For six years, I covered the U.S.-Mexico border for The New York Times, based in Phoenix. Many times, I traveled to the Mexican side of the border, bringing my sensitivity as a Latin American living in the United States to stories I reported in Spanish and wrote in English for one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. Months into the Trump presidency, I spent days in Sonoyta, a tiny border city where the western ends of the states of Sonora and Arizona meet, investigating rumors that Central Americans, mostly young men traveling alone, were stuck there, discouraged to push north because of Trump’s threats of detaining and deporting more migrants.

I returned to the border in late May, though to another city — Ciudad Juárez — and in another role. I’m now a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and I was there to help teach local journalists to insert more fairness to their coverage of the Central American migrants at their door, a joint initiative with Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para Prevenir la Discriminación, or Conapred.

Our goal was to telegraph what the future could be like if Mexican journalists covering the migrants in their backyard take their cues from their American counterparts. It is fair to say that the situation faced by Mexican border communities such as Juárez is a direct result of policies enacted on the other side by a president who governs more like a bully than a diplomat. Just recently on Twitter, he threatened to impose a 5-percent tariff on all goods from Mexico “until such time as illegal immigrants coming through Mexico, into our Country, STOP.”

Thousands of Central Americans have arrived in Ciudad Juárez in recent months, fleeing violence, poverty and persecution. One estimate is that there are roughly 13,000 of them there, trapped by Trump’s requirement that they stay in Mexico while their requests for asylum in the United States are pending. As I was riding from the airport to the hotel, the taxi driver, a sexagenarian named José Quintana, told me that local residents used to bring food and supplies for the migrants, but that their benevolence — and patience — has worn off.

“People are angry,” he said. The migrants “are not our responsibility.”

While I was in Juárez, I saw the animosity in evidence on the pages of El Diario de Juárez, the only daily newspaper serving this city of 1.4 million. One of its most prolific interlocutores is Mayor Armando Cabada Alvídrez, who just the other day declared that “antes de los derechos humanos de los migrantes están los intereses de los juarenses (before the migrants’ human rights are the interests of the people from Juárez)” and said the federal government ought to “ponga el recurso para que se regresen (put up the money so that they can go back)” to their home countries.

I told the journalists at the training that I believe fairness can only be achieved when we recognize our own biases and that instead of striving for objectivity, they should focus on controlling their subjectivity. In other words, they should build a personal checks-and-balances system with their beliefs and opinions and use it to modulate their coverage.

So I set out to discover the beliefs and opinions they had. I handed each of them a piece of paper and asked them to write the first words that came to mind when they heard “migrante centroamericano,” urging them not to stop and think about it. “Let your thoughts flow onto the paper before you run them through the filters inside your head,” I instructed.

Here’s what some of them wrote:

“Pobreza. Maras. Delincuentes.” (Poverty. Gangs. Delinquents.)

“Maras. Ilegales. Delincuentes.” (Gangs. Illegals. Delinquents.)

“E.U.A. Gente que vive en la calle. Probablemente me miente.” (U.S.A. People who live on the streets. Probably lying to me.)

“Pobreza. Desesperación. Ilusión.” (Poverty. Desperation. Illusion.)

Prior to this exercise, my colleague Andrés Martinez had spent some time talking about the politicization and polarization that have defined the coverage of immigration by U.S. cable news channels, in particular Fox News, a favorite of President Trump’s. Trump and Fox have operated as close allies since his days on the campaign trail. He often shared the stage with one of Fox’s highest-rated on-air personalities, Sean Hannity, working in tandem to fire up the crowds with tendentious questions and comments about a border wall that was going to be paid for by Mexico.

Martinez, a former editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, titled his talk, “El Reflejo del Espejo: ¿Qué podemos aprender de la cobertura de migración mexicana en E.U.?” At one point, he showed a picture of Trump during a White House event in June, surrounded by families of American citizens killed by undocumented immigrants. That was Trump’s way of capitalizing on a lie that he has been hammering on since his days as a candidate: that “year after year, countless Americans are murdered by criminal illegal aliens,” as he declared in his 2019 State of the Union address.

Statistics and studies have proven otherwise, but the story has taken a life of its own, frightening people who live far away from the border and to whom the crisis that’s unfolding there is consumed in hyperventilating news bites delivered all day and night.

