I've
bought boneless trout, and sage, and new potatoes for two recipes in Provençal Light, spring dinner. And in the meantime we are clearing shelves,
braving archaeological layers of dust, to pack and move in May to Santa Cruz
(voted the third happiest city, where I ought to fit right in).
More soul-searching, as I weed out what goes and what stays, and trace back reasons why, the day or year when, who it's made me, all of it together, whatever I have
turned out to be. (A hoarder certainly! Both hunter after pieces of myself out in the
world, and gatherer back in to me.)
Weeding is flowering, I write, procrastinating as
ever among the words. (Charmed I think
by my laptop because it's all so light, almost invisible, the whole card house
that's on it tucked away each day again so effortlessly and neatly.) Unloosed from tangled roots, moldering
leaves, I bloom. Like the exhilerant apricot
trees in the orchard outside the library, popped suddenly like Sunday popcorn
into brilliant white profusion.
My life, I write, denying the reality of dust and
unattractive this and that and always the other, is colors, spices, books—from
Amaranth to Zaffre (obtained by roasting cobalt ore); from Aleppo Pepper to
Za'atar; from Archimedes, The Sand Reckoner
to my tattered old copy of Zorba the
Greek; neatly arranged (I say ironically) in perfect alphabetic order.
In fact life is a melange, a menage, a
great mess that is often as not delightful.
image: Christie
B. Cochrell, Glass Beads
