It wasn't Thoreau's birthday

I thought it was though, that hot summer afternoon as the Greyhound bus wound its way up over precarious mountain roads and at the edge of sheer cliffs. I waited for the redwoods, and was surprised that they were--brown, really. But so huge, so tall. The driver pointed out osprey nests. I ate a little container of yogurt and conversed with my boyfriend. Or whined. Or fought. My memory, actually, is that our nerves were strained, I was tired, and the start of a migraine beat at my left temple.

We stopped in a small town, about an hour from our destination. The hills around were dry, golden, dusty. Some sad looking children poked at a dead bat they'd found. Where on earth was I going? I thought, staring at the children, at the leathery, beautiful, sad wings of the little bat.

The bus pulled into the town we'd found, at last, on a map of the state back when we were considering journeys and we were closing up the house outside London and I was destroying the start of a novel I'd written and wondering where the year, the wonderful year of writing and freedom had gone.

The streets were bare, dust blew from the north. The friend who was supposed to meet us wasn't there. Well, the bus was, after all, over an hour late. And she did eventually show up.

But what stunned me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, head hurting, mouth dry, was the message.

I suppose I should backtrack here and assure my readers that I am usually sane. But now and again through my life I have heard voices--internal and external. And I have seen things that apparently other people do not. So, at this moment, as I stepped onto the sidewalk of the ugly and dry and uninteresting little town, as I looked at boarded up buildings, as I wondered how long my head would ache...a voice within said "This is where you are supposed to be".

Of course I figured I was indeed not as sane as I've just assured you I was. What I thought was "great, fighting with the boyfriend, migraine, bus late...and now I am going into a major mental breakdown or something. Great".

And the quiet, patient, still voice within just said again "This is where you are supposed to be".

I took it on advisement.

We were supposed to be traveling further north after a weekend with the friend. I would work at a library, my boyfriend would write a thesis, we would live happily ever after.

So my friend arrived, and we went to the place she'd bought by the river, where there were two little extra cabins, and she kindly showed us to the one nearest the river. It being July the river was a tiny trickle over a lot of grey rock, and my friend apologized, assuring me that when she'd moved there, in November, the river had been right up to the fence. Hard to believe.

And within three days I knew I had to stay.

I've fallen in love a number of times in my life, and hope to continue to do so. I've fallen in love with men and women, with dead poets, with buildings, with dogs and cats, and with the color of the sky on a summer night. That year--indeed, that day, some three days after my arrival and two after Thoreau's real birthday (my friend the librarian was good at fact checking)--I fell in love with a landscape. I fell in love with the scent of river water running over mossy stones and with the dust that covered my sandals. I fell in love with the plants I didn't recognize, and with the white egrets. I fell in love with the way the light hits the hills, the way the sunlight filters through evergreens, the way poison oak gleams. I fell in love with the gnarled hands of lumbermill workers and the crazy stories the old timers shared with me.

This love is ever renewing. So I got a job as a motel maid, and I broke up with my boyfriend, and I fell in love, and I fell in love, and I fell in love. Sometimes with people. And my children were born, and there were as many twists and turns to my life story as you can imagine. Someday I might share a few.

But every year, on the 11th of July, at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, I pause and think about the day I stood on the pavement with my head pounding and a voice in my mind and a sense of craziness.

There is no way I could even begin to say how glad I am, how thankful, how purely delighted, how lucky.

Thoreau would have approved.

The Snail's on the Thorn

Well, actually, the snail is in a little basin, under water, gently nibbling algae while wandering over pebbles and larger rocks. The snail is black and white, about the size of a quarter, and when it pokes out its eyestalks to look through the watery contained world I am unreasonably charmed.

I am easily amused, and oddly trusting. These traits I think are inborn, like my twinned toes and my blue green eyes; I don't take credit for them, but they get me by. Yeah, even the odd toes, which used to make me assume I was meant to be a mermaid somewhere.

Above the little basin in which the snail and a few little fish live, an orb spider has been building a web. When I go to check on the fish and admire the snail I always look for the spider as well, and usually she is there, mid web, waiting, noiseless and patient. When the web tears and I think she is gone--the next morning brings a new web. Renewed, beautiful, perfect. Sometimes frogs visit. A family of little salamanders lives deeper in the recess above the basin. All's well with the world.

The lark may not be on the wing--the only larks I've seen here are closer to the river, in the wild vast meadows by the river, meadowlarks who rise up singing and fall again--but across the way there are woodpeckers, and ravens who come perch on the still blank sign that someday is supposed to say Books and lure all wanderers in. And little sparrows.