The training also included local communications professionals and members of civic organizations working directly with migrants. One of them, Hermana Esther, a nun who runs Casa del Migrante, the largest migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, took to the microphone and said, “This type of rhetoric that Trump has used against Mexicans, the Mexican media is using against Central Americans.” Then, she noted that when Central Americans say they have been mistreated by Mexican law enforcement authorities, “the journalists don’t get interested in it.”

The journalists, for their part, face their own obstacles. One is that government has a heavy influence on the media in Mexico because government is still a big advertiser and it is its advertising money that sustains many a print and broadcast media enterprise. There are also challenges that are all too familiar to U.S.-based journalists, like a 24/7 news cycle, the requirements that they write fast and often, and the demands of promoting themselves and their news on social media, which favors the most alarmist of angles and headlines.

In our workshops — there were three, one for each cohort — Martinez and I highlighted how we’ve really messed things up in the United States, to the detriment of Mexicans. The vilification of immigrants has created errant shortcuts in the minds of many Americans, to whom “immigrant” has become synonymous to “illegal immigrant,” which, in turn, has become synonymous to “Mexican.”

“The voice of the person who speaks is very powerful,” Marcela Azuela Gómez, of Conapred, told the participants. Yes, theirs are powerful, influential voices, but it is the journalists who have the loudest megaphone. And journalists in Mexico have the opportunity to chart their own course toward a fair and responsible coverage of migration, one that fosters understanding, not division, as it has in the United States.

The other day, I asked my friends on Facebook to recommend books that dwell on questions of citizenship and American identity, and told them that my particular interest is to explore the issue from the perspective of immigrants to the United States. I have this book idea … It’s still in its infancy, but I know it’s there because this is a story I’ve lived since I came to this country in 1998 to stay a year and go back to Brazil.

I’m still here.

The central question I’m trying to answer is, what makes a citizen? What is it that determines the country that one carries under her skin?

My friends suggested dozens of great books. This is the list, edited to suit my immediate curiosity:

“The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration & Displacement”

“Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America”

“How Race Is Made in America,” by Natalia Molina

“Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration and Identity,” by Tomas Jimenez

“Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities,” by Mary Waters

“Immigrant America: A Portrait,” by Alejandro Portes & Ruben Rumbaut,

“Citizen U.S.A.: A 50-State Road Trip,” by Alexandra Pelosi

“Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” by Gloria Anzaldúa

“The Joy Luck Club,” by Amy Tan

“My Underground American Dream,” by Julissa Arce

“Juarez: The Laboratory of our Future,” by Charles Bowden

“How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America,” by Moustafa Bayoumi

“Strangers from a Different Shore,” by Ronald Takaki

“Barbarian Nurseries,” by Hector Tobar

“Just Like Us,” by Helen Thorpe

“The Faraway Brothers,” by Lauren Markham

“Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” by Richard Rodriguez

“Suburban Sahibs,” by S. Mitra Kalita

“English With an Accent,” by Rosina Lippi-Green

“Lost in Translation,” by Eva Hoffman

“Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol,” by Kelly Lytle Hernandez

“Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Irish of New York City,” by Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan

“Becoming American, Being Indian,” by Madhulika S. Khandelwai

What are your suggestions? Let me know in the comments.

Taking the buyout is a choice I’ve made, a well-thought-out choice that will allow me to take control of the personal and professional paths I carve. It is about pursuing my definition of success.

Success is meaningfulness, so I am setting out to sharpen the meaningfulness of my life. I am grateful for every single day I called myself a staff writer for The New York Times, all the wonderful places I have visited and all the amazing people I have interviewed, many of them under very difficult circumstances. I thank The Times for giving me space to grow and try new things, and I thank the people I have interviewed for allowing me into their lives. Now, it is time for a new challenge. It is time to go deep where I want to go deep, and to go where the story takes me.

I have chosen to stay in Arizona, where I can report and write about the United States-Mexico border, which is a place like none other in the world — and one that I’ve gotten to know so well. I’ll use my history, sensitivity, and perspective to guide the journalism I produce.

Here is what that means to me:

I am going to share my knowledge and mentor budding journalists. Stay tuned for more news on that front soon.

I will produce journalism that is focused on topics I care about most — immigration and the border — and I’m going to do so from the border and from a border state whose demographic, political and economic changes foretell the profound transformations we are witnessing in the United States.

