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Carmen Ezpinoza demonstrating tortilla preparation at Tumacácori National Historical Park. 

Carmen makes the soft and pliable flour tortillas that are the staple flatbread in northern Mexico and in the Santa Cruz Valley of southern Arizona.

The tortillas

―

made only of flour, lard, salt, and water ― are cooked on site on a mesquite-fired griddle.

At the demonstration ramada she serves them up with beans and chile de arbol salsa made using recipes handed down from her mother and grandmother, who also worked as food and craft demonstrators at Tumacácori.

Friendship confirms existence―and in the most generous of ways. Against harm’s haunting insistence that any given self is the world unto himself―that all that is real is judged to be so by the mind perceiving the real, to the horrific point that even the self thinking the world is but the idea of the self thinking the world―friendship says, “he is and I am and it is.” Friendship answers skepticism with a peculiar and intimate faith: my friend is as real as me. The stakes of the world are the world. It is dangerous because it is real. One must find a friend to sail with upon the ocean. Only friends can face the awful risk that is living, and the awful wonder. One looks at his friend with the world in his eye. It is not “mine.” The friend knows the world is always and ever, irretrievable, maddeningly, lovingly, longingly “ours.”

A Whaler’s Dictionary, Dan Beachy-Quick, 2008

I drove an hour yesterday for a morning of birding, only to find this fellow perched high in a sycamore over my parking spot when I returned home. 

He’s not presenting all of the field marks I could hope for, but I think this is a youngling red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), whose eyes and breast feathers will keep darkening as he matures. Your ID suggestions and corrections are always welcome.