Let French Ring

I am so heartsick about the bombings in Paris that occurred on Friday. I know many other countries deal with such atrocities even more consistently than Paris, and of course, my heart goes out to them as well, but I have always felt such a connection to and admiration for Paris. It is indeed a city of dreams, be they romanticized or realistic. I lived there as a young woman, and have returned whenever I can manage it. As Ernest Hemingway said: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." I have two "Parisian Moms" to whom I dedicated my first novel, one who lives here in California, and one who now lives in Toulouse but happened to be in Paris when the attacks occurred. They were the first I reached out to after the terrible news started trickling in. 

Paris is an old, old city. It has survived so many atrocities, the Nazi occupation comes to mind, but still Paris remains a place where intellect, freedom, beauty, art, history, all are revered. There, now,  the word is that the biggest act of resistance they can enact is to continue to live their lives in the way they always have, working and playing in the light, never cowering in the shadows, to embrace their very special version of joie de vivre that the world loves them for, that makes them French.

I wrote this piece for a local paper in 2007 when Bush called France "ungrateful" and "cowardly" for not backing him on the invasion of Iraq. He said we should remove French from our lexicon, though Bush would not have used that word exactly. So I wrote this piece as satire, and today, it seems a good time to bring it out again. Vive La France!

“Let French Ring”

By: Jill Koenigsdorf

            It was a beautiful spring day and the sunlight was streaming in through the glass of my Freedom Doors and the fragrance of Freedom Lilacs was wafting into the kitchen.  My boyfriend and I only moments before had exchanged deep and lingeringFreedom kisses, and he was now out back, thinning the Freedom Ivy while I ground some Freedom Roast.  Birds were chirping, spring fashion was arriving at the malls, much of it designed by big-name Freedom designers from abroad, and, except for a pesky couple of million scofflaws and naysayers who had been protesting this “war on our terms,” (most of them probably foreigners,) one could almost believe that all was right with the world.  Perhaps, in a swift and forceful way, a way that would harm nary an Iraqi civilian nor a U.S. GI, a way that would both “shock and awe,”  America could, at long last, open blind eyes around the globe to the joys of democracy.   Democracy by any means necessary! Why in God’s name wasn’t EVERYONE on board with us?  I always thought the Pope was just automatically patriotic, but no! Heck, all great nations have been colonizers at one time or another, why were we getting so much flack for it now? The road to liberty is never without its bumps, I thought, spritzing a little Freedom perfume on my wrist.   The country of Turkey not wanting to be a launching pad, I could maybe understand, but I was truly baffled by the Gaul’s lack of team spirit in this America-at-War thing. 

I have always been a Freedomphile, to the point where I wore a beret in high school and wrote many college papers on topics ranging from: “The Freedom Resistance Movement in World War II” to “The Freedom Surrealist Movement in Paris in the 1920’s” to  “Freedom New Wave Cinema in the Sixties.”  I knew that those Gauls had given us everything from the Chevrolet, to the Statue of Liberty to a virtual blueprint for our Declaration of Independence to the invention of the MOVIES, for goshsakes, so I was saddened by the lack of the ole liberté, fraternité, and egalité they were exhibiting now!   Sure they were America’s friends and friends should be able to tell you when you’re making mistakes, but as Our Leader, or maybe it was someone else, once said: “Yer either fer us or agin’ us.” 

When my boyfriend came back inside and saw the state I was in, he put on a lovely classical  c.d. and soon the soothing strains of Freedom Horn and Freedom Harp filled the house.  We engaged in some more deep, soulful Freedom kisses to the point where I had to say “Honey, we’re going to have to unwrap a Freedom envelope tout suite if we don’t stop or conception will  certainly occur!”   We agreed to take the proverbial cold shower, and certainly all the news of war put a damper on any thoughts of romance.  We read the Sunday paper with heavy hearts, as it was filled with the grainy images the all powerful had allowed the embedded press to publish, fuzzy images of tanks in sandstorms and buildings obscured behind clouds of black smoke and a blur of white flags. It was all such a downer!  But as I poured some good old Canadian maple syrup on my Freedom toast, I thought to myself, hey, relax, congress would never have approved a war budget of eighty BILLION dollars unless they had confidence in our president’s motives and foresight.  So who was I to worry? “Ours is not to question why/Ours is but to do or die.”  Maybe the President said that one too and I must say, blind faith is certainly a lot less taxing for most folks in the long haul!

