rainbows and visitors

My English friend who lives on a unstable hillside in a newly thrown together shed, with his cat and his memories, stopped by the other morning to tell me there was a rainbow.

I immediately left the bookshop to rush out into the mixed rain and sunlight and stare at it.

I have very few rules in life, but one, as I told him, is to never miss the opportunity to stare at a rainbow. There aren't enough in a lifetime to take the risk of missing one.

He's a good man, married four or five times ("why on earth did you bother?" I once tactlessly exclaimed). He's a twin, adopted at four or five months of age with his pretty blonde sister. He was, he said, the extra--the dark and crying boychild. Much of his life...well, I don't probe where it hurts. But I see the pain.

"Stinky old dog" he greets Champ, and Champ is delighted. And because it is said with warm affection I don't get upset. Sure, call my old dog stinky and chat with my cats, it's fine.

There is an odd privilege to being the bookstore lady, the person who can be found with ease, who will take a moment to listen, who has some bowls of good fruit and a well known box of warm socks and a sort of Mary-Poppins grab bag of what-might-be-needed. I'm pretty lucky.

And people like my English friend do alert me to rainbows.

Yesterday was exceptionally full of visits and revelations, amongst the chat about the latest mystery novels, and whether someone who likes Steinbeck would like McPhee, and poetry, and rain.

What struck me was the common thread though, amongst the stories I was told.

Poppy's companion came, as he does most days, for apples and water and some bread and a biscuit for Poppy. Poppy's a little black and tan dog with white paws; to my untrained eyes she looks like a beagle, but she dances like a poodle and her person once told me she was a particular fancy sort of hound. Her person showed up last summer with her and asked for a needle and some thread to repair his sleeping bag. I had those on hand, but I also had a light sleeping bag not in need of repair, which I gave him. He said then he was moving north, just here for a day or two. Fine, said I. He said "I was once a meteorologist". Handy knowledge, I said.

So he came yesterday, got some apples. I offered him some kiwi fruit as well. He confided that pears were his very favorite. And he told me how his mom used to leave offerings of bread and fruit in the garden when he was very young, for the fairies.

We thought there were fairies, he said.

Well, maybe there were, said I, you never know. And I asked if he had many sisters and brothers or what.

And he told me. He told me his mom had been 15 when he was born, the eldest of her children. He told me his dad was drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the young girl said to hell with that, she wasn't gonna wait for a dead soldier.

And she gave her son to her sister to raise.

"How old were you?" I asked.

Four, he said. And he said when he was 15 his mother got in touch, but he didn't want to have anything to do with her. "I was 15, I didn't need a mother".

I said nothing.

"And when I was in the Navy later she wrote...well, she emailed...she had three children, she didn't need four. So that was that."

She's a nurse in Ohio. High up in some hospital, he said. He said he was proud of her. And his dad died, and his wife died, and there wasn't much to live for, so he walked out of the house with his dog, with Poppy, and that was a few years ago. And so it goes.

No sense in getting close to anyone, he said. And then he seemed a bit ashamed that he'd told me all too much, so I got busy looking for some biscuits for the dog, and wished him a good day, out there along the roads.

The next guy, with his pitbull puppy, had been thrown out again by his girlfriend. "So, I'm back beneath the bridge" he said, and he said he was sorry, cause he'd told me he was getting money together to replenish the dogfood and he didn't.

I understand, I said, things come up, don't feel bad. His girlfriend had taken up with some drugs he doesn't do, and some guys who can supply them.

I'm sorry, I said.

I know about his mom, who died long ago, and he found her. I know about the jail time and the series of girls, young women, who cling to him a while and then drift off.
The pup is looking good, though.

And then John came in. Now, I haven't seen John for a few months. The last times I saw him my heart was full of trouble. He was lean, and dirty, and desperate and sick. He was using, he was drinking, he was looking for some quick way to fortune or some quicker way to death. I'd run into him at night and his eyes were haunted.
Yes, his story has abandonment in it too, and foster care, and hardening.
John used to bring me small treasures. Small, stolen, treasures. I'd quietly try to get them back to where they belonged. He would offer me his gifts with hurting, pleading eyes.

Women liked John, especially women who shared his drugs. Oh, there were stories.

So he came in, after some months of no news, and he said "Kathy, I had to come see you. I'm clean, I'm okay. Took some jail, but I'm okay".
He'd been picked up for something minor, and had done a bit of county time, and then decided to go to a clean and sober house.
"Kathy, it's been 124 days. I'm not using, I'm not drinking, I have a job. I'm living up north, but I had to come see you".