I will continue to report on wildfires, using the expertise I acquired while writing my first book — and which has only deepened since — to bring fresh voices and perspectives about the way we fight wildfires, who fights these fires, and the effects that humans and climate have fires, today and over time.

Much love and appreciation to the editors and colleagues who inspired me and made my stories better along these 12 years at The New York Times.

Now, it’s on to the main event.

¡Adelante!

The idea for this post came from an email I received from friend of mine. He wanted to know who I know which stories make a book, and which stories are better told as magazine or newspaper articles. “When have you reported enough to figure that out,” he asked, “and how much of it emerges in the writing?” It’s a question I often hear at book signings; besides their interest in the story of my book, The Fire Line, readers also want to know how I found out that it was a story worth telling in a book.

It all started with satisfying my curiosity. I have a habit of writing questions I’d like to answer on the back page of the notebook I’m using to report a story. That’s what happened after I left my home in Phoenix on June 30, 2013, and drove as close as I could get to the wildfire burning in Yarnell, Arizona, where 19 firefighters had died. I wrote several stories about the fire and its fatalities for The New York Times. As the days passed, that list of questions on the back of my notebook grew longer and longer. Soon, I realized that to answer all of them, I needed time, lots of research and lots of space to string it all together. That’s when I learned I had a book in my hands.

A fundamental question, as I call it, is the main thing you want to find out in your quest for answers. In the case of The Fire Line, I wanted to know why was it that the 19 firefighters — all of them members of the same crew, the Granite Mountain Hotshots — stayed together even as a wave of flames rolled their way. To find that out, I had to answer a bunch of other questions:

Fundamental question: Why did they stay together?

=> Who were they? => Why did they fight fire?

=> Why did they fight fire on this crew?

=> How was this crew different than/similar to other crews?

=> Who fights wildfires? =>What types of crews fight wildfires?

=> What exactly are Hotshots?

=> How are wildfires fought? => How do wildfires burn?

=> How do weather and fire relate? => What are monsoons?

=> How did the fire in Yarnell burn? => Why?

=> How was it fought? => Why?

The key to writing a good story is knowing what you don’t know and finding the right people and documents to help you learn it. It’s a simple principle, and one that all of us apply in our daily lives — What is it that I need to learn to cook this recipe, or help my children with their homework, or figure out the advantages (and disadvantages) of taking this new job. You have a fundamental question that leads to a bunch of other questions that need to be answered so that your fundamental question makes sense.

As a grown-up (on most days, at least), my hard-headedness has acquired a different name: determination. If you tell me I can’t do it, I’ll find a way to prove you wrong. So if you’ve ever wondered how it is that an immigrant who didn’t grow up speaking English and who moved to the United States as an adult has been able to make a living writing in English, that’s why.

One year ago this week, Flatiron Books released my book, “The Fire Line,” where I tell the story of 19 firefighters who died together while battling a wildfire in Yarnell, Arizona, on June 30, 2013. Writing it took all the determination I had inside of me, and more. It took facing my limitations, accepting them, and pushing myself to overcome whatever obstacles they presented. It took persistence. It took time and a lot of listening. It took some crying, too, but that’s alright. I write with my heart, and there’s no other piece of writing I’ve produced that has more of my heart in it than this book.

The paperback edition of “The Fire Line” comes out on June 6. If you haven’t read the book yet, you can buy it here and also pre-order the paperback on Amazon and at your local bookstore.

If you’ve read the book already, thank you; now go buy some copies for your friends, or tell them about it. There are so many books out there, but I believe “The Fire Line” is special. Help me spread the word.

Those of you who buy the paperback between now and June 6, email me a copy of your receipt — my email is fernanda@fernandasantosbooks.com — and your address. I’ll send you an autographed bookmark in the mail.

With love,

Fernanda

We spent our time together talking about the elements of storytelling, things like narrative arc, character development, description, sequence of actions, point of view. We read some amazing interviews to learn the importance of preparing for our interviews and asking good questions. We turned long stories into shorter ones, an exercise that reinforced to the students the importance of selecting what to include and not include in their stories. Again and again, I told them, short narratives are tough to write, but learning to write them is critical.

It is also critical to understand the challenges of being a journalist. Newsrooms are full of big egos and journalism is full of people who are highly competitive, which can be good and bad. Some reporters will do whatever it takes to shine, even if it means stepping on a colleague. Some editors are great mentors. Others will not hesitate to criticize you behind your back. I told my students they must believe in themselves always. Confidence — or the appearance of confidence, at least — is a critical survival skill in this business.