We walked in the meadows yesterday, my partner and my youngest, down in the lands put aside for a park, down by the river where the community farm grows greens and radishes and the fields are harvested for hay. It's an old ranch, many acres of flat land in an embrace of hillsides. The river is across the road. The river is much too low this year of drought. But the meadows stretch on, and the song sparrows and bluejays and birds I can't name and can barely see as they flit from shadow to sun--all those are there.

We went to the labyrinth. My partner expected something grand--I think he envisioned a formal shrubbery maze, not the simple pattern of laid stone and gravel circling to the core and out again. My son lit up and made signs in the air and great bowings and dancings. My son loves spaces that have--I don't know. Something simple, something holy in them. And I think this little labyrinth does. It winds, I reflected, as I walked it while my partner and son laughed at me, at the indirectness, the going and coming--something in the same way the little watersnail's shell does, upward to the center, downward to the edge.

As you walk it you can look up and see the sky, you can see the turns of the hills, you can see the curious deer as they bound away, and the birds. It's a heart pattern, somehow, by which I mean that the walking of it seems in tune with the beat of one's heart, which seems in tune with the wind in the trees, which seems in tune with...well, with the whole wheeling universe.

The time I was there before this was at the end of construction, when I was called on to come help with the gravel and the cleanup while the sun blazed in the sky, a few days before the dedication ceremony. I was unable to attend the grand opening, and I was actually glad of it in a way. I sent my good wishes and my blessings, the group did assorted neoCeltic ceremonies, power was called down--I was told it was wonderful; I was celebrating Father's Day with my dear and our assorted children, who came by with stories and treats in an unplanned row--my eldest son and his partner with wine (and where is our corkscrew?), my daughter and her partner with cake and trinkets, and my youngest--always here, at the last with his carefully chosen gifts: a handful of dinosaurs, a flashlight that makes noises, a shiny pocket knife. It was also the anniversary of our bookstore, opened with a handful of boards and a trailer's worth of books in a long ago burnt down building, 28 years in the past, but we simply marked that by staring at each other in wonder. Actually, my partner scoffs at 28 years. Too soon to celebrate, he says. Now, 38 years--that would be something. And I laugh. And I try to focus back to the present moment, where joy lives.

Flickering perhaps. Sometimes seeming gone. Ever returning, this core where all's right with the beautiful world, despite all I know, all I grieve, all I love. Or because of that.

The snail on the stones is a photo from Flicker by theearlofgrey who has many other photographs, some very very odd indeed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7436734@N02/

Something for the summers yet to come

In my memories of that time it is always summer, or spring about to break into summer. The light is soft, the air is scented with flowers. The river has turned tourmaline blue/green and sparkles as it runs over the rocks. There are otters when I walk out at sunset. There are deer when I wander in the morning.

And it was summer, for a time. I was pretty young, my friend's daughter was younger still, and the landscape of the hills and rivers and creeks was new to us. What else to do but hike through it, summer day after summer day, on our strong young legs, looking around at flowers we didn't know the names of and trees we were seeing for the first time.

In the evenings the herons and egrets would settle down behind the island, furling their great wings.

We would come back tired, and her mother would be playing scratchy old Beethoveen records on the record player. All the string quartets. And now and again some old radical folksongs. We'd talk of poetry as the moon came up.

There were sandstone crevices and hillsides of manzanita. There were walls of green ferns, dripping with falling water, even late in that summer. Thrown horseshoes, bleached bones.

She was younger, and always far stronger, and I struggled to keep up with her. After all, I was supposedly a responsible adult. It was in that guise that I led a climb up a seacliff covered with poison oak as the tide rushed in. It was in that guise that, as I wandered with her and some other young folk into a midnight torch lit scene, I talked fast. We'd gotten lost--and in fact that was the truth. We were just looking for a way back to the road.

The carcases gleamed red by firelight; poached deer being stripped of its meat. Only in retrospect did it seem scary though--the guns, the long knives, the rough men. They pointed the way, we trudged on, over the swinging bridge that fell down years ago, the one with 4 feet gaps between the rotting planks, a hundred feet above the shallow waters.

We made it home. We walked someplace else the next day.

Perhaps we were claiming the territory of our youth, I don't know. I was walking off a lot of grief, though it would be two summers later that her brother would die and the world would shift for all of us.

Yes, I remember it all very well, those days of summer. My young hiking companion settled down by the river after some years of wandering. Her son is a poet, now older than I was when his mother and I clambered hills and watched the herons settle.

