Category Archives: Gratitude

Two Hemingways (22)

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I just read the chapter in Natalie Goldberg’s book where she visits Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West. She describes his attic studio with big windows and a “palpable presence.” She hears tourists gasp behind her. They feel it, too. Now that my short story has won his granddaughter’s contest, I feel connected to Hemingway, as well. I didn’t remember this chapter, but now it lights me up. Natalie talks about how he “cared about the sun and the gradation of light,” and I think: me, too. Me, too. I’ve bought his granddaughter’s memoir, Walk on Water. It’s sitting by the window on my kitchen table. And I will need to read the grandfather’s work now, as well. It is his name, his blood, that is my entrance into the literary world. I want to honor it. I want to know them both, fellow writers. I didn’t know he killed himself, or I’d forgotten. I only know I’ve had a great fondness for him for almost 40 years, ever since I fell in love with Gertrude Stein. I adopted her love for Hemingway. Now I take on Natalie Goldberg’s, too. I want direct knowledge. I want to stand in that attic studio with the Florida light falling through the windows. Maybe I will go to Idaho and stand beside his grave. Or maybe I will read The Sun Also Rises when I am walking the camino de Santiago across northern Spain, and I will visit Pamplona and stand in the room where he wrote and feel him there, this century later. And I will whisper to him that I used to think I was Gertrude Stein in another life. I will tell him about the uncanny light I fell in love with in the mountains of Jalisco. And I will thank him again and again for Lorian, for this granddaughter who loves my work.

I Won the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition

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newsclip of my contest win (Lorian Hemmingway Short Story Competition)

Here is the little Associated Press newsclip that got picked up in newspapers and posted on their websites. I also have a couple of pieces started about how it has all felt, but they still need to sit for a while. I have not yet fully digested the experience. But I didn’t want to wait any longer to tell you, my dear readers. I will say when I see the 857 entries it makes me gulp. And when I read about the community college professor who won the contest, I get a little thrill. It’s me, I think. It’s me.

[Here is the link to an online version in case you are relying on a screen reader: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/25/us/ap-us-hemingway-days.html?_r=0]

Summer Rain (20)

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I sit in the courtyard watching a raven in the rain. He is sitting in a palm tree in the distance, moving up and down in the light wind, but he seems to be enjoying himself. I count the seconds between the lightening and the thunder. Sable goes inside, hides under the bed, the only marring of my delight. In the kitchen I hear a loud popping sound and look out the window half expecting to see a palm tree in flames. Outside again, the birds take flight in unison, and I crane my neck looking for a hawk. He lands in my neighbor’s tree, and I move the binoculars to my eyes in slow motion. He’s all wet, his neck feathers slick and clumping like the wet fur of a cat. He is gorgeous, regal, his golden eyes fiercely alive. Later, I eat popcorn in bed, my eyes closing on my book, and let sleep claim me. I drift from dozing to deep sleep and back again, the steady rain soaking through all my layers. It is this long nap in the rain on a summer afternoon, so rare here, that is most alive in me now as I write, embedded in my flesh, touched by the divine. Did I remember to thank you? After, I go for a walk in the late dusk. I place each foot with care, small frogs hopping out of my way with every step I take.

Everywhere but Here (17)

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I wake from deep sleep after 8am. Good dreams drift away like fog before I can wrap my hands around them. I look out the window, and joy rises in me, full and light. It is the eleventh day of my 16-day holiday. I stand beside the kitchen sink and know I have fully returned to myself. Have I been gone for weeks? Years? It took ten days to shed the angst of having to check in throughout the day to answer questions. Even during the times of year when I take weekends off, it is not long enough for me to stop “feeling” people out there needing me, students and educators both. Now on Day Eleven I am free of it. I can feel the difference as the day unfolds. I am not in a hurry. I feed the birds, haul buckets of collected water from the sink and tub out to the young bougainvillea. I make my “liver flush” drink, lemon and garlic and olive oil in the blender, brew my fenugreek tea, feed the cats al fresco. I sip my drinks in the courtyard, talk on the phone for a long time to dear old friends who summer in San Francisco. I slide in yoga, too, quiet and easy, before I need to leave. I stay mindful, don’t rush, eat yellow melon and Brazil nuts from my purple glass bowl. When Audrey drives up, I bring my breakfast with me and eat it in the car. When she brings me home again after we have run around in the hot, humid afternoon, I eat gazpacho and slices of tofu on the patio and let myself read my Valdemar novel while the sun lowers in the sky. I water and feed the birds again in the almost dark because I am leaving early in the morning. A huge frog hops across the pavement, and I hope he is the same one I met before, am cheered to think he may have survived since spring. Later, I even take the time to make garlic and beet goat yogurt dip, and after my shower I eat it with potato chips and watch Parenthood until midnight. I can’t say how good it feels, how grateful I am to have come to this point. The difference is subtle, wordless, impossible to define. But today I have more room inside my skin, and being present becomes effortless. Why, I wonder, would I ever want to be anywhere else?

