Category Archives: Nature

Cherimoya (34)

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cherimoya sitting on the Saturday section of the L.A.Times

I am holding a bag of lemons. Should I buy one bag or two? The farmer is describing the cherimoyas to another customer. “They’re creamy like a custard,” he says. “They taste like vanilla and coconut.” I remember seeing them in Mexico, but I can’t remember if I ever ate one. I like the odd cactus and reptile look of them. I read the sign—it says $6 per pound. My mind must balk because it plays tricks with that. My lemons are $5 for a bag of nine. I have already counted. I think, oh, the cherimoyas are really cheap. They must not be very popular in this country. My mind is thinking they are six for a dollar. I choose one that is not yet ripe, select five tangerines, pay, too, for my lemons. After, I find out the cherimoya cost $3.40. Now it is sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting to ripen. I don’t know whether to hope I love it or hate it, though hating it would be easiest, I think. If I love it, I will have to buy more.

Coming Home (33)

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It feels good to have my notebook propped against my thighs again, my bare feet on the curved edge of the footstool. Yesterday I felt awkward, clumsy with the pen in my hand. Today it feels familiar, comforting, like finding an old sweater at the bottom of the drawer. I thought I’d given it to Revivals, I think, and pull it on against the chill of a late evening. It has been too long, it seems, too long since I felt like who I am inside it, the old friend who brings you back to center. It hasn’t been that many days since I’ve written, but the days have been long and full. Even when I wanted to write—and I wanted to, bringing my notebook out to the patio table in the mornings, moving it to the edge of the couch in the late afternoons thinking maybe I can write that evening—I didn’t find a place to fit it in. The days have been so busy it feels like months have passed instead of weeks. But I am writing now, and I realize I love the act of writing itself, moving the pen across the page. I like pausing, looking up in the middle of my dreamy thoughts. Two doves and one house finch in the big tray feeder, wary I might decide to stand up again at any moment (human that I am). Sable disappearing beneath the honeysuckle. I love the way writing makes me feel, as if putting words on the page is bringing me more fully into the world again, more a part of life in our courtyard garden. We have smog today. I can see it from where I sit, a thick veil across the mountains. I hear the noise of traffic, too. But there is the quiet pecking of the birds, the scratch of my pen, the soft sound my hand makes moving on the page. It feels good to be here writing, good to be back.

Mockingbird Layers (28)

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Yesterday morning I heard a mockingbird singing on the telephone pole outside my bedroom window. It had been singing for a while before it came to me–this was the first mockingbird song I’d heard in months. I lay in bed and let it wash through me, the pleasure and the delight and all the many layers of mockingbird meaning laid down over time. My big love brought the mockingbird to my world fourteen years ago. I still think of him sometimes when I hear one, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table in my Santa Rosa apartment on a warm summer night, the mockingbird’s song drifting in the open windows from somewhere in the nearby dark. I still have never read To Kill a Mockingbird, though I think an old tattered copy of it may still be somewhere in my closet. I have picked one up more than once through the years from one musty used bookstore or another. I think I have been both intrigued and afraid to read it. Does a mockingbird die? Last Wednesday night the Camelot Theater was showing the film with Gregory Peck. I’d hoped to ride my bike to see it and try out my new headlight, but I let my work get the best of me. Today I read in the morning paper that Harper Lee is having a second novel published in July. Now I think I must read her first one, and watch the movie, too. And if I love it, there will be a sequel waiting. I like few things better than getting to read more about characters I’ve come to love. Maybe I’ll make it another mockingbird summer.

