Remember That!? Driving Across the Country to See a Yucca Plant

Do you remember a time when we didn’t know everything?

As she looked out the window she wondered when we would stop. At least that’s what I imagine my mom was thinking as I look back on that desert car trip.

“That’s a nice yucca plant.”

She had said it so many times that day, now years later, we still remember it. My older sister and I use it as an easy joke when we are in the car together when one of us wants to stop, but the driver keeps pressing on.

I guess there were only six of us in the car at the time, four in the back seat, my parents in the front, where my mom hinted to my dad that she would like a picture of a yucca plant. That was a small group for my family, which had nine kids. There had been trips with more kids crammed into cars than this one.

All of us in the back seat, me along with my sister 10 years older than me, my brother and sister, five and six years above me, stared out the window at the blurry desert, our bodies crammed together, rattling like stew bones. I had no idea what a yucca was but imagined a tall cactus with three arms like the ones I saw on the Road Runner cartoon.

Later I would learn that I was wrong. That was a saguaro. A yucca was a shorter plant with a bush of spiky leaves. I started seeing them in my neighborhood a few years ago, 1,300 miles from our desert trip. This summer I walked down the street to my neighbor’s house and looked at the plant from the sidewalk.

There were three yuccas growing in his yard. Each low plant had a tall stalk standing in the middle as high as me with a bell of blooms about to burst forth. It seemed crazy to me that all I had to do was walk a few steps to see these plants while my mom had to drive across country to do the same.

I don’t know how many times she had to say, “That’s a nice yucca plant,” and the implied “let’s stop and take a picture with it,” before my dad stopped.

I have no memory of the plant from my childhood, only the line. I remember bits and pieces from trips to the south, though I can’t be sure if they were during this trip or another. A drive up a tree lined road in Arizona, with my mom’s…