Acacia and Mimosa

The acacia is in bloom along the drive, intense yellow where there has been just gray for weeks. It reminds me of the Bonnard painting, Studio with Mimosa. Are acacia and mimosa related, I wonder? Apparently not, though the name of the Mimosa derives from the Greek for mimic . . .

There is acacia honey. Acacia is used in perfume and incense; it can be medicinal. In Freemasonry it symbolizes purity and endurance of the soul. It’s also called Silver Wattle, one of its varieties (though surely one less gold?).

And other yellows—

In Januaries twenty years ago I used to run away from home in San Jose to oldtown Los Gatos, escaping being shut in, stifled in spirit. The yellow of the mustardweed I’d never known before was redemptive, revelatory, on the January hillsides under rain-soaked leafless trees—a glory of color that made me feel myself again.

image: Pierre Bonnard, Studio with Mimosa, artarchive.com

Blackcurrant Margarita

If there is still the need to counter the gray, here is a lovely, lively purple libation:

Blackcurrant Margarita

2 oz Sauza Añejo Conmemorativo

2 oz Crème de Cassis*

2 oz Key Lime Juice

*or 1 ½ oz Triple Sec and

½ oz Crème de Cassis

image: Black currant (černý rybíz), July 2007, Jaroměř, Czech Republic, Europe, Author= Karelj

Grays

We’re all complaining about how gray, gray, gray it’s been—the endless rain and cloud cover; the days that just never get light. But I am tired of complaining, too, and have drawn up a list of grays that aren’t depressing. Pleasing grays, soul-satisfying grays—

the luxuriant gray of Himalayan cats

oysters, especially baked three ways, like that place in New Orleans which is probably gone now

Earl Gray tea

a dappled gray hunter named Tapatia clearing a jump

gray-green olive trees on a hillside in eastern Crete

a crisp pinot gris from Alsace

my wooly gray lambswool sweater, I must pull out to wear with turquoise

dried sage leaves

elephants

the middle name of my Bonnard quest heroine, Isabel Grayfeather Girard

my true love’s dear, silvering hair

gray fog covering Venice, yes!

image: Nebbia a Venezia: Riva degli Schiavoni. Foto di Giovanni Dall'Orto, 10/12/2007

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Back in July, on the way to Ashland and Shakespeare.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Flowerscape

St. Brithwald's Feastday

I find that January 22 is the feastday of St. Brithwald.

Benedictine bishop and a benefactor of Glastonbury Abbey in England. Brithwald was a monk at Glastonbury when he was named bishop of Ramsbury in 1005. He eventually moved his see to Old Sarum. Both Glastonbury and Malmesbury abbeys were under his patronage. Brithwald had visions and was a true prophet.
(Catholic Online, Saints & Angels)

Glastonbury draws me strongly for its connections with the legend of King Arthur, which has fascinated me since junior high when my father gave me The Once and Future King—still a favorite. King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are said to be buried beneath the high altar at the Abbey, their graves discovered in the Twelfth Century.

According to two accounts by the chronicler, Giraldus Cambrensis, the abbot, Henry de Sully, commissioned a search, discovering at the depth of 16 feet (5 m) a massive hollowed oak trunk containing two skeletons. Above it, under the covering stone, according to Giraldus, was a leaden cross with the unmistakably specific inscription Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia ("Here lies interred the famous King Arthur on the Isle of Avalon").
—Wikipedia

For further on Medieval abbeys, here's a good site: Abbeys and Monasteries in England

image: Glastonbury Abbey, Mark Robinson, Williton, UK

Asilomar, Storms

The wonders of Photoshop? No, a crazily sunny hour between torrential rains down at Asilomar, where we weathered a fine, exhilerating storm. High winds and surf, incredible curtains of rain, and even lightning and thunder just before dawn. It felt wonderfully cozy in the big old stone and dark wood park buildings, which have surely weathered some historic storms, with implacable grandfather-like calm. We read by the big fireplace in the lobby (which reminded me of the lobby at Lake Lodge in Yellowstone where my Father taught me to play ping-pong one long-ago rainy afternoon), and holed up in our room with lamps and wooden floors and windows on two sides looking out into sturdy oak branches, venturing out only to eat fish—and then to wander down the dunes to watch a silver sheet of sandpipers on the beach when the clouds had blown away. A perfect retreat. I would have loved to stay a week to walk and write and feel my mind clear.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Asilomar Beach

Painted Cockerels

A little color for a rainy day.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Cockerels

Quote for the Day

Bunthorne, the poet: "Do you yearn?"
Patience, the milkmaid: "I yearn my living."
—W.S. Gilbert, Patience

We're looking forward—impatiently—to The Lamplighters' performance this weekend!

Christmas Cactus Two

This red one, at home, was given to me as a cutting back in Santa Fe, one Christmas Eve—just a slip of a thing. That was the last party I remember with family friends a few doors down Sombrio Drive, a snowy night with piñon in their fireplace and bowls of good posole made with crumbled chili pods, oregano, and pork. The cactus has had its good days and its bad, blown always by the winds of change. It was unsettled for a year or two after its move to California; delightfully happy three years ago to find a sunny spot on its new shelf, among the Bonnard books under the octagonal port-hole in the Thendara hallway. It almost didn't bloom at all last year, when one of our dear friends—one of its family from Sombrio—died, as if it knew something was wrong with the world.

