Category Archives: Home

Morning Kisses (11)

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Prodigal Feline (2)

Posted on by
4

close-up, cropped image of my cat

Sofia’s been gone since yesterday morning. I cried when I woke up in the middle of the night. She’d done this already three days in a row, but the latest she showed up was midnight. I remembered Richard talking about the poems he’s writing for their cat Sunny who died only weeks ago. He’s wishing he’d been as loving, as open to her, as appreciative of her in her coming as he was in her going. I tortured myself in the dark with memories of pushing her off the bed with a pillow when she returned at midnight two days before and wouldn’t settle on the bed with us but kept making determined strikes for the bolster above my head. I wondered if she had found a home where she’s happier, where she is better loved. Even as the thought broke my heart, another followed on its heels. How could I deny her that?

Logic tells me she is only up to independent cat things. But I can’t remember when she had a stretch like this. Sebastopol? Over a decade ago? It’s an upswing in her cyclical illness, I think. She must be feeling better to take off like this. She’s hardly left the courtyard in months, almost always returned in an hour or so on the rare occasion when she did. She would disappear like this when she was young, first a response to her adoption, feral cat that she was. Later because the Hopland countryside was irresistible. I’ve gone through this with her for years.

I am sitting in the courtyard in the late morning, telling my mother about it on the phone. She’s been gone for over 24 hours now. “I tell myself she’ll be okay,” I say. “But every time I wonder if this will be the time she doesn’t come back.”

And then there is movement beside me. Sofia appears in the courtyard on her quiet cat feet. She acts as though she never left, or had been gone only for a moment. I tell my mother she was the magic talisman. I cry again, a muddled combination of relief and gratitude and fear. And then I laugh, kneeling, hugging her, shaking teardrops around us on the cement.

Early Morning Softness (52)

Posted on by
Reply

I have to pee at 5:30 in the morning. When I come back to bed, I reach for my big chunks of citrine and chrysocolla. I lie there, rocks held in my fists, body sprawled and comfortable, soft from sleep. I feel excited and happy. Even work thoughts don’t change that. I hear a raven calling nearby and the sound of morning traffic. I hear the pwitter of dove wings in the courtyard. The doves are polishing off what is left of yesterdays seeds. I feel reassured by dreams I don’t remember, my body fed by sleep, fortified, my heart soothed without knowing why. I prop myself up in bed to write and end up staring out the window. There is a small bird bouncing on the tip of a Palo Verde branch, a goldfinch maybe, or a verdin, lost amid the yellow blossoms. I am not yet wearing my glasses. Between that and the lingering softness of sleep, the world has no hard edges. I continue to drift on fuzzy thoughts, content. Later, fully immersed in the busyness of the day, I am stopped by the moon over my shoulder when I am coming in the gate. I pause, reminded, and pull that early morning softness to me, a shawl across my shoulders.

A New Moose (50)

Posted on by
Reply

Sunday afternoon the sun comes out in the middle of a hard rain. I look for a rainbow. I think of my father. “Oh,” I tell the cats. “A new moose is born.” I am excited. My father taught me this when I was three or four, an old Native American legend. The rain falls even harder. I hear it on my neighbor’s awning, watch the slanting fall of it through the sliding glass door. The sun gets brighter. “Oh,” I say, enchanted. “Maybe it’s more than one moose.” Then I grin. “Or maybe it’s a really big moose.”

Grace (49)

Posted on by
Reply

I wake up at 4:30 in the morning because Sofia is having trouble. I get up to give her more for her pain. On my way back to bed I see the almost full March moon hovering above our mountains on its way to the other side of the world. I stand by the sliding glass door and watch it, grateful to be awake to see it. After, I lie in bed awake, wrestling with my ongoing trouble with a colleague. These thoughts morph into worries about my job. What will happen if our nonprofit falters? Then I remember I don’t need to be afraid. I can trust the universe. Everything will be okay. I am curled up on my right side, Sable’s warm weight a comfort against my back. For a moment, I know I am held. Safe. Loved. It is like rolling onto my side on the yoga mat after Shavasana. I always lie there for a while, letting things sift through me, before I sit up and bow. “Namaste,” I whisper. The sky is beginning to lighten when I drift back to sleep.

The Promise of Pretend Rain (46)

Posted on by
Reply

Summer in Palm Springs requires a kind of stamina, I think. You discover ways to cope with the searing heat. Again and again you count the months remaining until it will be over. We are not quite there yet, and I haven’t given up hope for a stretch of cooler days still between us, but temperatures here are set to keep hugging 100 degrees for at least a few more days. Last summer we had thunderstorms, and I got excited at the thought that global warming might bring a monsoon season to our valley here. When I left town for my annual work retreat in June, I dragged all of my potted plants and trees into a clump and set an automatic sprinkler on them. When I got back, I left the odd little jungle in the corner of our courtyard garden. I liked looking at all that green in one place. Then one day when I was sitting on the patio something went awry with the water pressure, and instead of my 4-foot tall circle of water the sprinkler shot up twice that high. I closed my eyes, and the water hitting the umbrella sounded just like pouring rain. I could hear it pounding on the roof, hear it running off my neighbor’s trailer. When it was done, the wooden fence was soaked, and if I looked at only that one corner, that almost quarter of my courtyard, it was exactly as though the world had been drenched, made new by rainstorm. It felt incredible. In spite of the drought, I couldn’t resist letting it run another time or two before I reeled myself back in. I wanted that feeling again, had no idea we could manufacture it. It made me want to fill the courtyard with plants and drench them like that every day. It made me wish I could just keep letting the sprinkler run amock. And remembering this unintended luxury, I will tuck it away for a possible repeat this summer, one desperate day in July or August. Maybe just knowing it’s an option will ease that sense of desperation in the endless brutal heat.

Frog Fun (45)

Posted on by
2

Last night I chased our resident frog around the courtyard. I didn’t mean to, but I surprised him on his evening rounds, and I’m sure it seemed like I was following him, the crazy woman with the hose. I like to water earlier, but sometimes I just run out of daylight. Then I miss seeing the bursting colors of the nasturtiums, or the new shoots on the fan palm starts I brought from our Avenida Ortega home, kin to our huge beloved tree there. And I don’t get to enjoy it in the same way after everything is clean and wet, sitting outside in the midst of it all, soaking it all up, relieved and expanded like the garden itself. I always feel a little silly out there watering in the dark, but I can manage because the courtyard is small and light spills from the windows. It was just enough to let me glimpse our frog hopping out of my path. I was afraid I was terrorizing him. By the time I’d worked my way to the front, I could see he’d circled back around to the shed. So, I thought, he wasn’t too afraid after all, or he would have gone into hiding. Maybe he understood my apologies. Or maybe the wet yard was irresistible. I wonder now if I’ll need to make a point of watering more often at night. It must be frog heaven. When I was done, I found him sitting on my cat sculpture underneath the Palo Verde, nestled up against her neck. I left the two of them resting there together, companions in the wet dark.