In Arizona: Books on a Ranch

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A lonesome widow runs a bookshop on a ranch in Arizona, one of the warmest bookshops on earth. Her name is Winifred Bundy, and her establishment is called the Singing Wind. You go north out of Benson on the Ocotillo Road, cross the train tracks and proceed 2 1/4 miles across a cattle guard to the shot-up mailbox -- SINGING WIND, it says, a careworn advertisement that is easy to miss -- where you hang a right on dirt, continue a quarter of a mile, open a gate, close it behind you and continue another quarter of a mile past horses, cows and a pair of feuding cats. The trail pays out at the ranch house, where Winifred keeps store behind a mesquite door.

Before entering, it is useful to poke about -- that is if it is in a season when the wind doesn't knock you flat. The wind is nearly always remarkable west of the Mississippi, but each time it forces an occasional visitor into the posture of a boomerang, leaning as far forward as possible in order to gain ground, feels like the end of the world. In any event, the wind doesn't "sing" through the Aleppo pines in these parts so much as it tries to uproot them (the hardest evidence of its vigor is on the barn's tin roof; but for the weight of a slew of dead tires, nature would snatch away that galvanized hat). Violets grow in the yard year-round and tulips in spring. Off in one direction the Whetstone Mountains glower; in another, the Empire Mountains; in another, the Huachucas; in another, the Dragoons, big and little. Birds in the air include meadowlarks, a splash of yellow on their underparts, and vermilion flycatchers, and four or five different hawks, the Cooper's sparrow hawk and the red-tailed being the most prominent. In the cottonwoods down by the San Pedro River there are eagles. And skittering across the sere terrain are deer, weasels and badgers. Beneath the dinner bell by the back door is a sign: SINGING WIND BOOKSHOP. HEADQUARTERS FOR BOOKS ABOUT THE SOUTHWEST. STUFF OF DREAMS MAKE UP BOOKS.

Half the time you won't catch Winifred minding the firm. She could be in the kitchen baking brownies or chocolate-chip cookies. Or she could be in the fiber-glass hothouse picking peas, pulling chard. She might be off on her bicycle feeding cows. She may have gone to town to fetch dry goods. She is a firecracker in a pair of bluchers, a woman the shape of a cigarette, with energy to burn. Winifred runs to get a drink of water. "I have no real hours," she says. "If I'm here, fine. If not, tough luck." Calling ahead doesn't always work either. "I detest telephone-answering machines. I put the phone by the door and leave the door open and hope I hear it, but you never know."