The juniors, seniors and graduate students in my class had to know that, just as much as they had to learn how to report and write a scene. After our last class, we went out to grab a bite and celebrate the end of a wonderful time together. These are the tips I shared with them. Read on and add yours in the comments. Who knows? I may well be back teaching in the fall.

1. Learn, learn, learn every day, from every person you talk to, every story you produce.
2. Don’t let self-doubt discourage you. Ever.
3. Remember that you are who you are, and use it to inform your reporting and find ways to connect with the people you come across. Because there is always a point of connection.
4. Don’t be a slacker: Pound the pavement, knock on another door, stick around a little longer.
5. Take your eyes off the screen and look, listen, smell and feel the world around you, then tell your readers/audience what that was like.
6. Be nice, but don’t be a pushover.
7. Be firm, but don’t be mean.
8. Always, always be honest, and demand honesty from others.

Shine on, kids! To infinity and beyond!

One of the perks of teaching a journalism class at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University is that I’m surrounded by incredibly talented people. One of them is Walter V. Robinson, the editor-at-large at The Boston Globe who led the newspaper’s stellar coverage of the Roman Catholic Church’s priest sex abuse scandal. The team won a Pulitzer for its work and the story of how its reporters got the story was immortalized in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.”

Robinson spoke to my students Wednesday night. I live-tweeted his talk and he gave so many great lessons in reporting that I decided to share them here. Enjoy!

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

1. GUYS! I have the amazing Walter V. Robinson, editor-at-large @BostonGlobe, speaking to my short-form narrative class at @Cronkite_ASU.

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

2. I'm going to share some highlights here.

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

3. First lesson: There's no story that is not a Page 1 story. It all depends on how well you *report* them.

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

4. He claims (his claim!) that he's not a particularly good writer. But he can get anybody to talk. AND THIS IS KEY. (I agree.)

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

5. "My view of writing is there's an extraordinary steep climb for the first part of the story." But once you frame the lede, rest is easier

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

6. Great details in crime stories come from police reports. These are public records. Go get'em. (Journalism students: This one is for you.)

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

7. Here's a story Robinson shared w/ my class where most details came from police docs: https://t.co/KyiXKYGSAa

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

8. And this is the real Robby Robinson in action. (Michael Keaton played him in "Spotlight.")

(Because I had to share a picture of him.)

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

9. Writers must be able to write serious stories and playful stories. Tone matters - and reporting will help determine the right tone.

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

10. Here's a story Robinson wrote that started as serious piece ... until the guy called him back: https://t.co/KyiXKYGSAa (The kicker!)

Actually, this was the story I meant to share in the tweet above. Can’t fix Twitter, so, hey, thanks, Medium!

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

11. If you want people to read your stories, run from the inverted pyramid. Craft lede that grabs reader - or reader will move on. (Concur!)

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

12. Only great reporting makes great writing possible. You have to get the detail. To get to detail, you have to go deep. And to go deep ...

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

you have to get people to talk. One way to do that: Tell them why it's in their interest to talk. No comment is never the right answer.

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

13. Most people are not familiar w/ rules of talking to reporters (off the record, etc.) If they say smth embarrassing, cut them some slack

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

14. Q from a student: How do you "bother" someone to get them to talk to you? (Answer in next tweet - and it's a good one!)

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

15. A: If you really want someone to tell you what's on their minds, what's uncomfortable, you can't email, text, call. You have to show up.

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

16. Here's another example Robinson shared w/ my class: https://t.co/8eGC23dgQV DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS!

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

17. When reporting, think of it this way: If you were to tell publicly how you got the information for a story, would you be embarrassed?

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

18. The public just does not believe in stories w/ anonymous sources. BUT ...

Fernanda Santos on Twitter

19. In today's fast-paced, competitive environment, one Q reporters & editors must answer is, do we know the sources & trust our reporting?

I hope you’ve loved these tips as much as I’ve loved them.

I dialed my daughter’s babysitter. She’s from Mexico. I’m from Brazil. We had bonded over our shared immigrant experience and shared status as naturalized citizens, and we had chosen to speak to each other in her native language. It helped keep my Spanish sharp. It helped her keep our communication effortless.