On mother's day, after a champagne brunch--my eldest son does things well--I visited a couple graves. My daughter's boyfriend believed me for a moment when I said "but of course we're going to the graveyard now; it's an old family tradition!"

I planted rosemary on the grave of my friend who loved Beethoven. I planted a little on the grave of the poet lying beside her as well; he was a dear friend for so many years.
And some bright iris.

Something for the summers yet to come.

(photo is by eldest son of some of our beautiful coastline)

Loving the wild skies

I've been thinking of the Vietnam vet--well, I think he was a vet--who for a year stayed in a seacave overlooking the Pacific ocean, down in southern California. I remember very little of his story. What I remember is the sunsets. He was taking photos of each sunset, he said, for year. And each was different.

I think he's on my mind because of the skies here, which are so changeable and so magical that every day when we are not soaked in rain or covered in fog I simply stop and stare. The sky takes my breath away here. Great swirls of clouds, great billows, and wisps.

Yesterday I asked my son Gabe to wait with me outside as the sun set. We have to see it, I said, I think it will be one of those flamingo days, or violet. He smiled and stood, and waited. It was a softer sunset than I'd predicted, but for a moment the new leafed maples across the river were backlit and glowing. So beautiful.

We have to look at beautiful things, I tell my son, so that we can keep them with us, so that we keep strong. Because Gabe so seldom speaks now I carry on a strange conversation with him, and I notice I keep telling him these sorts of things. Why it is good to smile at people. Why we need to take time to look at the birds. Why we feed our goldfish carefully.

Gabriel listens, and sometimes he laughs at me.

"Look at the sky!" I say to my daughter, as we walk from the coffee shop to the bookstore. "Oh, just look, look at those clouds". She glances up "well, they're all right, I guess". It's my turn to laugh. "You don't know, Laurel, you were born here. These skies are one of the things I love most about living here. Some places the sky is flat, all one color, all the time." She gives me the "sure, mom" look.

Robin understands the skies. I met her years ago, and no longer recall what we first talked of. With Robin it could have been anything, depending on her state of mind at the time--or mine. There are days when the world is full of danger and conspiracy and signs, and she talks of them. Those are harder conversations for me; usually I simply listen, struggling to find the thread.
But there are the days we talk of beauty, or when she comes and says "the fawn lilies are up already!" or lets me know the state of the river.

And she talks to Champ, my rescued pitbull, a great deal. I think Champ talks back. I know Champ loves her.

Robin sleeps where she can, outdoors, under bridges, by the river. She's had a few carefully hidden homes. She's lost a few, as the police find her and threaten her with arrest. During the snows of the winter I looked for her and begged her to come in to shelter. She told me she couldn't; she'd lose her edge and not be able to survive. She accepted an extra sleeping bag and blanket.

Sometimes, rarely, she asks to borrow a book. The latest was on John F. Kennedy. "I love to learn things" says Robin. And she brings me food--a chocolate bar; a snack for Champ.

I think I love her because ours is a mutual and respectful friendship, and I am easy in it. One of the days when she was being threatened by police I went out to stand beside her. The officer--I'm old enough now that I knew this officer's kind, gardener mother--said "Why are you here? This isn't your concern". I told him of course it was my concern, and he asked why. The words leaping straight to my tongue were simple, and stopped him.

I said "Robin is my good friend. I'm staying with her now".

And I put my arm around her shoulders, more to anchor myself than to reassure her. The officer left.

There was the year of the foxes, when Robin came and asked me for bandages for her bitten hands. And we had days, weeks--nearly three--of conversations on the theme of "you must go to the clinic, you must be treated". It was early in our friendship. I recall pouring peroxide over her wounds and saying "you can't die, please don't do that, go to our clinic".

Our beautiful foxes so often carry rabies. She did, at the last possible moment, seek treatment. And maybe she was right, she might have been fine without it. She told me how delicate the foxes were, prowling round her campsite, the mother and the two kits. Robin watches many animals through the seasons; she knows them, she knows the river.

And she knows the sky. When she runs into me on the streets she grins as she catches me staring up at the clouds; "It'll be a great sunset tonight!" she calls. Robin has no camera, but over the years her heart has recorded thousands of skies and sunsets and dawns. She has walked the mountains. She has migrated with the wild geese some years, and some years stayed. She's been robbed, and hurt. She's been cold and she's been hungry and I've come on her drunk and sobbing and raging at the skies we both love so. She survives.

We run into friends, teachers, sisters, brothers in strange ways in our life. I've been very fortunate throughout my life in having them walk right up to me, or turn up in the oddest of places, like Robin on the streets of a small town, admiring the sunsets with me.