“Honey,” I said to the boyfriend, topping off his Freedom Roast, I thought I’d make Freedom Onion Soup with Freedom Fries and Freedom Dip for supper, can you swing by the grocery store?”

“Sure thing,” he said.

“Just pick out a nice bottle of Freedom wine you think would go with that menu.  And please stop by the Freedom Laundry for your shirts on the way.   Oh! And we’re also out of Freedom Dressing.”

He looked so sweet, yet slightly weary driving off to market.  No, this war was not going to be easy on any of us.  Sure, here we have clean drinking water and electricity and shelter and are not being invaded, but psychologically, it’s taking its toll.  And the hassle at the airports!  But I just know this one’s going to be an easy-in/easy-out type situation, because if we learned just one thing from that Vietnam thing, that would be: “keep it short, cut your losses, and bail.”  As I squirted some Joy into the sink, I told myself not be be such a Gloomy Gus.  I recalled one day long ago being upset that one girl didn’t want to come to my birthday party.  My mother hugged me and said: “Now Dearie, you can’t be EVERYONE’S best friend!” And I guess that’s sort of what America has to remember now: you can’t please ALL the people, ALL the time, and there will always be some party-poopers, both on the homefront and abroad.   Still, it was too bad about France.  I’d always liked that place.  We were planning a trip there this summer and, after much agonizing, had decided to go ahead with it, war or no war.  Maybe we could even act as ambassadors of a sort, show them we’re NOT that stereotype of the “Ugly American.”  I began to get excited about my mission: to teach, not to condemn.  But to do that, I knew I’d have to speak their language, at least a little bit.  I have to say I was somewhat amazed that no where in my entire Yellow Pages did I see a listing for what I needed: Freedom Lessons.

My Life Aquatic

 

         

 During my "staycation" this summer, dreaming about Hawaii....a piece

I wrote....

            Even the names there are dazzling: Redlip Parrotfish. Moorish Idol. Teardrop Butterflyfish. Epaulette Soldierfish. Devil Scorpionfish. Snowflake Moray. I had been to the ocean before. I had swum in the ocean. But I never understood that there was a complete environment, an entire universe below its surface, until I snorkeled for the first time at the age of thirty-eight. For someone who had always loved being in the water,  this was an entirely new level of wonderful. Snorkeling was transformative, an awakening. After entering the domain of the reef and meeting its population, I could never again see the world in quite the same way.

            The happiest hours of my childhood were spent in lakes and pools, and I found this amphibious capability, the power to transform from land dweller to swimmer, one of the best parts of being a human being.  Each time, I marveled at my transition from dry land into that watery world. I was shape-shifter, mermaid, a double agent.  I wanted to freeze frame the journey, to witness how I might have changed during the leap from dock or high-dive. If only I had been able to breathe underwater, my dualism would have been complete. I could have lingered there well past the point when my fingertips became pale and pruney, and my teeth began to chatter. I would have, as my mother was fond of saying, “spent so much time in the water that I would start to grow scales.” But no matter how long I practiced holding my breath underwater (Two laps of the pool! All the way to the cold muddy bottom of the lake!) I eventually had to come up for air, gasping and disoriented.

            I grew up in the smack-dab center of the United States and did not see the ocean until I was ten, when my family took the Amtrak Super Chief from Kansas City to Los Angeles, California, home of The Pacific Ocean. When we arrived at our little hotel on the beach, I was so excited that I leapt out of the car and ran headlong into the surf, still wearing my clothes from the train. I was promptly clobbered by a wave, me the fly, it the swatter. The power of that breaking wave flushed my sinuses with burning saltwater, scraped up my knees and elbows, bounced me like a basketball onto the hard ocean floor, filled my underpants with sand, then spat me out onto shore.  Yet I was newly baptized, giggling wildly, and eager to try again. My mother, an Australian who had grown up by the sea and had never stop missing it, understood, and let me rush back in, but cautioned me with one sentence: Never turn your back on the ocean.           

