Who's the Interloper?

The other day looking online we found someone practically giving away a tall cactus. I don't know my cactuses well enough--is this is a saguaro? So we borrowed a neighbor's truck and drive up to SLC to get it. Turns out the cactus was left in a penthouse by the previous owner and the current owner no longer wanted it. The current owner believed it had been growing in the window for the past fifteen years at least.

This is a pic of S standing next to it, feeling intimidated, as you can see by her face. Usually the porch is the place for pawpaw seedlings, but this big cactus? It's an interloper, isn't it?

But the pawpaws are interlopers too aren't they? That's the whole premise of this blog, Expatriate Pawpaw. Look closely in this pic and the subsequent pic--both of the Mango pawpaw cultivar--and you can see the sun damage on the leaves, caused by the hot western sun radiating through the dry air of the Great Basin. 

And then some other interlopers....This spring some barn swallows started perching on the bricks above our front door. We knew they were perching because we saw them flying around our yard a lot and then we found bird droppings all over the mat in front of our door. It was about this time that we gave the mat a good cleaning and looked up where they were perching. There was a shallow circle of mud--not a nest, it seemed, just a roost, so I wiped the mud away. But by the end of the same day the swallows had built a full-fledged nest up there! We gave in--sure it would mean a summer of bird droppings covering our welcome mat (what a welcome!), but the swallows were determined and besides as we thought about it more it seemed like having swallows raise a family up there would be fun for us, balancing out with the undignified welcome that our front-door guests would need to endure. 

So here we all are: swallows, saguaro, pawpaws, and humans, part of the
rambunctious garden of the post-wild world.