Sagebrush

Sometimes, we talk about our funerals. I want the congregation to sing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Dad prefers “How Great Thou Art,” and Mom’s choice is “I Believe in Christ.”

Mom wants sagebrush to be part of the floral spray on her coffin. When she was a young adult, she visited a friend in Washington, D.C. They traveled to New York City and she found herself powerful homesick. She’d never seen roll-up security gates on storefronts, and the amount of people and concrete was overwhelming. On the drive back to Utah, she rejoiced when she could see wide open high mountain desert vistas and smell the sharp, clean fragrance of the sagebrush. Sagebrush meant she was in the West. She was home.

It’s an unassuming plant, sagebrush. Never demands the spotlight. Scraggly and spare, it thrives in extreme temperatures and low water conditions. One reason there’s so much of it is because it’s bitter–the herbivores pass it up for tastier fare. Sage is long lived, with some reaching ages over 100. It’s the ever-present backdrop to my time in the West’s great outdoors, and as such I usually don’t pay it much heed.

On a recent Saturday, I woke early, biked out of my manicured neighborhood, and headed toward the canyon. As I neared the mouth, the path was lined with sagebrush. The cool and wet of the morning amplified the scent. I stopped and inhaled deeply, reverentially. A lifetime of moments spent in sage county collapsed into each other and became one centering memory of dirt, sun, and wind. One memory of home.

Later, I leafed through Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, looking for an ode to sage. I found it combined with a love letter to juniper, which suits me just fine.

“The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West.”

Sagebrush on a coffin. The more I think about it, the more right it feels. If Grandpa could have a medley including “Tumbling Tumbleweed” played at his funeral, surely Mom and I can have sagebrush on our coffins. Sagebrush is home, after all, and that’s where we’ll be going.