I must tend it more tenderly this year, and see if it perks up. It didn't seem to like spending the summer outside, though it didn't mind being trimmed back. Its red is glorious, and should be encouraged.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Christmas Cactus (Red)

Christmas Cactus

My Christmas cactuses are in bloom, a little off-kilter as usual.

They are free spirits, both of them, blithely heedless of the calendar, obeying inner rhythms only they can feel. Swayed by the temperature, the light, water and green plant food, how often I pay attention to them during the course of the year, what music or what cooking odors come their way, traumas and tenderness—like any living thing.

This one, at work, is usually finest around April, in a second blooming. We'll see what happens this year.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Christmas Cactus (Pink)

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Meditating in the countryside. (Tassajara would be nice.)

image: View of the Gandhakuti in Jetavana Monastery, Sravasti, Uttar Pradesh, India. This is what remains of the hut where Buddha used to live. Buddhist monks from Myanmar are paying respects and meditating at the site.

Thought for the Day

What kind of unholy mess would it have made if I had hit the Bloodmobile?

Leaf-Shadow

I have leaf-shadow on my wall and ceiling now, cast by the paper lamp, the white Japanese lantern, and the spindly ficus next to it in its neat basket. Fog outside makes the world indistinct. And inside there’s this shadow-play, the slender fish-shapes on the white paint, like ghost koi rising in a clouded pond, or cut-outs in paper, those snowflakes we used to make as children with a few snips of the scissors.

I’m happy inside, reading, but still thinking of Half Moon Bay. The card shop, the market that sells artichoke bread, peas in the pod, jars of jerk spices, local mustards and salsas and jams, pumpkin butter. I'd love to go and eat fish, photograph the fishing boats, the one that especially charms me, “For Tuna.” Not a good day for a drive, with the fog, but maybe sometime soon we can drive to the ocean, and tonight, for supper, cook some Mykonos Sole.

image: Water drops, Staffan Enbom from Finland

Violets

To restore me to myself I’m chopping onions and parsnips, washing red chard, finding violets like rain-washed amythests half-hidden under the dead winter twigs and leaves, trying to shape a story from the wistful images of other Januaries, yearning for something a new year promises: bloom and new growth of my own.

image: Sweet violet, photographed in Ungureni, Măneşti, Dâmboviţa, Romani

Grace

New Year’s afternoon in Santa Fe: most shops surprisingly open, the Cathedral doors just closed. We park by the public library and walk to the Plaza, though not under the portal of the Palace of the Governors where silver and turquoise is laid out for sale on woven Native blankets. We go into La Fonda, the old railway hotel, with its dark polished flagstone floors, the bar where newspapermen met and drank martinis or margaritas, the inner lightwell set off by painted glass windows that is the restaurant, and behind that the leather couches and enormous fireplace I remember from when I worked that winter for the court reporters, after college and before coming back to California, on icy days a smouldering piñon log giving out warmth. The newsstand’s still in the lobby where you can get books by Donald Hamilton, Oliver Lafarge, Tony Hillerman—the Santa Fe writers whose children I went to school with, or who I almost invited to my parents’ 40^th anniversary party; who I’d once thought to join.

There in the shop we find a perfect cup, tomato red, painted inside and out with very Santa Fe flowers—and on the red saucer (really a spoon rest), something like the hollyhocks that grow so tall and straight and proud along coyote fences, the peeling rough wood posts of my childhood. It has a yellow florette where the handle meets the rim, and is too lovely to resist: a cup I’ll treasure for these regenerative moments of grace before the sun is gone again into the winter dark.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Red Cup

Kettles

On the first morning of the new year, before anything else (instead of noticing as I might have the sweet, innocent singing of a bird in the bare apple trees beyond the back wall, or the winter sun making a little crystal palace of a patch of crusted snow), I’m in my mother’s kitchen tackling a sinkful of dirty kettles—thoroughly stuck, impossible to clean—surely the very same kettles I battled with in junior high, in high school, summers after college, as long as forty years ago. Hating every soul-scouring minute of the fight (not pleased, as with a bowl, a cup, to find the cleanness along its smooth form, something in those kindlier objects that cooperates in the process of cleaning), I realize how exactly these kettles of my mother’s reveal the difference between her nature and mine, the inexplicable battle with the world she is constantly engaged in—has been for over eighty years without ever tiring of it. I overhear her saying how funny it is that I always want to put kettles in the dishwasher, and hand-wash glasses, while she (and all other right-thinking people, is the implication) is just the opposite.

While I’m applying the inadequate scratch pad (not a brillo in sight, of course, only the immaculate white plastic) I think how maddening it is that after all this time she hasn’t thought to buy new kettles that don’t stick, kettles that aren’t forever burnt, egged, gummed, encrusted with unspeakable things, things I want nothing to do with. But it is so very much her way—her creed—her declared preference—she would no more do the easy thing than I, by choice, the hard. It makes me want to cry, this lifelong battle that I know can never be resolved. And my defiant, treacherous thoughts of gleaming copper, sophisticated Caphalon, French country enamel, with their dirt-repellent surfaces and amiable soul, have been thoroughly defeated yet again by the stark, no-nonsense reality of this broiler pan, burned chowder pot, and egg pan.

image: Goguryeo kettle, Three Kingdoms of Korea period, 5th century

Places I Would Rather Be Today

On the Thames at Abingdon, in mild January weather.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Thames

Remembering to Be Grateful

As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse
by Billy Collins

from Nine Horses (Random House)


I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.