Rainy Day

Images from my last afternoon walk, in lovely mist and rain, the day before going back to Flint.

Shh -- don't tell anybody, but the windows are open

Up at 6:30 a.m. in San Pedro, still on Michigan time, I'm sitting on the couch, laptop warm where it belongs -- on my lap -- reading about all the snow back east. A photo comes up of somebody cross-country skiing on the National Mall in D.C. Mother Nature taking charge: airports closed, holiday shopping and highways all tangled up.

And here I sit in my pink bathrobe on the couch, watching a red sunrise bloom up over the harbor (yes, we face east on this hillside) and yes, it's so mild that we've left the windows open. I just heard the L.A. Times plop onto the porch -- a reassuring sound -- I wonder how much longer we'll have this part of morning. I'm not complaining, not disposed to let myself sink into melancholy nostalgia before its time.

No, I'm not complaining at all. I know enough to be grateful. Because it's a quiet, serene Sunday morning and I'm reading poems in the new Driftwood Review, and the whole day is ahead of me, and my husband is still snoozing peacefully in the next room, and I'm facing the sparkling ocean and...the windows are open.

Local Wonders #2: Korean Bell in Fog

Tomorrow is the Korean Bell's big day -- one of only two in the year it is rung. Tomorrow the site at the top of the hill overlooking a wide expanse of harbor and ocean will be crowded with well-wishers, celebrants, politicians and ringers wearing white gloves. Today, it was quiet and enveloped in fog. At first I was the only one there -- what delight to be alone here. Then a hawk getting chased by crows. Then these two gulls. Then a long-haired guy with a long-haired dog. Then three gabby Korean men with a bottle of Windex and a red rag, polishing the plaques -- for tomorrow, I suppose. It's one of my favorite places in San Pedro.

Local Wonders: Ted Kooser's and Mine

We awoke to a thick, cool marine layer today. This is our favorite kind of San Pedro morning. The front windows of the apartment are wide open facing out to a misty, dreamlike harbor, only four shadowy palms visible at what I know is Fort MacArthur. Behind the fog, the harbor sounds continue, muffled, a murmuring chant, soothing after last night's annoying bursts of cherry bombs. The marine layer is a local wonder.

The phrase emerges because on the flight out here, I finished reading a book about a life about as far from LA as you can get -- Ted Kooser's Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. The "Alps" he writes about are a series of low hills in Eastern Nebraska settled by Czech and German immigrants in the 1870s. Writing one chapter for each of the seasons, he ruminates about his outhouse, church dinners, the rarity of curved roads in the Midwest, his dog Alice, tombstones, mice families, herbicide sprayers, his Uncle Tubby, Mennonite women in their sixties at the Etcetera Thrift and Gift Shop in Seward, Nebraska: "They handle every article with reverence, as if it had personality and character; they have a winning way of looking upon a homely paint-by-number picture or a tweed sports coat that's a little bit stinky under the arms. You can tell that though they'll be happy to see it go, they wish it a happy future."

I imagine some "sophisticated" people find Kooser's writing dismissable -- his writing is quietly observant and his topics totally unpretentious. I seem to recall a few sneers when he was named the 13th U.S. Poet Laureate. (Jim Harrison, a dyed-in-the-wool Michigander who, let's face it, hangs out with pretty rarefied company from time to time, and who's a friend of Kooser's, says Local Wonders is "The quietest magnificent book I've ever read." So there.)

As a Midwesterner to my marrow, I think Kooser gets it -- the weather, the heart of life in the lands of four seasons. He makes me want to buy a chunk of land and raise goats -- a ridiculous notion for ME. But still. His similes and metaphors are wonderful. Here's one of my favorites: "The sky is like old blue denim just before dawn, with one round hole worn through, exposing the cold bony knee of the moon." I've been thinking about that image ever since -- how it perfectly captures something both weary and resilient about certain Midwestern nights.

Now off to walk to the Korean Bell in the fog, before it burns off.

Long Day, New Poem

Ted and I have a ritual of ringing my mother's Chinatown dinner bell when we think the longest day of the year is over. The wait proved to be a muse. Read it fast. I'll pull a Rappleye and "poof" it after a day.