Just as I Am (12)

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auqua aura pendant on black cord

Going to the dentist makes me vulnerable. When I lived in Sebastopol I endured a long stretch of dental work. After each visit, I walked to Putto and Gargoyle. (It is now P&G Art.) I would breathe the sweetness and whimsy of this airy shop, take home a fat round mug or a big glazed candlestick to comfort me after my ordeal. It became a tradition. So when I had pre-crown work done earlier this month, I went to Crystal Fantasy and bought myself a pendant, an aqua aura, clear quartz infused with gold. They gave me a black cord, so I can wear it around my neck. Today I do my sun salutations in the courtyard. When I hold plank pose, the aqua aura dangles below my face. It has never looked so blue. I wonder if it’s picking up the sky, or if it’s the way the light reaches it when it hangs free like this. I move to downward dog and the crystal comes to rest against the tip of my nose. I want to giggle. I am a little kid with a magic stone glued to my nose. When I surrender to chavasanah I’m in tears. I am crying and laughing at the same time. It comes to me that I am doing good work. I know I am okay, even though I didn’t get up early to weed the tecoma bed beside the road, even though I still haven’t started my fall prep. I am crying and laughing because these things are true and still I know I am okay. I am doing good work. I am finding small ways to be easier with myself, kinder to myself. And maybe all my tiny efforts have added up to this small window of knowing I am enough just as I am. I sit up on my knees, my feet tucked under me, hands together in front of my heart. “Namaste,” I say. I touch my forehead to the mat, bowing to the light in each and every one of us. After, I roll up my yoga mats, and I am singing. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” I sing. My voice is quiet, tender, dear to me. I am enough just as I am. I keep singing. “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”

Morning Kisses (11)

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I like to wake up slow. When Sable is beside me, I turn over for morning kisses, pettings and rubbings of his soft furry face against mine. Today he takes off before kisses. Sofia comes instead. She never used to want to be touched, but now the cat she has become will present herself for affection in rare moments. (These times tend to be when I’ve just begun to work on the computer or have just sat down to dinner, and she’s pushy about it. I remind myself I don’t know how long she’ll be here because there is something about the way she invades I don’t find at all endearing.) This morning she is quiet. She gets in my face but then sits down. She lets me kiss the top of her head, stroke her cheeks. She stays for a long time. I talk to her about not hanging on for my sake, remind her to let me know when she’s ready to go. “I’ll help you go night-night,” I say. It makes me cry, good tears. I’m not open to her as often as I’d like to be, so this feels right. Then she decides to run off the bed, quick, jerky movements. She knocks my mini iPad to the floor. I yell at her. I remember I don’t want to yell at her. “Arrrgggghhhhhhhh,” I say, sotto voce, like the whisper of cheering baseball fans on the radio. But then I tell her she’s a creep. If I remembered to stop yelling, couldn’t I not call her names? Still, maybe it’s progress of a sort. I will add name-calling to the list, I think, as I walk to the door. I let the cats outside, step out into the courtyard with them. I say my little morning prayers. I try to forgive myself for yelling at Sofia (yet again). When I “come to,” when my eyes focus, I’m staring at the big waning moon just setting behind the San Jacintos. It is framed, postcard perfect, between the smooth green limbs of our Palo Verde. It makes me stop, this miracle, this affirmation of life, of magic in the world—this big gift. I stand there, grateful, and everything else seeps out of me. I watch, not moving, until she disappears behind the ridge. Goodbye, moon.

Goodbye Grackle (7)

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I hear a bird who is not one of my “regulars,” and I stop sweeping, stand listening in the open doorway of my trailer home. A timid peep comes from the Palo Verde, a verdin, who also doesn’t visit often. But his is not the sound I’ve stopped for. It was someone louder. Someone is calling from the top of the electrical pole across our small road. When I walk outside to look, I can’t see anyone up there. But he keeps talking, so I go get my binoculars. I used to bring them out to the courtyard every morning, to sit beside my notebook, my pens, my small pile of books. Sometimes I would just sit and watch my regulars, my mourning doves, my house finch, my hummingbirds. But they would be handy when someone unusual showed up. It’s a habit I’d like to resurrect. Now I study the top of the pole with the binoculars. It takes a bit of time, but when I see the bird it clicks. He is a great-tailed grackle, one of my favorites. I used to talk to them when I walked in the mornings along the bike path. But now there is no water for them on the golf course, and I don’t hear them anymore. I would say they never come to our trailer park, but there he is. I watch him on the pole, glossy black, big tail waving, intense. I stand listening to his calls. I should have recognized his voice. It is the sound of the Mexican mainland to me, a return to civilization, the exotic calls both welcome and comfort. He flies off heading south. I stand at the edge of my courtyard and watch him fly away. It feels like he came to visit me. Warm tears push at the corners of my eyes. And now the moon is in the south, too, a thin waning sickle in our pale blue sky. I breathe and settle. Goodbye, grackle. Hello, moon.