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
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
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
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
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
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
Some blossoms for another rainy day. This, the last painting Bonnard worked on, at eighty, just before his death.
Too ill to hold the brush, Bonnard begged his nephew Charles Terrasse to change a green patch to orange. It is one of the most intensely poetic pictures in this century. The 80-year-old creator had just managed to complete his hymn to joy, discreetly sung in deep solitude.
image: Pierre Bonnard, L'amandier en fleurs (The Almond Tree in Blossom), 1945
I've been intrigued by the concept and execution of monsters on ancient maps—charting what's fearful to us, the unknown, which yet has its own lure and an at least aesthetic charm.
image: w:Carta marina, a wallmap of Scandinavia, by w:Olaus Magnus. A part of entire map showing part of Norwegian coast. Legendary whirl of water has caught a ship and monsters attacks other ships. James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota
And on the same theme, in the same palette (which I always confuse with palate), this from Cezanne.image: Stilleben mit Granatapfel und Birnen, Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH
The flats of strawberries on offer now from solitary vendors standing on street corners on and near campus are somehow not appealing in the least. Not like the sliced fruit dripping juices wrist to elbow at the fruit stands in the square in Mexico City that spring—papaya, mango, melon, what?—dipped in lime juice and chili powder, said to be unsafe to eat and so much more desirable for that. Safer were greenish glass bottles of CocaCola at the Mercado, and a soup made from succulent pink shrimp and cilantro eaten with handshaped corn tortillas. The wondrous market offered everything from slabs of beef dizzy with flies to fragile butterflies in silver filagree, from onyx chess pieces to cotton dresses embroidered with every color thread, the light material kind to sunburned arms and shins. My first trip to a foreign place—what made me never want to do without again.image: Mangga gedong gincu, a cultivar of mango, Mangifera indica, from Tomo, Sumedang, West Java, Indonesia, W.A. Djatmiko
+Madame+Misia+Godebska+Natanson+1895.jpg)
