Cherries

A treat for the vacation morning—French croissants and cherry jam.

I’m only sad that the jar of sour cherry preserves with honey from the “Mylelia” Water Mill has gone bad, opened for almost a year. It would have been perfect on the Navajo bread I've just baked, with cornmeal-dusted crust.

image: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Cherries, 1873

Eye Exam

The only test that I could never pass—

I felt ashamed, unfairly failed, when every time the letters refused me again. Was it simply that they didn't spell anything, didn't shape themselves into poems (Rilke's sagacity, or Billy Collins' deadpan wit) or any language I might recognize? A kind of hard-edged Cyrillic cacaphony, without serifs or serafim?

But no, it wasn't that. It wasn't just the letters that I couldn't see, but the whole chart itself, the chart that marked my course, a blur against the wall.

Not being able to see—

So many doctors who didn't understand, who were insensitive to what it meant to me. One took me down the hall with my glasses off, and expected me to find the room again where we'd started. I had to plead for help, be led blindly by someone whose face I never saw. Another prescribed an endless course of drops, stupidly thinking I could be corrected, so I spent all one summer in a haze, lying (all I could do) under the trees in a park near the library a block or two from home, where I might only have imagined the whole goat roasting in a barbecue pit for a family's Sunday picnic, the Morris dancers who appeared in the leaf-dapple out of nowhere, and in a bell's shake disappeared again, like something out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

My eyes are too nearsighted for lasik surgery, but I would have hesitated anyway. Having read Mark Salzman's Lying Awake, about the nun whose mystic visions and her gift of verse turn out to have been brought about by a life-threatening illness, I have to wonder whether my own particular way of seeing, my eye for beauty, might not be affected (if not caused) by my extreme myopia, and whether if I could see clearly I might lose forever that impossible, aching pleasure in what I do see . . .

image: An eye chart (E chart) for assessment of distant visual acuity, Sarindam7

Santa Fe

Santa Fe was enduringly—endearingly—itself.  This is my favorite season there, between the time of blowing tumbleweeds that catch on chain-link fences like bony fish in a net and the time of yellow-hearted roses, Peace, that were always full-opened for my birthday at the true beginning of summer, in June.  It seemed a lesser lilac year, but there were still cascades of them around town, evokative of springs gone by, of rope swings over the river with water still in it, recent snow melt, not yet run dry.  The time of playhouses and track, the running broad-jump, of Gormley’s Grocery on Canyon Road where we stopped after school, bicycling home.  And one year, making a movie in a distant canyon with a small adobe church, caught with my classmates in the unexpected rain, the sky bruised dark as plums against the mountains as we waited it out inside—one of those turning points that marked me.

After, the moments when I took stock were in winter, at the darkest period of the year, but then spring changed me utterly, thawed me, left me longing for what was too far ahead.  And Santa Fe conspired with its lilacs and its budding trees to coax me on.  Birthplace, and place of annual rebirth.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Green Gate, Santa Fe

More Lilacs

Mary Cassatt, Lilacs in a Window, 1880

Lilacs: An Elegy

I'm off to Santa Fe for the weekend, hoping to find
lilacs—spilling over coyote fences, that dusty purple fragrance in the dark—reminding me of that last spring, burning with love and loss that was to come. Seeing Phaedre up the road at St. John's college, sitting apart, alredy changed, for Baccalaureate one sun-struck evening just before the end, never playing the Faure song that would have marked the turning of my life away from all of that, from the time I would always remember when there was, for a brief moment only, a profusion of lilacs.


image: lilac Syringa vulgaris in bloom, Stockholm, Marisa DeMeglio

Natural History

The natural world is changed, in just a day—

Some little bright red baby finches sit outside my window on the ledge, trying to get in (or scrabbling at their reflections).

And at the other end of things, the planet Jupiter has lost a giant cloud stripe, the photographs tell us . . .

While I, drinking my French roast from my Cretan cup, seem to go on as always. Chaos Theory, though, would have it that my world is rocked, that consequences (if unknown) are inevitable. Now, or twenty years from now?

Or forty years past—the frozen nights when I went out into the January dark in Santa Fe to look at Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, in the simple telescope borrowed from school. Catching frosty stars and planets in a glass the way I saw crystals precipitate from clear liquid.

The reverberations of these small and yet enormous things do go, as they say, on and on.


image: View of Jupiter's clouds with the Great Red Spot at top right as brown oval to right of wavy white and brown clouds. Below the Great Red Spot are various bands of bluer wavy clouds at smaller scales with smaller light blue spots, NASA, Caltech/JPL

Poppies

I feel happy, after a tedious workout, because of poppies, Ottmar Liebert's nouveau flamenco on my iPod, and the thought of chicken marinating in Greek yogurt and Tandoori spices in the fridge for supper. And because I did work out, and got my neck and shoulder muscles stretched at least, against the beginnings of a headache.

And now the good Madame Fleur rosé is cold, and those poppies amazing.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Poppies

Paths

I've lost sight of the footpaths, that lure me up into the hills, or down a long rose-crowded lane, behind houses, between the openings of gates, into those explorations of both mind and foot and often camera as well—unplotted stream-of-consciousness walks in misty or fine weather, following a little shimmer of sunlight or dance of leaf-shadow, the possibility of ruins or of sheep. When we moved to Thendara we were promised a map of hiking trails, some sixty-five miles of paths and off-road trails somewhere there in the Los Altos Hills. The map was not available, and just last fall I finally got one—but I haven't opened it. I must begin again, find time to wander and explore. And then in England this summer, along Hadrian's Wall, on moors or dales, along the River Avon and the River Wear . . .

image: Public footpath near Malham in the Yorkshire Dales (North Yorkshire), United Kingdom, Immanuel Giel

Celebrations

An ordinary worknight, no roses for sale at the bottom of the road. But tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, and I'll marinate pork tenderloin in marjoram and citrus juices for tacos, and in the morning make some guacamole, following no recipe—always almost a meditation for me. I will find my tablecloth that looks most Mexican, rough woven, yellow striped, and the pottery plates that come from Mexico, left out on the sidewalk for the taking several years ago. So days of festival follow the everyday, and special celebrations can be conjured to liven the humdrum spirits.


image: Tacos, PDPhoto.org

May Day

In honor of May Day, the festival of Flora, leaving flowers on the doorstep. My mother talks about having made May baskets in childhood back in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, but I don't remember ever doing so.

I do remember that when Amish Friendship Bread was all the rage, and my whole life was being dictated by it, I thought about leaving the bowl of irrepressible batter on some poor unsuspecting person's doorstep, and running away—as people in stories did babies.


image: L'affresco della Primavera di Stabiae, una delle pitture più famose dell'epoca romana. Rinvenuta a Stabia, si trova oggi al Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Mentnafunangann