            There was always a love-fest with water: suburban sprinklers, skinny dipping in quarries and waterfalls at college, or, once I moved to California for good, sunning on rocks like a stupefied lizard on the banks of the Yuba River, trying to raise my body temperature enough to brave its icy currents.  Entire road trips were built around the pursuit of hot springs.  But the ocean was different, gigantic, foreign, wild. I needed to be a part of it, to explore. It took me three decades, but I finally found the solution to my longstanding frustration with not being able to breathe underwater:  a mask and a snorkel.

            My inaugural snorkeling experience took place at Makua Beach, also known as The Tunnels, in Kauai, Hawaii. I did not know anything about reefs or what to expect there. I did not know that putting my fins on so far from the water’s edge would force me to goose-step ridiculously, stumbling several times before even making it to the wet stuff. I did not know how to keep my mask clear, the drops I put in giving my first viewing of the undersea world a Vasalined effect and burning my eyes to boot. I did not know that the reef would appear and disappear, that there were layers, canyon-like formations, impossible darkness giving way to  gobsmacking light and color. Crossing the deeper parts of the reef demanded a willingness to be far outside my comfort zone. I felt so vulnerable in these depths,  ill-equipped, experiencing the familiar they-can-see-me-but-I-can’t see-them feeling of horror movies.  But heart hammering, I moved forward steadily, trying to make my breath sound less like panting, until just ahead, I was able to make out a shape the size of manhole cover, if a manhole cover had wings. It was a turtle, the Green Sea Turtle known locally as Hono, and I was close enough to see the striated patterns on its shell, curved lines with feathered tips, like shafts of wheat. It looked back at me, and when our eyes met, I forgot all fear. I was intent only on following this spectacular creature as it seemed to beckon me onward with that front flipper, a “come on, this way’ gesture that was impossible to resist.

            How to explain the beauty of what followed? My mask became the eyepiece of an oceanic kaleidoscope, yet all that prismatic color and movement was created by living things: anemone tentacles that swayed with the currents, schools of Technicolor fish, chartreuse corals that looked like toadstools. I did not know the actual names of any of the reef fish at that point, so I dubbed them by features: Blue Dotted Puffers, Little Darting Neons, Mohawked Orange Fish, Flattened Canaries, Turquoise Pucker Lips.  I imagined the bubbles coming up from my snorkeling tube containing my exclamations, the “Ooh!” “Wow!” “Amazing!” becoming audible when they popped in the air above me. It was like shrinking to the size of a bee and entering a big bouquet of vibrant flowers.

            I learned something new each time I entered the water. Simply by changing my focus, I could alter the sea life I saw. In time, I noticed that the almost transparent Needlefish tended to hang out near the water’s surface, their snaky, cellophane bodies parallel to my own. Bands of mercurial Jacks or Yellow Tangs preferred the middle depths, and a well-camouflaged octopus the color of sand, might materialize on the bottom. If I wanted to experience a more microcosmic view of the reef,  I developed a technique I called “skimming.”  This was like swimming, but in such shallow parts of the reef that I had to make my body flat as a leaf, moving forward, arms at my side, using tiny flutter kicks, to avoid scraping my knees or belly on the coral mere feet below. In these up-close-and-personal viewings, I could see little explosions of polyps, colonies of shaggy sponges, two-inch long bug-eyed Blennies, delicate shrimp and lacy algae, swaying with the tide. Once, farther out, by patiently hovering above a crevice, knowing that most holes in the reef were prime real estate and probably inhabited, I was rewarded by a sighting of the puppet-jawed head of a Moray Eel emerging and looking around, before ducking back inside its lair. Sometimes, I would shut my eyes to allow my sense hearing to sharpen, and could then discern the sounds of fish chomping on coral, and, on several occasions, have even been fortunate enough to hear the organ-pipe call of a whale or the bird-like chortles of dolphins.