Good Candlemas (27)

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nasturtiums, bougainvillea

I light five candles for the pagan holiday today, pick flowers from our courtyard garden. They are still out on the patio table. I peeked at them a bit ago, watching them through the kitchen window, something reassuring and ancient about the look of those five flames lighting the dark. It’s been like early summer in the middle of our Palm Springs winter, that delicious evening air that feels like velvet against your skin. Or maybe you are the velvet—it is hard to know. It reminds me of one evening years ago sitting in the warm pool at Tassajara, the water and the air and my skin all one temperature so you couldn’t tell where one began or ended, the closest I have ever felt to being literally one with air and sky and water. The days have grown warmer than I’d choose, wanting as I am to push summer off as long as I can, but how can I complain about this evening air? It is like January in Ajijic, bare feet braced against the railing of my third floor roost, my northern Californian self almost gloating. I was barefoot in January. Now seven winters later I am spoiled in this. But still, I want to linger, wallow in the sweet, soft ease of it. Happy Candlemas, everyone.

five tealight candles, flowers, orange metal bird

February 1st, Candlemas Eve (26)

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The sky is beautiful this evening, that brief blaze of orange clouds in the last light of the sun, long gone from our valley but only now disappearing below that unseen horizon. I walk outside the gate to see more sky and spin, head thrown back. The waxing moon, almost full, surprises me. I spot the evening star setting in the west, Venus, I think. It’s as though a line connects her to the rising moon. Are they talking to each other? Later I write with the sliding glass door wide open, and I can see the star poised above the dark shape of the mountain, a sleeping beast, Venus wide awake and calling. It is Candlemas eve, Imbolc eve, the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the turning of the earth, the waxing of the light. Already we can feel the days growing longer. What sweeter way to mark the return of the light than with this bright circle of moon and her star companion, buddies in the early night?

Wild Things (24)

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My kitchen sink is angled in a corner, so when I stand before it to do my healing “toning” with the CD, the voices come to me from behind, engulf me, and my own meets them in the space between me and the corner, echoing, blending. Today I am toning my weakest note, the C, my birth note. I run the scrubbie inside a dirty glass and hit the note. “Jah,” I hold for eight counts, then “pah,” for eight counts more. I still run out of breath. My voice cracks and wavers, wobbly as I work to heal. But already I can feel the difference. Ideas for my blog flit through my head as I stand there, a series, maybe, about my health things, my German healers. The toning vibrates me. The dishes pile up clean and soapy in the left side of the sink. I think again about the power of belief, and just then the birds outside the window at my back bolt in a sudden racket of wings. I look over my shoulder, and the hawk swoops past and lands on the fence. I stand still, my fingers full of soapsuds, so I won’t startle him away. He moves to the other fence, and I turn around and bend my knees to see him through the window. When he flies off, I wish him well, send up a prayer. “May he have a full belly,” I whisper, “a little more often than he needs.” May he have a mate, offspring, a happy life. May he not go hungry. And then I cry, squatting on the kitchen floor, taken by that odd mix of gratitude and grief and love, aching for the small, beautiful, wild things of our world.

Keeping the Peace (17)

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Sunday, December 14th
When I wonder what to write for my Christmas letter, nothing comes but a vague sense of knowing, like a remembered dream, or as if viewed from underwater, blurred and indistinct. What was my year? How might I lay it down on the page? What will I choose, pluck whole from the blurred images, the trout tickled from the icy stream? It was a second hard year for me, but I turned a corner with Indian summer. Do I try to explain? Or do I try to capture the odd ethereal quality of the light on my arm as I sit in our courtyard garden on this winter afternoon, the cats both napping beside me on their pillows? I savor this ease, this togetherness. Sundays have always been sacred to me, a holdover, I think, from my childhood when the world would stop for the day. I wrap the lazy quiet around me like a cloak. I feel the sun on my throat, my collarbone, speaking to my thyroid. I am inclined to be tender with myself today, a warm regard that is new to me. For the moment things fall away, the hectic work week behind me, all the preparations that lie now between me and Christmas. I want to keep this with me, so I make a vow. I will remember to relish the cold air on my nose in the early mornings between now and then and to listen for the new songbird in our Palo Verde. I will remember to revel in the glistening magic of the colored lights on the fig tree outside the window when I turn over in the middle of the night. I will stop in the late afternoon to feel the sudden coolness on my skin the second the sun sinks behind the mountains like it’s doing right now. I’ll touch this peace again. I’ll look for the white-crowned sparrows visiting for the winter, so small but somehow sturdy. I’ll watch them flit about on the ground beneath the feeders, like I am watching them now, with a glad and grateful heart. And I’ll wish you your own delicious moments now and always.