Reboot. Disconnect from work and home, connect to the ground, air, living things. Touch soft moss and cold water. Hear rocks crunch underfoot and the wind sweep across the mountain. Deep healing.

A cold Sunday afternoon with friends. We caught some serious air on the jumps, Jack. We sledded until dark, and then fifty percent of our family fell asleep in the car on the way home.

While the preacher spoke of a world beyond the veil, one half of a mated pair caught his neck in a loop of nylon cord that he or his mate had worked into their nest. He parted the louvers covering the exhaust vent and launched himself through to the outside.

I closed the car door, then stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the side of the house. His bloodied head looked as though it was glued to the metal slats, and was twisted at an odd angle to his body dangling below. His mate clung to his bottom half, flapping her wings as if trying to fly for two, swinging them both back and forth. She flitted to an overhanging branch and watched as we freed his body from the vent and the plastic. I buried him in the garden bed along the back fence.

I told her just after she came through the front door. She asked if it was the mostly brown one or the one with a lot of black on his face, and I said it was the latter.

“That was Solomon,” she said, her voice breaking. She turned away to mourn privately. I stepped to the back window and watched thick grey clouds pass high above the freshly turned garden soil.

Clusters of red and white brittlegills dotted the path through the back woods. Can’t know for sure which species, there are over 750 in the genus. But if there is any poetry in happenstance, then surely my path was strewn with Russula sanguinaria, bloody brittlegill, the deep, rich red of a life poured out at your feet.

We were alone for the afternoon, and so we walked around the lake, slowly, savoring the warmth of that Indian summer day. She patiently waited for me each time I stopped to take another, and another, and another. We watched flying creatures of all kinds enjoy a large patch of asters (I’d never before seen a Buckeye butterfly). Just as I was zooming in on the center of her web, a spotted orbweaver zipped past my lens and encased a newly-caught fly in a death cocoon, and I felt pity and awe and guilt in equal measure.

At work or church I would say that the view was breathtaking, that the climb was invigorating, that watching the sun rise over blue mountains was moving, and I would mean every word. But what I would whisper to you in the quiet is this:

…she reclined like a queen on a cushion of stone and watched birds of prey circling beneath her…

…he grappled with fear and emerged a victor, unafraid to look down…

…I drank in the cool forest air, knelt to feel the stubble of giant fern leaves broken by the careless, traced the initials of lovers carved into the bark of a bent tree…

I text her a photo: pictures of her life hang from clothespins on my kitchen wall.

“It cracks me up that you took pics of all of the messy places,” she texts.

“Those are all of the beautiful places,” I text back.

And it’s true. Every corner of her home held beauty. All things burst green with the late northern spring in the Oran Valley. We stayed at her place even though she was away, but her family memb[…]

Bruce gathered eggs from the hens’ favorite corner of the barn (why they don’t lay in their coop, no one understands, but chickens are complicated people) and served them up for our Saturday m[…]

And then there were those chickens. I couldn’t stop myself–I took about 900 pictures of chickens that weekend. Why? I have no idea, but who wouldn’t take pictures of giant pet birds that w[…]

When we were away from the house doing family things, attending the events for which we’d made the trip north in the first place, we talked about what Tilly, Monty, Jag and the chickens might be[…]

Weeks later, I stand in the kitchen while the tulsi steeps. I reach out and touch each picture and remember sweet birdsong, the squeak of trampoline springs, the crack of a bonfire, the quiet of a[…]

• I could barely believe the beauty of Manhattan Beach. Lemon trees and succulents in nearly every front yard, warm and fragrant breezes, my feet in soft sand after a painfully long winter.

• I’d never before attended a wedding held outside in the rain, but now I can heartily recommend it: huge smiles peeking out from under dripping raincoat hoods and umbrellas, steam rising from the pavement, the sound of water all around.

• I made a cake, sewed a colorful bunting and watched a newly minted teenager dive into blue water over a long weekend.

• Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei.