            Some of the snorkeling routines I began during that first foray continue to serve me well on my yearly visits to Hawaii, and I have never strayed far from these. I get up at dawn when the waters are calmer and the palm trees swish their fronds against a sky the color of pink lemonade. I never touch the coral or crowd the Honos; it is their home and I am a guest. I stay in the water until the winds pick up or I begin to shiver, whichever comes first.  Rinse off snorkel gear at a public shower…. stop at road-side stand to stick a straw in a freshly macheted coconut….pass the time as a land dweller until the next dawn…repeat.  And today, even after dozens of dives, when I visit the reef, my eyes still tear up, but now it’s not from the mask-clearing solution. My eyes tear up because there is always a surprise awaiting me each time I enter the ocean. My eyes tear up from the great gift of being able to be a part of another world. My eyes tear up because at last, I can breathe underwater.

Beyond Mom

Tribute to Heather Jean on Mothers Day:

Beyond Mom

By: Jill Koenigsdorf

            

            There comes a time in every child’s life when they experience the devastating realization that their mother might actually have a life outside of cutting the crusts off bologna sandwiches. My own lightening bolt moment arrived at the age of twelve, when I discovered my mother’s lingerie drawer. I was snooping around in my parents’ bedroom when I opened this particular nook-of-no-return. My mother’s perfume wafted from its depths like an escaping genie, and the first thing I saw was stockings, silk stockings, unsnagged and tenderly cocooned in tissue paper. There was a black pair amongst the others that had a seam running from heel to thigh, and for some reason, that made me cover my mouth with my hand and giggle wildly. 

            The stockings would have to be held up by something…enter: the pink satin garter belt nestled alongside. And what was this? A “shortie” girdle in a color called “nude?”  Next to it: a black bra with a tiny rosebud sewn in between the cups. More excavation yielded a stiff white corset that I wanted badly to try on, but did not dare due to a daunting number of clasps, as well as its intimidating cup size. My mother had tucked sachets in between all her sinuous half-slips and strapless wonders. I touched the items tentatively, reverently, sensing that I was in the realm of something private and adult.

            For days after that I could not meet her eye. There she was in my father’s stained, oversized tee-shirt and some madras Bermuda shorts, huffing and puffing in front of the black and white T.V. as Jack LaLanne encouraged her to “give him a pretty smile.” I watched her surreptitiously, with a new fascination, but also some confusion, as if my real mother, the one who embarrassed me by belting out show tunes when she drove the carpool, the one who molded ground beef into loaves, then baked it with ketchup as the top layer, had been replaced by a woman who wore sexy undergarments.

            But who was she wearing them for? My father? They fought like cats and dogs when he got home late from work, or when he neglected to ask her about her own day when he finally did walk through the door. Herself? This would require more research. In the weeks that followed, I would race up to their bedroom whenever I had the house to myself. Under her mattress, I found copies of Fear of Flying and The Happy Hooker. In the drawer of the bedside table, I found hormone pills and a Revlon lipstick called “Love That Red.”  Ours was a testosterone-heavy household, two teenaged boys and my father. I was supposed to be on the girls’ team, but was a rabid tomboy, spending every waking hour on my trampoline or riding horses or fishing. My mom could have used an ally.

            My mother has been gone now for fifteen years, but every Mothers Day I think of that lingerie drawer and it makes me miss her anew. I always think if she had been born even a decade later, she would not have had to hide those things that made her feel sensual and alive. She had been a registered nurse when she met my father, and often spoke fondly of her career.  I used to invent great feminist scenarios for her: that she returns to work, that she flees the suburbs, that she writes her memoirs.  She never did any of those things, but each time I returned home I checked, and the lingerie drawer was still tended to and in tact. And shortly before she died, I was given the great gift of being able to paint her fingernails, just chat with her a while, holding her hands and daubing each nail with a color I had found called: “Love That Red.”

This Hyphenated Life

My man surprised me today with an unexpected delivery via what used to just be called mail, but is now referred to as "snail mail."  I picked the package up from the front porch, weighing it and, not recognizing the return address, tearing off the outer envelope.  Inside were two little boxes containing my new, groundbreaking business cards, heavy stock and gorgeous, featuring my name and contact info, a flaming typewriter, and the lone potent word like a bold decree at the bottom: "WRITER." This was a first.