(the rainbow photo was taken by my daughter once upon a time. She loves rainbows the way I love clouds).

April, that complicated month

I wonder what it is about April that breaks my heart? It is certainly the month of poets; heavens, it is even National Poetry Month. It is the month of songs and poems, the cruellest month, the brightest month.

It's the month of the births of two of my children, the month in which my father was born, the month in which each day has the name of a friend on it, and most of those friends dead now.

It's the month in which I actually was in Paris, decades ago, dazzled by the pure light, amazed that even little children spoke French with flawless accents, enchanted by the hotel concierge's huge marmalade cat.

And yes, there were chestnuts in blossom, great candelabras of chestnut flowers. And little captured foxes in wire cages by the Seine, and doubtful gentlemen trying to pick up a much too innocent little blonde.

They thought I was Swedish. For some unknown reason--my professors in college also remarked on this--when I speak French I speak it as my Swedish speaking ancestors would have. Wasn't a bad thing, back in the day, though it dashed the expectations of my gentlemen.

My lovely daughter is now a few years older than I was. Though in some alternate universe that thin young blonde poet is still staring at the Seine, mulling over a line or two, waiting for her April born, dashing young love.

He would have been busy poring over dusty files in a library while I was off weeping over the little foxes.

April is the month of my last time at the edge of suicide as well. I was thinking of this the other day--not suicide, but that phantom anniversary, that little fork in a winding road I didn't know I was on. As I get older I am astonished at how quickly the time flows by. It was surely yesterday I wept and lay down in the long soft April grass and plotted my death so carefully, with such pure exhaustion.

And..I think 16 years have passed now, since I faced such a dark door, and then came through into the purest light. Think of that. 16 years. Entire trees have grown up that I planted by seed then. I have planted such gardens, and watched over dogs, and cats, and my growing children. My dear Gabe, though still fragile, has had a pretty good time these years. I have seen my quirky little girl flower into a spectacular womanhood, and my eldest son become a wonderful force in our community.

What on earth was I thinking? I can only tell you that the logic of suicide is strange and seductive. I wept the other day when I heard the news that Nicolas Hughes, the son Sylvia Plath wrote such moving poems about, had stepped out of this life. But I know the territory.

It was April. The friend I called to, out of my despair, was most fortunately for me a doctor and someone I trusted. And indeed loved. We walked through the river valley where the new flowers were blooming and the April rains were falling. We talked. For me I think it was my one last bid for life, and I didn't really think it would work, but I felt I owed it to my friend and to anyone else who might care to reach out once more.

But my soul was exhausted, my body was aching, I had gone through a winter in which my youngest was near death over and over and over again. When I lay on the long grass I was longing for my heart's mother to just swoop in and take me away. Let me rest. For God's sake, let me rest.

I intended, of course to take my youngest along. I was a good mother.

Of course I tremble when I think how close we were, my boy and I. And life had a lot more to give us and ask us, both of us.

My friend the doctor gave me a remedy. I had no belief it could work, but I took it.

And the sun came out in my heart.

It was April, the season of rains and flowers, and birthday celebrations. I sort of count one of my own birthdays from April onwards, not from my actual date of birth. Sort of "welcome back to life". It's a private celebration--but I'm glad to mark it.
(photo was taken in a long ago April. I'm showing my daughter how elegant it might be to wear four o'clock blossoms on one's nose)

Why I add cocoa to spaghetti sauce

"Hey, girl, whatcha doing there?"

The ponderous, loud voiced woman across the street seemed used to commanding a great deal of respect. I stood up, dusted the dirt from my jeans, and called out "planting bulbs".

"Hey, that's not your place, what do you mean?"

So I crossed over, and explained that I was renting the little white cottage with the rose garden and the leaning plum tree, and that I'd be moving in as soon as the deceased owners belongings were taken south by her sister. But I needed to get the crocus bulbs in now, in October.

That was how I met Lucille, who was my neighbor in the few years I lived in the white cottage, cherishing the roses, planting more flowers, happy to have found so lovely a little shelter. Lucille was a survivor of the San Francisco earthquake. She fancied black lace dresses and flowers with some color in them. She had no patience for cats or boys, and in the time we were neighbors I was always interceding on behalf of both--the little boys who would come to play at my house and bake cookies with me, and the cats, my own and those of my other neighbor, who persisted in entering Lucille's little garden.

She had a dog, a little mutt. "Smart as a whip, too" said Lucille, who was mostly called Chub by her friends. I never dared.

