Melancholy
bends and twists
and bows
lilac after an early summer rain.
Touch it
smooth and hard
like sea glass.
Melancholy
a deep blue green
water
in Greece.
Melancholy
tastes like tree bark
like tea brewed from bitter roots
without enough honey
like artichokes.
It rings like chimes
in a light breeze
at dusk.
I dream I am dreaming. I know when I wake up in the dream whatever is there–whatever I see first–will be what’s important. I open my eyes and the first thing I see are the stars, a whole deep sky of them, the kind you don’t see in the city. And below is a wooden roof that is my mother’s roof in the dream, and there is some sort of art sitting on it like a fancy painted nesting box made of wood. I don’t understand it, but it makes me feel good looking at it in the quiet night.
Begin with the phrase, “I want to write about. . . .” Go.
I want to write about frogs and waffles, the way frogs come overnight in the ditches beside country highways after a summer rain, and you can hear them, thousands of frog voices all at once, when you drive along with the windows rolled down, and waffles crisp on the outside, pockets filled with melted butter, and you pour real maple syrup over it all and eat fast so they don’t get soggy. I want to write about trampolines. I remember how Del’s family had one flush with the ground in their front yard in La Crescenta. I loved that, not having that extra height of it being off the ground. I want to try one again after I’ve done more yoga and become less and less tight, less constricted in my movements. And oh! The trapeze! I’d forgotten about the low-flying trapeze and how somehow I was light enough and strong enough to move from one to the other in a large circle around Terri’s Berkeley studio all those years ago, like flying, like music, like being in synch, “aligned with something larger” as my blog reader wrote. I want to be that person again who can move around the room on the trapeze. I want to write about fossils. Fossils?!!? I would still like to go on a dig someday. And there is something to be said for holding a piece of life in your hands, rubbing your fingers against its roughness, along its ridges. I want to write about rain spouts in Ajijic.
Time’s up.
I ride along the bike path on my way home from the farmers market, the San Jacinto mountains ranged before me. “Look where I live,” I whisper. I remember driving home from Santa Rosa on Guerneville Road, fields spread out beside me, the green rolling hills ahead. “Look where I live,” I’d say. I’d wiggle my butt on the seat, both hands on the wheel, dancing a little jig inside. I can go all the way back to Oakland, to that freeway junction I loved, from 580 to 24, I think. It ran in a wide climbing arc, the glory of the East Bay spread out below me. In Hopland I would sit on our wide stone porch and watch the rock outcropping change colors with the day, and I’d feel like I was living in a vacation rental. Then walking on the beach in Todos Santos, alone amidst scoops of brown pelicans, no one else in sight. Or riding the bus to San Juan Cosolá, ranchera music pouring out the open windows, my cheeks wet with grateful tears. I have been so lucky. But there is something about the San Jacintos that stirs me. And they are such a contrast to the lush farmland and oak woodland green of Sonoma County that evoked that first deep sense of wonder over where I lived. Now it is this stark, enormous nearby presence that makes my heart beat, breathes my lungs, these craggy rock mountains so alive I wonder if I can ever choose to live without them.
I glance up and see a new yellow blossom on our palo verde, Serena. It reminds me of April 29th, the first full day in our new home. I was sitting outside in the morning, and a little yellow bird came to perch in the tip of our tree. She was smaller then. I remember talking to the bird, thinking her visit was a good omen. Today I am surprised by this first bloom. But glad, too. It feels like she’s telling me she’s okay. I’ve worried about her all along, my first tree planted in the ground. Maybe this new burst of fragile yellow really is a message for me. Maybe she’s saying, “Don’t worry.” Maybe she’s saying, “I’m happy. You be happy, too.”
Tuesday before the little wooden bridge I glanced back over my shoulder as I walked and saw a big bird flying in my direction from the southwest. I stopped to gawk, and the dark, animated silhouette became an egret. She was flying too high for me to hear the sound of her passing, but I stood and watched the long, silent strokes of her wings until she disappeared. She was still in my head moments later when I rounded a curve and came upon the moon, almost full, peering through the lacy winter branches of the old palo verde beside the path. And so, in the way of things, the two images were linked inside me: the slender, graceful bird, the large, round moon near the horizon, their white shapes both luminous in the late dusk. Words can’t do them justice, I know. But maybe that doesn’t matter. Because the overlapping moments live in me now, their wonder, my awe, clay feet planted on the earth, all of a piece in our fragile, fleeting world. If I might be so blessed, may they live in me all the rest of my days.
The first time it rained last summer made our trailer home in some subtle, indescribable way. I lay in bed in the early morning listening to the rain falling on the metal roof. I reveled in the sound and the smell of it, fresh dirt and wet pavement coming through the open louvered windows. It’s been one of my secret hopes that global warming will mean Palm Springs gets to have monsoon season like Arizona and parts of Mexico. Lying there in bed, listening and breathing, something loosened in me. The rain outside our metal shell made us one, somehow, the rain falling on us together. Later I went for a walk with my lime green umbrella. I stood for a long time beneath a big tree at the school listening to raindrops falling on the leaves. The rain woke me up, had me walking through the rock labyrinth on the way home, each step on the wet dirt slow and deliberate, my lungs outside my body, the wet air breathing me.
No Holds Barred 