Other garden notes:
–> Killed my seedlings that were started way too late by overfertilizing them. Too much love, hyper-vigilance, overparenting, the story of my life. But I found some lovely heirloom transplants at my friendly neighborhood garden center and adopted them.
–> Lettuce is growing and I cannot wait for the first homegrown salad of the season.
–> Peas, melons, peppers, cukes, herbs, they’re all growing away, but this time I am determined to avoid a jungle mess, and so am studying pruning techniques.
–> My garden is child’s play compared with the restorative agricultural work being done by my Regrarian heroes, but we all must start somewhere.

I spend hours in the garden. I weed the beds and tie the bamboo supports with fresh twine. I spread black gold from my illicit compost pile over the turned soil. For a while I listen to music, then I listen to the wind, then I just listen. I feel gratitude for the warm sunshine and cool air, for a functioning (if aging) body, for the worms and dirt, for the smell of the wild mint and chives made fragrant by the cut of my spade.

But I also ache: for a little farm to tend with my gentleman farmer at my side; for the quiet evening conversation that often follows a long day spent outside; for sweet words of poetry whispered back and forth by the light of the full moon.

So many below freezing days, and then this storm of heavy and wet snowflakes that stung our cheeks as we walked. The pond, transformed by a layer of ice and snow, was a white meadow ringed by bare trunks. I snapped a few photos and then the wind told us it was time to turn back. Just as we started on our way home, I looked down and noticed: she’d worn her purple sneakers instead of her boots. Silly girl.

I stand very still in sparse underbrush and listen to voices echo across the water.

I drop to my knees in the middle of a stand of hardwoods.

I bring my face close to moss, bugs and fallen leaves.

I hover over clusters of soft, grey mushrooms.

I stare too long at a patch of sunlight on bark.

I lose hours to the forest.

I wear the woods home:

dirt on my knees,

burrs in my hair,

mud on my boots.

I sat on that very same flat hometown rock when I was her age, on the side of a rushing cold water creek filled with crayfish and bubbles.

We found a new trail and followed it to its end.

We returned to Woods Edge farm for our third annual bonfire on Saturday. Angelina‘s non-profit hosted a camp for Native American youth this summer, and many of her campers returned for the day. So many sounds: Johnny Cash coming out of the barn speakers, horses neighing, a leaf blower making a giant pile for jumping, laughter, native flute.

I spent time in the chilly upper pasture trying to get a good shot of the boy horses grazing. The only way I could keep them near me was to sing, so I made up the most ridiculous, operatic songs about horses and belted them while setting up my shots. Just when I thought I had the perfect picture, the horses were spooked by a squirrel. A SQUIRREL. So much for the power of opera.

to show them beauty between strips of asphalt

to console myself

to let the urge pass

(not all good things are wild and free)

sweet gentle green moss

frail butterfly wing

round red berries

a single thorn

More music on our front steps. The kids played hide and seek in the dark spaces between the buildings. One nearby door slowly opened a crack, an unseen man or woman probably peering out to pinpoint the source of the sound. I sat on my stool, listened, swatted away mosquitos. My neighbors’ television sets cast strobing stripes of light on their front lawns.

We took a walk after dinner Friday evening, following mossy trails to the playground. I admit to doing a little climbing, a little playing, but only as much as becomes a forty year-old. At the end of our walk, we approached our front steps. Fireflies twinkled all around the concrete and the grasses, but only at our house. We were chosen. I lit them a candle to keep them company.

This early summertime has been lovely. Some notes:

• We waited with bated breath for cicadas to visit, but in the end had to settle for finding a few husks out at a friend’s place in Haymarket.

• My kids were the very first people in our community pool on the Friday before Memorial Day. It was 54 degrees outside.

• We three went strawberry picking, our first time ever. My first time ever. There is no thing sweeter than a freshly-picked, ripe, red strawberry. Except for maybe a ripe and juicy peach.

