the leader. She's 3 years old, jamming down a footpath trail next to a desert river with a stick in her hand. She's unstoppable. Of course she's the leader. Even her 8-year-old cousin yields to the demands, looks at me and . . .

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