I have been working varied jobs since the age of 16, scooper of ice cream at Baskin Robbins, graveyard shift postal work at the Kansas Main Post Office, bookseller, fille au pair, science guinea pig, editor, gardener, dog walker, floral designer, free-lanceer at numerous newspapers and magazines, caterer, antiques vender, and of course, waitress, waitress, waitress. Anyone in an artistic pursuit will be familiar with this duality

: always chasing the paying jobs, while still trying to leave some time and energy for "one's art," be it dancing, acting, painting, clowning, acting, sculpting, etc. Income has a way of trumping creative endeavors every time,  so it is a constant juggling act to try and reserve enough bandwidth and passion to manage both.

I call this my hyphenated life. My business card might say "Floral Designer," but there is always the unspoken hyphen, the silent second half of the title, as in Floral designer/Writer, Personal Assistant/Writer, Waitress/Writer. But this silent second half of the equation will forever stir up a terrible moment of doubt in the one who fishes this card out of purse or pocket and hands it to the stranger who has asked "what do you do?"  The trepidation boils down to this: which one is the career, the serious life-long pursuit,  and which one the hobby?

I enjoy seeing commonalities between myself and others of my species, and have noticed that one of the first questions we ask one another when meeting for the first time is invariably: What do you do?  This may be a springboard for other topics, an icebreaker,  but in many ways, is may also be a stand-in for the real question, "Who are you?"

Many of my artist friends also have two sets of business cards. The one that says "realtor" or "contractor," and then the one they made years ago on a whim that never manages to make it into their wallet, the one that says their name and under it, their passion, be it carver, acrobat, sword swallower, or novelist. So does this mean the business card represents less of who you actually are, and instead speaks more to how you pay your rent? Or does it mean that artists have a hard time taking their art seriously enough to let it be the full-time job? Of course the ideal is that one's art is actually also one's source of income, and we all continue to hope that SOMEDAY this will be the case. But shoulder-to-shoulder with this dream, there is also the slightly deluded, romantic notion in my tribe that one should never "sell out," with that subtle disdain for the overly practical. There is a long tradition upholding the conviction that seeing to food, clothing, and shelter is in fact  the antithesis to excelling creatively.  We want the security, and at the same time, we resent the time it takes away from that other, equally, if not more, important part of ourselves.

I wish I had a big, frayed top hat filled with the best business cards I have seen over the years, for many of them belonged to artists. There was the stand up comedian whose card portrayed him as a hard-up Depression-era figure, wearing a barrel and suspenders, and beneath it the phrase: "No reason to live but doing it anyway." Or the casting director whose card was simply a depiction of a large red couch with her phone number on it. Or perhaps the most straightforward of all, the musician whose card showed a piano with the words "Wage Slave" spelled out on the keys. These are clever ways of edging closer to giving that silent second job top billing. So today, for me, was a landmark of sorts, as the cards in that box said only the one word: Writer, straight no chaser, no disclaimer, no qualifiers. A thrilling hear-me-roar moment of commitment.

My Recurring Bouts of Spring Fever

Despite California's current and terrible drought, a smattering (or perhaps well-timed, if meager?) amount of rain has tricked the countryside into a state of greenness that makes this hiker catch her breath in wonder.  Other symptoms include dreaminess, spaciness, random euphoria, heightened sensitivity, and a burning desire to learn bird calls. Coupled with the unseasonably warm weather we've had in February, I think I can officially diagnose my condition as Early Onset Spring Fever. Here is a piece I wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle a while back on this condition....

I often joke with friends from other locales that Sonoma has two seasons: wet and dry. This straightforward system makes for some dramatic changes in our landscape, as it transforms the brown hills and the brittle beige stalks of wildflowers gone to seed in the dry months to miles of dazzling green. Such a verdant panorama can bring on the palpitations, delirium and zeal that are the first signs of spring fever. Other symptoms may include a certainty that everyone is flirting with you, an irresistible urge to wear chartreuse and/or hot pink, and frequent sighing. Let us take our cue from that old Herb Newman song as we attempt to unravel the mysteries of spring fever on several levels: a) the birds, b) and the bees, c) and the flowers d) and the trees. We will conclude with: the moon up above and a thing called "love." 