I noticed the man glaring at me as I spoke. Something about it made me uncomfortable. I turned my eyes to the cup of coffee before me, still untouched, and looked up a moment later. He was still glaring at me.

I hung up the phone. He got up and bellowed, “Speak English!”

I came to Arizona in 2012 waiting for that. The state, ground zero of our country’s immigration battles, had become synonym of intolerance. I steeled myself, preparing for a hostile environment, challenges to the language my daughter and I speak (Portuguese), or to the Spanish I use often among friends and at work, or to the café con leche color of my skin. On our first month here, we got pulled over on Interstate 10 as we returned from a lovely long weekend in Bisbee, in southeastern Arizona. My husband, who is white, was driving. I was beside him and our daughter was asleep on the car seat behind us. He still had a New York driver’s license. The patrolman glanced at it, gave us a warning and sent us our way.

“Welcome to Arizona,” he said.

We’ve grown to love living in Arizona, my husband, our daughter and I. We live in Phoenix, near Piestewa Peak, which we hike often, greeting and being greeted by hikers of all ages, skin colors and nationalities as we climb up and down the mountain. I met a man from Burundi once as we both were hiking at the end of a particularly hot summer day. He told me the heat of Phoenix was nothing compared to the sticky heat of Burundi. I told him I’ll take a hot summer over a cold winter any day.

The man I encountered at the coffee shop on Wednesday didn’t give me a chance to tell him I speak very good English, thank you. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I make a living writing in English, and he may well have come across one of my stories, or maybe my book. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him that I teach a writing workshop to aspiring journalists — in English. He didn’t know that I didn’t come to this country to stay, but met a man, fell in love, and then built a life for me here, carved my own path. My story is a quintessential American story of honest hard work and reward.

He told me to speak English. I told him — in English — that I speak four languages. He told me to fuck off, got up and walked away.

I was too shaken to say anything else to him, or to notice his license plate (not that it would have mattered), or to do anything else but get inside my car and cry.

What gives him the right to treat me this way?

A lot of ugliness has been happening these days. Insanul Ahmed, a senior editor at Genius, compiled a bunch of that on a Twitter moments he titled, “Day 1 in Trump’s America.” Maybe it is the dawn of a new time for all of this country’s “others.” Maybe it’s just that we’re more aware and more inclined to share. Maybe it is that the revolt against political correctness has unleashed the worst in people, given them license to say whatever the heck comes into their heads, civility be damned.

What I know is that ignorance is not a new phenomenon.

I shared what happened to me on Twitter because I had to get it out from inside of me.

Twitter can be an awful medium, and it has been particularly vicious since the start of the presidential campaign. I put it out there and put my phone away as I taught the writing workshop. My students and I were talking about interviewing and I told them, never judge, never assume, always approach your stories with an open mind and an open heart.

I got back on Twitter when the class ended. I was overwhelmed by what I found. There were hundreds of messages of support, most of them from people I’d never met and may never meet, but who nonetheless took the time to say they were sorry, that they were happy I was here, that the man at the coffee shop was an asshole (I agree), or maybe he was just jealous I can speak Spanish and he can’t (possibly).

Matt Schrader on Twitter

@fernandaNYT Phoenix native here. You are always welcome. Thank you for making my city your home.

Mariana Martins on Twitter

@fernandaNYT inveja porque ele só sabe falar uma língua.

John Eligon on Twitter

@fernandaNYT We got your back Fernanda! That special ignorance makes the work you do all the more important. Keep it up!

Liliana on Twitter

@fernandaNYT siento mucho lo q te sucedió. Ve con la frente en alto, orgullosa d tus raíces! Y no dejes q este incidente robe tu paz https://t.co/C3bgQ8EiAK

A lot of people have suffered unspeakable abuse, physical and verbal abuse, horrific abuse. I’m fine, and I can defend myself. What about those who can’t?

The thing that boggles my mind is, why is it that speaking another language in public should set people off? Diversity is only one thing that makes this country a great country.

This isn’t about politics. This is about basic humanity. It is not OK. It is not right. It is not American.

These are perverse emotions. They mock me. They’ve manifested themselves in many iterations over the 17 years I’ve lived in the United States and every time I felt I had them under control, they’d swallow me again. I’m like that woman struggling against the waves that keep crashing over her on shallow water. As hard as I try, I can’t get away.