I hugged him. I thanked him, I told him he looked great. He'd put on a little weight; had cut his long ragged black hair. He was smiling.

"You never gave up on me" he said. "You never did. So I'm not giving up either".

And then I cried.

(the photo, oddly, comes from Finland. But it so looks like my part of the world)

In the Ever Present Rain

Yes, it seems it has been raining at least 40 days and 40 nights. The water drips down from the porch, over the stones, in a tiny rivulet, a mini waterfall over the green, green moss. The air is warmer than it was in the days of the hard frosts that covered the hillsides with glitter, but everything is wet.

When you walk the ground squelches. Champ the pitbull looks at me as if I am out of my mind as we set off for the hills or down the road. Go out in this? Get wet? I insist, and off we go, splashing through the streets turned into little creeks and the creeks turned to rivers.

Winter here sometimes seems to last forever, even though it isn't the closed in, cold winter of the east coast. I peer at the signs of green. I am pleased the tulips are rising up from the mud, that the geraniums I feared dead are showing green again, that the days are getting longer, second by second.

I think I can make it.

Winter has been healing and breaking my heart again. There have been deaths. There are always deaths, and don't tell me it is simply that I am older and people die--people have forever been dying in my life, and really...can't they stay around? So the guy who had the show following my poetry show on the radio died, and he was just a bit past 40, and his eyes were speedwell blue, and he was a joker and an artist and...

well, how come, world?

Meanwhile I selfishly was rejoicing that my oldest son made it through a medical emergency and a hospital stay and is healing, is well. But--having one's child go under a surgeon's knife has got to be one of the more terrifying moments of my life.

And so I balance that with my dead friend. At least it wasn't my son, I think. And I think--well, that is harsh.

"I was so lonely" says Scott, one of my friends who camps out in the rain by the river and who comes to talk with me when he has a moment and can be indoors. Scott, like my dead friend, is one of the blue eyed charmers of the world, worn and sobered by a lot of strange turns. But he's glad now, because a cat has come to live with him. From out of nowhere. He asks me a lot of questions about the care and feeding of cats, and I am so afraid this cat is just an opportunist, soon to vanish. But no, Big Cat seems to have settled for the winter with a gentle wanderer, content to sleep in an almost dry tent, on a special blanket I have dredged out of my boxes of rags and riches. There are good moments in the winter.

"Do the papers inside come with the book?" asks the very handsome young man, holding out a critical work on Nabokov as his very lovely friend browses the poetry shelves. I say yes. We always keep ephemera in the books as they came to us--the recipes, the love letters, the funny matchcovers, the grocery lists, and the newspaper clippings. In the Nabokov are mostly newspaper clippings--other reviews, notes on the author. I glance at them as I tell the young man the price of the book, and the total price of the interesting stack he has gathered. And I say "this book came from the library of a fascinating woman; she died a few years ago, but she was a good friend of mine"

And he says "she has some poetry in here".

I am startled by this, and ask...where? And he pulls out two sheets of folded paper. I laugh.

"She was a poet, that's true, but these--these were drafts of a poem I never finished. I'm so surprised she kept them".

He offers to return them to me, but I let go of that poem a long, long time ago. "I was probably younger than you are now" I say, "when I was writing that. It's so odd to think of that".

It's an interesting moment, this collision of the past and the present, and the future. I wonder what the young man or his pretty girlfriend may write. I wonder where their journeys will take them. I wonder why my friend, who once destroyed an entire pile of my manuscripts and letters, tucked away these two imperfect sheets of a poem that never really finished.

I write my name on a scrap of paper for my book buyer. And he thanks me, wondering perhaps...well, I'm not sure what he wonders. He has good taste in books, though.

And they walk out into the ever present rain, almost bumping into Scott who is come with another report on his new friend the cat.

(the photo is by someone called lepiaf. geo on flicker)

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/

At the new windows

In July, if asked, I would have assured you I deal very well with chaos. I am accustomed to doing several things at the same time; I am usually fairly graceful about it. Or so I would have told you.

In early August, if asked, I would have cheerfully told you, "No problem; yes, it is complicated, but all is well."

That would have been true, but it would have ignored the month or so to come, and the late night times of "I do not want to lift another box of books in my life" and the dust in my hair, and the fights with my partner, and the poor confused critters.