*poof*

Okay, readers, here's a new draft. It, too, will go poof in a day.

*poof #2*

Love Poem on the Second Day of Spring

The terrible waste of war goes on, it's Good Friday, that darkest day, and some parts of Michigan might be getting a foot of snow. Yet this poem, from the vernal equinox four years ago, still applies. Here's to love embattling darkness.


for Ted

Cruel worlds conspire
against my need for
ease this gloomy day, deaths
piling up on hectoring news,
a frozen rocky orb found circling
the sun beyond Pluto.
We are pecked by circumstance
beyond control; as I write this,
sleety rain swoops down
on struggling tulips, mid-morning
light curtained almost to night. Street
lights blink on again as if winter
decided not to go. In the chilly dark
my day dips down
toward deductions, floods and
rumors of more war. Yet love, you are
the daffodil blooming in snow. You
are my real spring, my lion roaring
against the universe.

Enough Already, and a Soporific

His visage is sweet and loving and all that, but I've been informed enough is enough with the Mahareshi. I've been swamped and uninspired, probably half-suffocated by SAD...such an appropriate acronym. What a winter! Ten degrees this morning, with lovely, sparkling drips of ice growing down the screen of my big office window. I love this window.



This winter is reassuring, though: a short-term salve for worries about global warming. I keep wondering, is this the last hard winter of my life? I don't feel like complaining. Each day of hard freeze seems like a reprieve.

Trouble sleeping -- part deep-winter angst, part post-menopause, part too much work before LA -- and so yesterday I picked up a little brown vial of melatonin, 500 mcg. I tried melatonin in the 90s during a bad time of life, both parents and a dear friend dying, professional travails, and it worked well until my dreamlife turned on me with frightening nightmares. A dozen years on, I'm ready to try it again.

So I pop the little pill an hour before bedtime, and the damn thing gets stuck in my gullet. No matter how many times I swallow, I can feel it clinging to the left side of my esophagus. I make a cup of (consciously chosen) Sleepytime tea and gulp iit slowly; the bolus is still there, stuck. Who can fall asleep with that going on? Frustrated, I click "sleep" on my bedside radio and trust the monotonous midnight BBC will do the trick, and it does, even its catastrophic catalog about Kenya and Kosovo. At least this night there's news of Obama's latest wins, a remarkable momentum. Daring to hope for change, I finally fall asleep, my last-ditch melatonin eventually melting in my throat.

Snow Day

Wednesday night and Thursday were magical. What a luxury to be snowed in. Today, the world is bit frowzy, chunks of snow dropping off branches and jagged paths cut or blown out through the foot of snow on the sidewalks. People seem to be venturing out into the cold realities again, and I'm about to join them. But I'd prefer to nestle back into my burrow and sleep until spring.

While the Blood Comes Back

Gave a pint of blood for MLK Day today, the first time I've donated my A-pos in decades. It could have been psychological, but I felt a bit light headed afterwards, even after my gulps of Hawaiian punch and cheezits, so I'm stretched out back home, my feet elevated on the Laz-Y-Boy, watching a CSI rerun and looking out the window into the back yard.

And there, abruptly, is a big fat red-tailed hawk, perched on the back of a chair on the porch. No sign of the usual flurry of finches, cardinals, juncos, nuthatches and chickadees. Way to clear the yard, Hawk. I imagine the little birdies all hunkered down, hiding in the bushes and whispering, "shut up, shut up...is he gone yet? Is he gone yet?" He fluffs up and swivels his beautiful head, making me out: he leans in for a better view. I try not to move or make aggravating eye contact from the recliner. After about 20 seconds he lifts off and I breathe again. A light snow starts up, and in a minute or two, the first finch back lands on the feeder -- coast clear. And then a red cardinal in the yew at the window, and then a red-headed woodpecker clambering up the mulberry tree.

Let's just say in the peace of this moment, I feel my blood regenerating, my platelets factory madly manufacturing. I'm glad to be in this world. It's good to be a body among these other bodies, alive in the midst of all this life.