Lucille had been a nurse at the local hospital, and so had been her friend Leona, who lived on the other side, in another tiny cottage. Leona was thin as Lucille was fat, and wore jeans, even though she was, I thought, quite old. Leona was friendly, but Lucille would have me over for tea and chats from time to time.

Strong black tea in a rose patterned cup. Two Oreo cookies. A lot of stories. She told me she'd known Leona since they were girls together in the Gold Country. They'd married at about the same time.

"Weak men" said Lucille, staring off into space. "Chicken farmers".

I sipped my tea.

"We did all the work, all of it, mind you. We was getting sick doing so much work, and the mens were just drinking it up, drinking it all up"

So what happened, I asked. "They died" said Lucille, and sipped her tea. "and then we went to nursing school, and then we came here"

Okay, then. I wish now I had asked more questions, but my own life was engulfing me. And pretty soon Lucille asked "so, when?" staring at my waist. I told her. "Well, it's a crying shame" she said, "but I think you are a good girl anyway".

When my first son was born--and I was obviously single, living by myself in my white cottage--Lucille gave me a lacy, hand knit, yellow blanket for him. It had belonged to her baby, who hadn't lived very long. "Seems strong enough" said she, staring at my infant. "Would have been better to have a girl, but you can't help it, I guess".

And she gave me handgathered blue columbine seeds, and the secret ingredient for her spaghetti sauce, handed down from her grandmother. Lucille always made me smile.

Years after I had moved to another place, beside the river, with my little boy, I'd check on Lucille and Leona. Leona had a stroke, wasn't expected to pull through. Lucille nursed her, day after day...and she lived. The whole town marveled.

It's funny, the people who pass through our lives. I hadn't thought much about Leona and Lucille for years, until the other day I was wandering the cemetery, where now the wild flowers and planted flowers are in full glory, great heads of lilacs, scatters of buttercups, and I came across a small marker I hadn't noticed before. I brushed aside the leaves and read it--yes there, together as they'd been for so many years, well into their 80's, rested my friends, in a single grave. Lucille had lived just a year longer than her dear, and they've rested there about a quarter of a century now.

But I can still hear that rough voice. And I still smile at that loving heart.

He's 20 now

Gabriel turned 20 yesterday.

It's hard to believe that two decades have passed since that April day, so sundrenched, so lovely, in which not even an entire day's labor brought this child, this being, into my life. He was born at home, in our very ramshackle cabin, barely an hour and a half after my midwife and her helper rushed in.

After the tumultuous events of his older sister's birth in the same cabin--the stuck shoulders, the intricate cord wrap, the near death of mother and child--Gabriel's birth was so easy. He slid into a welcoming world, embraced by my midwife's assistant, who sang a welcoming song to him.

I was busy comforting his big sister, who was just barely 4, another April's child. She'd been wakened from her sleep by the noise of the birth and cried with her newborn brother.

But mostly there were smiles.

Gabe was the easiest of my children; nursing him I would find myself drifting into a world of peace and sweetness that was unlike anything I'd experienced. When my brother came that summer to help build a needed extra room he said "he's your favorite, isn't he?" I denied that (and still would) because finally my mother's "All you children are my favorites" made sense to me. But it was undeniable that Gabriel calmed my soul.

It wasn't until he was 6 or 7 months old that the likelihood Gabe was more unusual than I'd thought, that there was something...very different...struck my dazzled mind. And when I realized, sure, I mourned. I cried all night for my Down Syndrome child, I rocked with fear.

And I won't say it has all been easy. There were the years of pneumonia and the lack of sleep. There were the infinite challenges no one had prepared me for.

There were the moments of pure joy.

So he's 20. And we went to the ocean the day before his birthday, taking the dog, smelling the salt air. I caught a few smiles. We had some pizza. A nice woman complimented his favorite shirt, which has Winnie the Pooh on it.

The winter was hard. The spring has been sweeter, kinder. We see more smiles. Gabe doesn't talk these days, though he sang happy birthday to his sister last week, full on, on key, happily. We work with books and words, we draw, we play games, we walk. He gazes at his father in particular with a funny expression--as if he knows something beyond what we know. And perhaps he does.

The night of his birthday I tucked him in bed with his new Ken doll and his bunnies. He smiled and went to sleep with ease.

The simple moments, the good moments, feed my heart

(my lovely daughter has been scanning her baby journals into her myspace; the photo I just popped into the top of this was taken the day after Gabe's birth; fey sister has been gathering forget me nots in the woods; Gabe is sleeping in my arms)