The birds 

I will admit to being more than a little envious of the female bird. In no other species will the males go to such lengths to dazzle and woo the females, and never is this more apparent than in the spring. It's as if the Goddess of Color had one glass of mead too many and drenched every male bird in colors so magnificent that any winged female would be a fool not to fall for him. Blue feet get bluer. Rosy beaks get rosier. Cranes just wanna dance! Feathers go beyond flamboyant into plumage that truly takes the breath away. Gular sacs on frigate birds puff out like a Valentine's balloon, so the fellow is literally wearing his heart on his sleeve. And the bowerbird from Down Under goes beyond a great set of pipes or a flashy costume, wowing potential mates with his nest-building prowess. This bird pours his heart and soul into the construction of mounds, luring the females in for a "visit," by actually decorating the structures with pods and flowers or shiny bits of foil, even "painting" the walls of the interiors with chewed up berries or pigments. What's not to like? And don't even get me started on epaulets! Is there anything as fetching as the liquid trill of the redwing blackbird munching on some exploded cattail or another, trying to look nonchalant but puffing out his scarlet epaulets with all his might so they catch the light just so for any female onlookers? Would that we flight-challenged creatures could learn from them all! 

The bees 

When I hear a soft buzzing somewhere off in the distance in March in Northern California, a shift occurs. My whole body relaxes and I am reassured that spring has arrived. There is no mistaking the whirr of a working bee for the dreaded cacophony of a leaf blower (have we somehow forgotten the virtues of a rake?) so I begin to search for the source of the sound. There, nosing around in the first delicate plum blossoms or taking advantage of a calendula that has jumped the gun, is a bee, gathering pollen and getting the fertilization ball rolling despite a bit of chill still in the air. The bee, for me, is a far superior harbinger of warmer and longer days than some seen or unseen shadow of any old groundhog. Long live the bee. 

The flowers 

Nothing says spring like flowers, in particular: bulbs. Maybe it's because they are planted as remarkable oniony things in the darkening days of fall and lie in wait under sodden ground all those months. Or maybe it is because they are the first to bloom when all else is bare. Or, perhaps I revere them because they come back year after year and multiply all by themselves and are not fussy, high-maintenance citizens of the garden. But mainly, I love the spring bulbs because so many of them smell so good. To call the soil in the North Bay where I live clay-ish is like calling cement firm. But the bulbs, when the world is, as e.e. cummings rhapsodized, "mud luscious and puddle wonderful," valiantly manage to push their green shoots through every single year, come flood or frost. Seeing that first narcissus traditionally brings on the first symptoms of spring fever in me, the flushed cheeks, the disdain for woolens that were welcome only a few days earlier. 

As early as January in California, the narcissus begin poking their green shoots of promise through the muddy puddles, followed by hyacinths, then daffodils, then anemone, then freesia, then ranunculus and last but certainly not least, the tulips. There is something reassuring about the consistency of this parade. I love following their procession, one ushering in the next, the slugs laying waste to the predecessors. There is also this orderly procession in the realm of wildflowers. After the first few rains, the fields near me fill with wild radish. Next, painting all the rows of earth between the vineyards a dazzling yellow, comes the wild mustard (planted there, rumor has it, because the flower imparts nitrogen to the soil, which is good for the grapes.) My dogs love to dig up the peppery roots and chomp them down, and I always imagine myself on our walks as a type of confident Euell Gibbons, able to survive, if necessary, for days in the wilds of Sonoma by knowing which of all those greens and roots that sprout each spring are edible. Mark that as another symptom of spring fever: sudden urge to graze. 

Is it wrong to have a favorite flower? Shouldn't they be like children where you love them all equally? After all, they are frivolous things of beauty, there exclusively and purely to delight the senses, and there are so few such things left in this world. And yet, I must confess that lilac is the favored one. Nothing can send me reeling back in time to a specific moment and experience as instantly as certain smells. This holds true for many people, so when they lean down to inhale the perfume of the lilac, you can almost see the wheels turning in their heads as past scenes flood their memories: "Grandma's Sunday breakfasts, the white pitcher she put lilacs in, the fresh strawberries," or "the house I grew up in, playing hide-and-seek behind the tall purple hedges" or "putting one behind my ear the first time I kissed my husband." Lilac wins the Most Evocative Scent of Spring distinction every time. And since it is, technically, a bush, this leads us handily into: 

The trees 

Trees go into a hullabaloo of fancy dressing in springtime. Eucalyptus acorns don their pastel hula skirts. Manzanita put on their dangly, pearly pink earrings. Acacia trees, with their abundance of yellow puffballs, enjoy a friendly rivalry with mustard as both aim to color the landscape in yellows. And once magnolias start boasting creamy pink blossoms the size of loving cups and plum trees begin to burst into romantic showers of pink or white, well by then, one can catch spring fever by simply walking down any street. 

