Saturday, August 11, 2018

Nature Crystallized In The Backyard





It is August in California, the "dog days of summer," very different here in Sonoma from those of my Midwestern childhood. Instead of window-rattling thunderstorms and the threat of tornadoes, cities around me are battling early and devastating wildfires, with a similar magnitude that Sonoma and Napa counties faced last October. The new normal, these colossal floods, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires are called, but how can we help but see these events as a message from our beleaguered planet? 

To try and counter the upset and sorrow these global changes make me feel, I have tried to create a haven in my own backyard over the past two decades, and summer is certainly the most sensual time of year to appreciate that. When I reach across a tomato plant to pick some Juliets or Sungolds, the tiny hairs on each vine brush my arm and send up a scent that is instant-Summer. The lavender, humming with bees and the pots of Basil too give off a perfume that will always remind me of the heat of the season. A blue hammock sways mysteriously, even when there is no wind, as if visited by a relaxing ghost. I juice limes and fill the ice cube tray with their juice. Limeade. 



 I feed the birds and, more importantly, have many basins of water that are hubs of activity. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to watch the cycles of their lives, from courtship to mating to nesting to the mussy fledglings learning how to eat and fly. This year, I have seen many baby Towhees and Finches and Nuthatches and Bushtits and Swallows and even two juvenile Hummingbirds and an Oriel survive those precarious early weeks out of the nest, now confident and exploring freely. I fill the birdbaths and the bees hover around me, waiting. 

Then too, there are the occasional surprises  A mother skunk and two babies took up residence under a storage shed. The dogs have been skunked in the past and it is a pernicious smell that resists all the ways that are said to eradicate it, and takes months and months to disappear. So I am hopeful these new residents will mosey. They do not like light or noise, so each night, the dogs safely inside, I shine a flashlight at them looking for grubs wherever the soil is watered. At first they scurried away, but now they look up at me, perhaps recognizing a softie when they see one, and continue eating. I am about to try a radio under the shed or motion sensitive lights, never ever poison. Not for the rats that live in the woodpile and eat the fallen birdseed. This is where the skunks could be helpful as they eat small rodents.  Clearly, not all the smells are delightful. Case in point: a mole died somehow and when I discovered it, I placed it in the greens bin, not knowing that the following two days it would be one hundred degrees. Today, a vulture appeared near the bin on the fence posts if summoned. The bird was drawn to the carrion scent from miles away, a remarkable sense of smell.



My place is small enough that I can know every tree and vine and flower and bird and critter intimately.There is the fig tree that bears fruit lightly in July and heavily in October. The Pomegranate whose fruits are labor-intensive to juice but beautiful as decoration, or food for the birds when they fall the to ground and split open, revealing their glossy jewels. Volunteer Sunflowers from the bird seed that does not make it into a beak and happens to fall near a drip line. Honeysuckle and Trumpetvine that threaten to pull down fences in their will to climb. Some of the summer harvests are small but revered: the Padron Peppers that I sauté with slices of garlic and sea salta and olive oil, mostly mild but every once in a while, a zinger. A rose called Fragrant Cloud that fills the whole room with deliciousness. Soon, it will grow cool and the flowers will go to seed and I will not be able to see the things in front of me at nine o'clock at night as the day cools and every living thing gets a second wind. But for now, I have the bounty of Summer for a little while longer.

New Poem

Heatwave




Always better to focus on
Blue dolphins & Bushbabies,
Secret gardens & girl spies- she too
a girl spy, at the banister last night,
her breath catching on the word
“choose.”

August: its shimmering, vaselined 
heat-ghosts hovering 
above car hoods &
empty sidewalks. 

Better to draw the dusty curtains, retreat
to the one air-conditioned room
in the house, her parents’ room.

Here, the hours pass elsewhere.
Outside
the cicadas’ cries swell in fury or
lust, then
subside.  Crescendo, 
then dwindle.
-The rhythm of battles, 
& ballads, 
not unlike
the sounds competing 
from the rooms below.

Soon the clang-clang of
the ice-cream man.
She will close her book & stumble dazed
out into the stupefying heat, towards
Banana Bombpops, or better:
Drumsticks  
She sucks the good stuff out, leaves
the cone behind.

The cicadas leave their empty shells
on the trees &
the girl will gently
pluck one off, place it on her shoulder
where it clings, as if 
still containing life,
but weightless. 
She will make her way back into the house,
to the table with sweating glasses & grey vegetables,
and meatloaf.
The table where everyone pretends
that the sounds she heard last night
were never made at all.

Sunday, June 3, 2018

New Poem

Vernal Study



Past the Rattlesnake grass &
Wild Pea,
the waft of Chamomile crushed
underfoot-
Through the canary corridor 
of Scotch Broom, stopped
stock-still to watch
in the path ahead,
A flight of Swallows, busy
at a mud puddle.
One thousand pellets of mud carried by beak
to create a nest equals
one thousand trips between
this puddle
and the underside of that bridge.
Fortunate observer,
so quiet I can hear the air
being mussed by their wings.

And farther along, the trickery of fields
allowed to go fallow-
to become inviting havens 
for rabbit warren and clutch of eggs,
only to be mown down by the indifferent thresher,
bees still working the flowers of the uprooted
Wild Radish.

