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I thought I had killed it. Totally ruined.  Destroyed. I had well completed a myriad of tasks during the many, many childhood summers spent in southeastern Arizona with my grandparents and the twenty acres of desert land they cared for.  We had dug ditches, run irrigation, kept the field grasses short (so snakes would be kept at bay), cared for animals of varying types, tore old buildings down, painted the ones still standing, and trimmed a lot of mesquite trees. Have you ever trimmed a mesquite tree?  For those of you who haven’t, a brief word of explanation:  Mesquite trees aren’t really ‘trees’ at all, they’re bushes.  In order to make them look like trees, they need constant attention.  They are thorny… really thorny—huge, long, deep-penetrating thorns (see inset)—and gnarly.  After years of practice, though, I felt I had become a master mesquite tree trimmer. On this particular day, the one tree I had to get done was the lone (more…)