Meanwhile, in the woods, chestnut and buckeye trees present their upright green buds like sleepwalkers holding candles as they move through the night. The word "bud" is usually accompanied by the adjective "tender" and therein lies the hopefulness of spring. Seeing all those tender buds on peach, plum and cherry, I can almost taste the fruits that will soon hang on every branch. 

The moon up above 

Moonlight exacerbates the condition of spring fever and makes poets of us all. There is some misinformation circulating that spring fever afflicts only those who can be considered romantics, but in truth, no one is immune to moonlight. Once the mockingbirds return and start inspiring awe at dusk, with their staggering repertoire, and all the white flowers, (you know who you are, jasmine) which smell stronger at night because, it is said, they need to be pollinated by moths, once they go into olfactory overdrive under the light of the moon, there is no use resisting. Even the logical and practical among us are lured by the moon, answering a sudden call to sit outdoors at cafes, wearing jackets if need be, if only to bask in its glow. Howling is optional. 

A thing called "love" 

Interesting that Newman chose to put the word "love" in quotes when writing his song, as if it is some fictional thing. Love, however elusive and enigmatic, is a huge part of spring fever, to the degree that Tennyson declared: "In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." After all, falling in love and spring fever share similar symptoms: inability to concentrate, sweaty palms, palpitations, irrational behavior. Is it my imagination or is every couple walking down the street holding hands, sweaty or not? If spring is all about lushness and rebirth, and the birds are flying around with nesting materials clutched dearly in their small talons, and the outdoors is so buzzy and pollen-filled that I feel woozy just inhaling and exhaling, then am I not already a goner? Every spring, I get to experience that falling-in-love feeling all over again. 

In fact, by the time you read this, many of you, too, will be showing the early symptoms of spring fever, as it is almost epidemic this time of year. No sick days are allotted at the office for the condition, no downtime granted to take off the shoes and wiggle one's toes in the new grass. There are no inoculations against it though it is highly contagious. Yet spring fever is the one condition most of us are more than ready to catch. 

New Year, New Poem, New Newts

Winter Estate

By Jill Koenigsdorf

The mist was a tease today when

what was needed, was rain.

Is it the same as passing through

a cloud?

The newts here

wriggle onto their backs

displaying yellow bellies,

playful & twisty,

before lumbering, dinosaur-like,

off the path,

& the Poison Oak, devoid of its greasy, warning

leaves,

more deadly, here, just bare sticks.

Fog makes everything more mysterious, therefore more

beautiful-

the slack phone wires vanishing, becoming

trapeze lines into infinity, or else

the wires of a swinging bridge over

some fern-choked chasm miles below, maybe in

a tropical locale.

The woods grew darker, became an estate, 

a mansion of rooms needing exploration,

My friend Marian lived in a mansion.

There was a dumbwaiter that fascinated us, 

a travelling box that would deliver

toys to the foyer closet,  soiled clothing to

the basement, &

her mother’s many empty highball glasses bleeding

their own, melted ice

to the kitchen.

We sent each other things,

from floor to floor,

toast, wildflowers, the family cat,

using the dumbwaiter. We wanted to climb

aboard, shape shift, travel

inside the walls, be

in a place no one else had seen,

but were already too big.

This mansion was her home, 

lonely and strange, a place

of experiments-

of no father-

of secret nooks and crannies-

like the forest today.

I do not feel too big for this place, 

my skills proportionate

to what light remains.

The booming of a Great Horned Owl 

to his mate resounds and thrills,

amplifies 

in my chest.

When she calls back to him,

it is like a great gust of wind-

making the shaggy locks of

Spanish Moss tremble,

the branches they hang from

all but invisible.