Today is a holiday and I woke up determined to allow myself to enjoy it as such. My husband was away on a business trip. Our 6-year-old daughter was a champ this morning, helping me get her snacks ready, then brushing her teeth and combing her hair while I brushed my teeth and combed my hair so I could look presentable. I had to drive her to summer camp.

Summers are tough in Phoenix, where we’ve lived for three years. It gets very hot, like someone-opened-the-gates-of-hell hot. But it wasn’t bad when we walked outside, my daughter and I. She held my hand; I felt so loved, so complete. I was happy.

Wait! I AM happy. (Oh, yeah, here comes Guilt — “You ingrate, how can you possibly be sad? Look at the life you have!”) But I have moments of profound sadness, and they often come when I’m alone. When I am “enjoying” the silence. Gosh, I hate Depeche Mode! Well, I hate them … sometimes. I mostly love them, but, today, they get no love from me.

Let me explain. I’m sure Dave Gahan will understand. Dave, try walking in my shoes for a minute.

I decided that this cloudy and relatively cool summer day was a perfect day for a hike; it was only 91F at 9:30 a.m., when I got back from camp drop-off. I live very close to Piestewa Peak. (It used to be called Squaw Peak, but now it has a much nicer name. It honors Lori Piestewa, the first American Indian woman in the history of this country to die in a war while serving the United States military.) I filled up a quart-sized thermal water bottle. I grabbed my headphones. I fired up my “Nanda’s Rocking 80s” list on Spotify, which also has some songs from the 90s and a lot of Depeche Mode. I locked the door and hid the key in my daughter’s Radio Flyer Pathfinder, parked on our front yard.

I reached the trailhead after a few minutes. I clicked on my e-mail — no urgent messages. I scrolled through Twitter — the world had not ended. I browsed through Facebook — like, like, like. I opened Whatsapp. My family in Brazil has a pretty active group on Whatsapp. Rogério, who’s married to my cousin Mariana, who’s one of my godmother Tania’s two daughters, shares funny videos. Tania and Riso, who’s married to my uncle Tinho, who’s one of my mother’s two brothers, share prayers. My brother Daniel talks a lot about politics. The rest of us share mostly pictures of ourselves, our kids and, occasionally, some beautiful text we come across. My mother, Vera, shared a poem this morning — “Almas Perfumadas,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. It talks about the comforting, soothing smell that some people have. The poem is in Portuguese, though, and I’m really not equipped to translate it. (And heeere’s Self-Doubt: “I hope you let an editor look at this before you post it on Medium. I bet they’ll tell you they have some thoughts on how you can ‘elevate’ the piece.)

I closed my eyes and tried to remember my mother’s smell, but couldn’t. I could see her face and hear her voice. I could almost feel her scratching my head, caressing it. But I could not remember her smell.

My eyes filled with tears. I pushed the thought aside — leavemealoneleavemealoneleavemealone! SHAKE THE DISEASE, I said, probably out loud. I will NOT let you, Sweet Memories of My Past, bring me down. Not today. Today is a holiday and I’m going on a hike.

The Bangles made me want to dance my Egyptian dance as I navigated the rocky, rugged trail, a path that gets narrower and narrower as it approaches the peak. I rocked the Casbah. I learned from Tears for Fears what I already knew: Everybody wants to rule the world. I huffed and puffed as I climbed, drank some water, and said good morning to the few people I walked past.

The views are pretty from Piestewa Peak. You see the flat cities of Phoenix and Scottsdale speckled by mountains of rock, red dirt and cactuses. (“Cactuses” are an accepted plural of cactus, per New York Times style, so I’ll stick to that.) Cactuses are pretty, too. And they’re resilient, survivors.

Some weeks ago, my daughter went to a weeklong summer camp at the Desert Botanical Garden here in Phoenix and she learned a lot of things I didn’t know about cactuses. She told me their thorns are called spines and that spines help protect a cactus from plants and people.

I wished I had special spines to keep some memories away when they sneak up on me as I’m enjoying the silence. But I don’t. So when I got up there, all the way to the tippy-top of Piestewa Peak, and Depeche Mode screamed at me to enjoy the silence, I didn’t stop them. There was hardly anyone around, so I listened, sang along and unafraid, let myself cry.

Screw you, Depeche Mode! was originally published in Life Hack: Your Story, Experience, etc on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.