But now--well, the view from my desk is of the beautiful hillsides I fell in love with more than 30 years ago; the hills I wandered with a friend, that slope to the winding river. The view is of some redwood trees across the street, of a little park graced with plum trees, and of my vast porch and windowbox and the very old grapevine clambering up the building on the north, and the sheltering plums, locusts, oaks and bay on the south. Old rock walls support the porch; the grapevine makes a graceful arc over the steps down to the path north. The steps south lead up to town.

When the sun sets I watch it over the distant green and gold hills, and my heart is at peace.

True, I still go to a shelf all confident in search of a book and stop.."oh, gee, that one isn't in alphabetical order yet..." But that is easily remedied.

We are on the main street of a pretty little town, and people can wander down to chat with us and buy books and pay proper attention to Champ and his feline companions.

The main street is also pretty much the highway for hitch hikers; I can be found by my wandering friends when they need me.

I hadn't figured on moving, though. The universe is full of surprises, and some of them come as shocks.

This move...well, it all started in late July, when there was some controversy over the installation of a portable toilet in the lot of the post office near our bookstore. It's a long and tangled tale, and involves allegations of destruction and such by folks without homes, causing the closure of the PO during evenings and weekends.
This was quite the problem for people who live in the hills and come in once a week--no one could pick up their mail. It was about a year long problem, and some folks got together to work out solutions with the PO. Seems there was a meeting, and the portapotty was one of the factors.

Not a bad idea. I mean, we all do have bodies and such, and many the tourist came to my shop wondering where on earth they might...um, go. We were informed of the portapotty by a rep from the Chamber of Commerce and by a candidate for the board of supes. Okay, fine by us.

Except we were told it was being placed next to our front door, near the roses I'd planted and tended.

Big reality time. My partner was enraged at what he saw as a deliberate slap in the face. I talked him down, because when I thought about it I figured...hey, we ask people to be compassionate. We ask people to go beyond their personal comfort all the time. How can we block this.

He grumbled, and said I was right.

So the glorious toilet day was coming, and the postmaster came to tell us it was being placed "tomorrow". And I was figuring, okay, I'll build screens and plant vines and all will be well...but then I wondered if anyone had bothered to talk with my landlady.

Well, no.

So I suggested the postmaster phone her.

And thus I became...well, lord knows what she was told, but she'd wanted for a long time to renovate the building, so...we, who invented homeless people (I gather) and had held the meeting to bring her property values to the ground (though we hadn't been there) didn't have to move that day, but tomorrow would be nice.

Sure, I know that's not legal. But here's the deal: I hung up the phone, told partner and daughter, and daughter phoned her boyfriend who said "hey, so and so is moving her office next to where I work...get on it".

And we did. Within 10 minutes we knew where we were moving a zillion books and...oh, you don't want to know about the piles of leaflets and the odds and ends.

It seemed to go on forever. A week stretched into another week. My partner started likening it to a hostage situation "day 22, and counting..."

But the help that came was so amazing. Not a day passed without someone unexpectedly showing up with a truck, or a strong back, or a vat of coffee. Old friends, sure, but people I only knew vaguely as customers--the guy who loves French literature turned out to be a great carpenter and built me a wall of shelves; the guy who reads sci fi spent a whole weekend carrying heavy boxes. My street friends, who could get some good money for the sort of heavy work they were doing for me, refused payment. "You've been our friend for so long, let us give you something back".

Although it was exhausting, although I seemed to live on ibuprofen and strong coffee for a few weeks there, it was also touching and astonishing.

We are settling in with joy and gratitude. The town cemetery is not too far north of us, down a lane lined with redwoods. When I first arrived in the area I used to walk there and sit and collect my thoughts, wondering what I should be doing with my life. These mornings Champ and I walk through, startling the bluejays, admiring the autumn roses, plotting guerrilla planting of daffodils, and noting the many friends whose markers rest delicately beneath the old cypress trees.

It's a good place. It feels right. And the whole move, though so tiring and so long, felt all along guided and protected. As I say, sometimes good changes come with a curious shock.

different windows

This is merely a quick note, typed between filling boxes of books. The next time I write I will be looking out different windows. The bookshop is moving, after our many years here.
I feel (besides exhausted and kind of in shock) a curious sense of being guided. We have a new location, I have signed the rental agreement, all will be well.
Books are very very very heavy.

My street friends have been putting in long hours, for free, to help. And sometimes I cry, for many reasons.

But all will be well.

"How are you going to manage this?" asks a shocked customer.

"Just a book at a time. Just a box at a time."

And I will.