Dizzying change, Spring.
The fleeting voluptuary
of the Bearded Iris, their feather-boa throats inside peachy
heads. And like a favored, satin camisole 
they fray at the edges, & fade
to mauve.

Too, the colony of nests
under the bridge will crumble.
The new birds already able to soar,
to sip from the water’s surface
mid-flight,
no obligation to stop.





Friday, January 12, 2018

Say Cheese!



I grew up in the Midwest and as a girl, was afraid of strong flavors. To me, cheese was bright orange Kraft American slices, each pressed against its own raft of wax paper, ready to be melted in some margarine between two slices of Wonder bread, (with the crusts cut off, because I swore the crusts tasted different.) Or cheese was Wishbone Blue Cheese Salad Dressing, with was my father's favorite, though I would not go near the stuff. On my on wedge of iceberg lettuce, I preferred Wishbone French, which, looking back, might have been some variation on catchup mixed with oil and vinegar and sugar. Or cheese was Cheese Whiz in a can, shaken then squirted on girlfriends' fingers at slumber parties, or directly into each others' mouths, or else used to draw happy faces on Ritz crackers.  College exposed me to fondue and runny, hot brie baked in foil,  but I never really appreciated the wonders of cheese until I spent a year in Paris.


I showed up at Bernadette's door, a total stranger that a waitressing friend in Berkeley had told me to call as a last resort, and she kindly showed me to her daughter's former room and said I could stay as long as I needed. Those first weeks, having never been to Europe before and knowing no one, I did what most lonely Expats do: I took the Metro to Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, or I went to old French movies with no subtitles to try and improve my French. I also explored Bernadette's kitchen while she was at work. My first Cheese Faux Pas was to put her lovely little plate of cheeses protected by its glass dome into the refrigerator, thinking she had left it out by mistake. When she got home from work, she saw what I had done, and held out the plate in front of me as if it was evidence of a terrible crime. Mais non, mais non, mais non, she said wagging a finger at me, Jamais dans le frigo! 

She explained to me that the flavor of cheese could only bloom when room temperature. She told me the famous quote by Charles de Gaulle, How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese? After the cheeses had warmed up a bit and recovered from their trauma, she sat me down for my first lesson, slicing a fresh baguette and starting me on my journey towards real cheese appreciation. Some of the cheeses she put on a small slice of baguette, and some she proffered straight up. She spoke very little English and I was trying to speak only French while there, but I was pretty sure when she passed me a taste of camembert and urged me to smell it, she said a good camembert should smell like God's feet. This was the first time I appreciated how a flavor could be strong and delicious at the same time.

My second cheese faux pas occurred because I had rapidly become something of a camembert junkie. Soon after Bernadette's lesson, I ventured out to shyly navigate the cheese stalls at the street markets, wanting to treat her to some of the cheeses I knew she liked. The venders at first ignored me as regulars stepped right in front of me. After about ten minutes of this, I grew braver, and the vendors took my order, teasing me in French. I laughed, though I think I only understood about half of their humor at that stage. When I got back to Bernadette's kitchen, I arranged small wedges of the new cheeses on her platter,  always "one soft cheese, one hard cheese, a blue and a goat cheese," as I had learned, and awaited her delight upon returning home. But then I got hungry. Full disclosure: I did not like the rind of the camembert nearly as much as the delicious, soft interior, so in true scoffing-at-the-crust-of-Wonder-Bread fashion, I slyly worked the knife inside the triangle, leaving the pointed end in front sagging for lack of support. When Bernadette returned home, I sat her down in the kitchen and with a Ta-Da, lifted the dome off the cheeses I had purchased. She immediately honed in on the hollowed out camembert and threw her hands up in the air, scolding tu ne respect pas le fromage! And it was true, I had not respected the cheese, and vowed in that moment to have the entire experience, rind and all, if that was how the French did it.


I was making real progress in my cheese education, until the night of my third and probably not final faux pas. I had made some friends by this stage in my stay, and wanted to introduce mes amis to Bernadette, so asked her for a restaurant suggestion that was "typically French and really good," perhaps a redundancy. After a wonderful meal at a place that our little trio of expats never would have found without the help of a local, I pushed my plate aside and exclaimed that I was extremely full but might be persuaded to have dessert. Right about then our waiter showed up wheeling a silver cart and on top, about a dozen types of cheese. With great respect, he gestured to each one, as if introducing us to a dignitary, and told us its name, whether it originated from cow or goat or sheep. He told us the region it had come from, and described in succinctly whether it was strong or mild or medium. When he had finished I laughed and asked if he had anything that involved chocolate. I sensed a blunder. Bernadette rolled her eyes at the waiter, then calmly chose her little portions of three cheeses, as if I had not spoken. The waiter made his way around to each of us, and, cheeks burning, I asked him humbly what he would recommend.

I learned that night that cheese aids in the digestion of the big meal one has just eaten, and that the  average French citizen eats fifty-seven pounds of cheese a year! But part of me thinks that the cheese course is also there as a way to preserve that other great French tradition: the art of conversation and lingering with friends over a delicious meal.