And was there something about working on and around water that was particularly appealing? I mean, the book is sort of organized into different bodies of water around which you've had these sort of formative experiences.

I think that's the through line of the book, that people may not think that, uh, the dunes along Lake Michigan are anywhere like a true desert.

But I had a Lebanese grandfather who told me stories of, uh, going out toward Mount Horon, picking anise seed, uh, from wild anise plants in the dunes at the base of the sacred mountain, and he...

Where he lived wasn't sandy in his orchard or field, but he told those stories like, uh, that are part of oral histories of any immigrants that made deserts loom large for me.

And the Indiana Dunes was about as close to a desert as we could have in the Midwest.

So I think it was a setup for what I did later on.

Uh, and by 17, I was visiting the North American deserts and just felt completely won over by them.

[laughs]

I wonder if you'd read that for us.

Yes, and let me contextualize it quickly.

It refers at the very start to a traumatic brain injury I had a few years earlier where I got thrown from a mule and suffered eye and brain impairments.

But it also echoes some interest in my very first book, The Desert Smells Like Rain, written in 1982, that I was trying to figure out why the desert smells like rain and whether the rains bring that smell and what it was comprised of.

So That's the context, and now I'll read you the piece.

It was more than five years after my traumatic injuries of cognition and vision when I could finally celebrate them as a blessing, not a curse.

And that happened because of how they allowed the rebirth of a powerful sense of smell that I had had as a child.

So if you talk about that here in the end, just a minute left, you know, you're hit your heart, not only your head.