Back in Buick City

The first night, velvet humid darkness, the Midwestern weather of deep summer that's inscribed in my bones. Loud cicadas, trains in the distance. A huge comfort to be what is literally "home" for my body and my "soul." Don't know what that is, exactly, but whatever essential part of me, the part that combines all the other parts and works intuitively with the universe -- that part is rooted in a Midwestern August night when the air is so thick and fragrant it's like breathing golden honey.

Second night, a raucous thunderstorm, tornadoes in Fenton just a few miles south. As agitated as the goldfinches which swarmed to the feeder on the back porch just before the storm, Ted and I wandered from window to window, outside to inside to outside, floor to floor, watching the storm come in and over. Hallelujah, I got that drenching I'd been dreaming of in arid L.A. We drove to the Red Rooster for dinner through giant puddles, cars daring each other through about a foot of rushing water the sewers couldn't handle. After two glasses of petite syrah, wilted spinach salad and scallops in a lime sauce, not to mention shared chocolate torte and an hour of conversation with Teddy and Ted about the existence of God and the chances of morality in the post-God era, I dragged Ted out for a long walk in the neighborhood. I can't go out in the dark so it was a luxury with Ted. Gilkey Creek, overflowing, sang a rushing cantata as we walked along.

Homemade pizza tonight with Gary Custer, Ed and Casey, Nic, Jessica, Mike, Roxana and those three little aliens they called chihuahua. I know this isn't exactly a diary but it was sweet out there in the lengthening shadow of the 300-year-old burr oak. Sake under the stars. Ain't so bad to be back in Michigan.

A Sensualist Moment on Earth Day

Eighty degrees on the back porch, I'm sitting in the shade reading rough drafts of student short stories (kids getting lost in fields, car wrecks with no seat belts, creepy neighbors, insane miming clowns, threatened virginity, a lottery winner losing it all -- the usual panoply of the Flint imagination) and the sun moves gradually onto the slate porch floor. I feel its radiance before it gets all the way to my toes, still in their thick winter socks. I'm drinking strong black tea -- nothing fancy this time, just the real goods, pekoe with the bag left in a half hour. Two yellow tulips blooming along the fence; two dozen more buds about to pop. A mourning dove chases his girlfriend around the yard. She stays just a few inches ahead, making quick swerves to the right and left. Eventually he'll catch her: she'll let him. A bee zips by my ear. A bee! Could it be a honeybee? Is it possible they're not all dead?

Since it's the end of April, I allow myself not to be anxious about the heat. It can be 80 degrees on April 22. That's not so unheard of.

When exactly did the sun become the enemy? In my lifetime -- after centuries of reliance and celebration, after centuries of art and poetry and worship. Today, I'm willing to take it the old way, so beckoning, so beneficent. Today it feels like a gift. I watch the oblivious doves -- adorable, panicky bobbers almost put on the "can shoot" list but saved in a Michigan vote. I'm trying not to think about Blacksburg, those unrelenting images of guns and blood and grief. I'm trying not to think about the worst week in months in Iraq -- hundreds die in markets -- in markets! -- those gathering places where there's food -- the one thing we must have to survive, and hope, and communion. I'm trying not to think about Gonzales, and how he can't recall, and can't recall and can't recall and can't recall. But one needs to acknowledge all this: this, too, is the world.

So I get up from the chair, drop my pen on the last draft, and submit. I stretch out on my back on the slate floor, in the sun. For a quarter hour those beams shine on my winter skin. I turn my face to it, my eyes closed, and the bright gold penetrates my eyelids, so that all I see is bursts of yellow coronas. The heat penetrates my black jogging pants. I stretch out my arms and let the rays warm even the pale white undersides. It's audacious, this unmitigated, healing warmth and light. Perhaps I'm old enough now that the warnings don't matter. For a quarter hour the sun feels perfect, my body soaking it in the way we used to. So this is what it comes down to for an old sensualist: indulging in unambiguous sun, an ancient pleasure, while a wisp of nostalgia lurks, just a few inches away, just a few inches, in the shade.