• My garden is really thriving. It felt like an epic struggle against entropy and all forces of nature to get the garden pulled together, but now? Now I have lettuce, two varieties of basil, arugula, beans, melons, peppers, three varieties of heirloom tomatoes, chives, cilantro and probably a bunch more stuff I can’t remember growing in our humble backyard. And only one unmentionable incident involving a varmint and my lettuce plants.

I have tons of soft, sweet clover growing all over my backyard and I and refuse to cut it short or spray it with herbicides. I just can’t do it. I often sit on a bar stool in my kitchen and watch the bunnies and birds hang out. The bunnies chow on the flowers and the birds look for worms near my de facto/illicit compost pile.

On warm spring evenings, our neighbor carries his huge bass across the driveway and plants it in the front yard. His little ones often follow him over. We grab the sidewalk chalk and whatever instruments are handy and then we jam. People dance, people draw, people come out and stare.

Whatever. We are that family, the one with puffs of unruly clover in our lawn and messy drawings on our stoop and a ten year-old playing cajon and a twelve year-old dancing with a box on her head and a crazy mother filming the entire circus on an iPhone.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/o8yUl8mw6oE

*“The aphid is a stupid little creature which lives by thrusting its bill or sucking tube into a stem or leaf if a plant, and thus settles down for life, nourished by the sap which it sucks up[…]

We three step outside our front door and walk down a paved path to a bridge that spans a small trickle of water, banked on both sides by honeysuckle. They pick small bunches of the flowers, then s[…]

Moments later, at the dining room table, we open the thick book and search the index in vain for honeysuckle, then cicadas, but then settle on reading about our most recent house guests, ants. The[…]

I slip outside with my camera, leaving behind the chatting and smiling that always makes me self-conscious, uncomfortable, embarrassed. I walk the property line, trailed by dragonflies, and stoop down to touch soft mosses and strange willowy seed pods. I descend to the culvert to look for frogs, but the heat has shrunken their pond to a puddle where a lone tadpole circles, believing himself to be the only of his kind.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked. ~Anais Nin

I came across a completely beautiful (and completely dead) cicada while on a walk with my girl. It now clings to the side of a nest in my home office.

We walked. The rivulets running across the path were choked with layers of leaves, mud and twigs, and thick, dark clumps stuck to the sides of my boots. I hugged my camera to my belly and hopped across rocks through deeper, freely running waters. They ran ahead, but I lingered at the sides of the path. Brittle mushroom skins covered a tree with brown, curling scales. I stooped to feel moss and bark. I turned to admire an empty peanut shell in a hollow. A single red berry clung to the end of a dark red, thorny stem. I heard their voices calling to me from deep within the wood. I looked up, and found that I was alone.

A sign hangs at the beginning of the long driveway, but I only catch the first word, Woods, white painted letters on dark pine. We pass fenced pastures dotted with small barns and stands of tall trees, only tufts of orange and brown leaves left at their very tops, their bodies spare streaks below. The horses lift their heads as we pass. We park under an old maple and haul folding chairs, blankets, and backpacks holding flashlights and sweatshirts past the farm house and into the back yard where the gathering has started.

This is Angelina’s farm. She is a former lawyer turned farm-owner. Her long, black hair hangs down her back, almost brushing her thick leather belt. Many of her family are here, and friends, and friends of friends like we are, standing around the food tables or sitting in small groups. Children run through and between the barns, jump into the leaf piles and then pull poking leaf bones from their hair and pockets. The sun hangs low. Thick rays skim the tops of the dry branches piled high in the fire pit. The air smells of horse and hay, salad dressing and vegetable stew, grass and sun-warmed wood.

We eat and laugh. The men pick up guitars and try out a tune or two. The grey mare gives rides to the little ones, circling in the pea gravel until the passing three wheeler spooks her to a standstill. The sky deepens and the barn darkens as the children take turns swinging blindly at a pinata hanging from a cross beam. One final crack of the broom handle and candy pours from the fatal wound onto the cement floor.

