The town was almost lost on the horizon and far away from any other inhabited land. It lay just at the border of an immense wilderness, so dry and barren that palms had stopped growing many decades ago. The never-ending sand dunes left no space for small valleys to stretch, and the crusty, salty surface prevented an oasis from growing.
A few old adobe brick buildings, rows of colourful mud shacks, and a handful of narrow streets, like tentacles scattering from the main road, made up the town of Picaflor.
Here, locals survived hardship and isolation throughout unknown generations. Since time immemorial, they had endured by harvesting tiny palm dates and red and yellow prickly pears. They struggled to cultivate meagre crops; selling dry, decorated gourds as containers to keep the precious water pouring from the ten-thousand-year-old spring at the end of the town. Lately, however, even the gourd business had almost disappeared with the arrival of plastic bottles and Tupperware containers.
That year, the days of summer went by fast.
Again, to the marvel of most, the tiny plants that Pete had nourished for weeks grew to unusual heights in no time, bearing colourful fruits of extraordinarily large sizes. By the season’s end, after the heat had toasted the valley’s residents to a crisp, fall and winter appeared and everything began to go dormant again.
One day, the butterflies began to fly away, one by one. The birds, fattened by the juicy worms from Pete’s moist soil, left in noisy flocks. The ladybugs, always reserved in their lifestyle, found refuge under the drying leaves and in crevasses to wait until the next cycle of life. Only the bluish-red-tailed squirrels, always dancing and jumping, kept busy until the very end. They ran endlessly back and forth before the first frost, carrying nuts and fruits into their nests high in the now almost bare trees. With no cars on the road stretching across the town, the squirrels’ life span was unusually long.
According to local legends, fall and winter were the seasons when the spirits of the desert took over the small valley and forced residents to respect the sand dunes constantly changing shape in the distance. The shared fear always was that someday the sand would scroll into town plugging the narrow alleyways, leaving everybody secluded in their homes as in a dry golden flood.
During that fall and then in winter, bright and windy days quickly covered everything and everyone with a fine indigestible floury dust. Free balls of dry grass crisscrossed the roads, as if escaping the hands of playful ghosts whistling behind them. Freezing nights made the sand dunes shine under the moonlight and the wells emit cracking sounds as they became covered with a shield of ice protecting the precious water from the blowing dust. It was like many other winters, hard and endless, the way everybody remembered them.
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