The moon is round and orange. The sweet mares whinny for attention and carrots from their fences. We sit near the fire and watch the bats make laps around the horse barn, passing in front of the floodlight with each go-around. We circle little limbs and pull blanket corners down and around body edges. A flashlight hunt for a lost belonging takes place in the giant leaf pile; we hear a shout of victory and know that what was once lost is now found. Sparks fly upward.

We weren’t really lost; we could see the house just across the cove. But the fields were so very cold and muddy, and the winds came off the water and whipped stinging sand at our eyes and mouths, making the evening seem desperate and epic. And so our thoughts and conversation turned to fire and food and warmth and shelter. The Muscari pushed toward the sunset, unfeeling, insensitive to our struggle for survival.

I found it at the edge of the Atlantic, lifeless, grey, sliding in the foam. The pain of the frigid waters shot up my legs as I darted in to pluck the ocean’s dead from her shallows. The white last now sits on my window sill, the trophy of a landlocked housewife.

The walking path was covered with seed pods. The kids thought they looked like alien faces. They found a squirrel’s nest that had fallen from a tree and poked it with sticks, looking for life. Most everything along the path was brown and grey, except for bright green patches of moss at the base of some trees, and the river itself, colored green by long ribbons of algae that quivered in the current.

I do like this time of year, when the outside colors are shifting from vibrance to reserve, diving deeper down into their end season. I, for one, think grays and browns are quite lovely, and bittersweet.

It was hard work. I had to lift heavy pine branches over my head to finish the lean-to, and while I held still to staple the sides of the tee pees, the mosquitoes nearly ate my face off. In fact, one bit me on the left side of my lower lip, and I have been doing dead-on Silvester Stallone impressions all afternoon. Adriaaaaaaan!

I wanted to tell them no, because I am old and tired and over-caffeinated. But this was the first weekend after the first week of a new school year, the end of the first week of our new days spent more apart than together. So I said yes instead. Yes, I will play with you. Yes, I like what you do. Yes, I love you.

Wooden paths and bridges lead to trout pools lovingly tended by ghosts. A thick layer of moss covers every surface, absorbing our words and footfalls. In a neighboring yard, a woman hangs her laundry on the line. We float past her unnoticed.

The succulents on our front steps look so beautiful after the rain.

Our neighbors have an awesome deck, a welcoming firepit, and a killer fashion sense.

“Before beginning a hunt, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it.” – Winnie the Pooh

Things here are still brown and gray, so we hearty Northern types have to hunt for Colour in March. We found a marble, played Pooh Sticks, collected rocks, and endured A Perilous Crossing. I think five is my favorite age.

She walked out of the gray woods holding this pot. She found wild snow drops under a shaggy mat of brown. She freed them from leaf bones and dried tangles, then plopped them, dirt and all, into discarded plastic. Now the pot sits on our front steps and makes Mama happy.

A cold Sunday afternoon with friends. We caught some serious air on the jumps, Jack. We sledded until dark, and then fifty percent of our family fell asleep in the car on the way home.

Actually, we were looking for our first letterbox and after three previous attempts and not one stamp to show for it, we didn’t care one bit if the guy watched our every move. We found the box, stamped our guts out, noisily re-hid it and left. From the highway I spotted the smoking guy poking around the hiding place, trying to figure it all out. I guess we’re bad letterboxers.

I want to need to remember:

:: a pod of dolphins hunting for their breakfast in the waters across the cove

:: the smell of laundry that has dried in the salty bay air

:: laughing and carrying on with old friends over wine and clams casino

:: a funky haircut that heralds a new season in my life

:: rounded triangles of moonlight reflected off the backs of thousands of waves and minnows

:: linguine con le vongole made by my former chef of a husband using clams dug from the bay with our own big and little hands. so. very. yummy.

:: reading sonnets under blankets after the weather turned much colder

Funniest conversation overheard:

Abbie: “Wow, you can see the whole world from up here!”
Jocelyn: “Can you see Italy???”