Notice of Transfer

Why is it so hard to say goodbye to old cars, even when one is entirely uninterested in cars at large and all matters automobiliac?  I've donated my 28-year-old Camry to the San Francisco Opera, which seems a fitting end for it, and something my parents—whose car it was for much of the 28 years—would have gotten a kick out of.  (I'm thinking it might well turn up as a prop in one of the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic productions!) 

The tow truck picked it up just now.  We took it for one last drive this morning, down to the ocean front, and while parked there we saw a whale—and later three or four dolphins.  I love seeing the many moods of the ocean; today's was sparkly, with a lone paddleboarder tiny and insignificant against the vast shimmering light.  All symbols of parting or something, of life carrying on.

The Camry became one of those legendary cars driven only on Sundays by a little old lady, to church—but in my mother's case, to the casino.  The Camel Rock Casino out by the Tesuque Pueblo in that high desert country.

I drove the car reluctantly in Santa Fe, because it seemed to take up more room than legitimate on the narrowest roads.  I know we bundled piñon logs into the trunk one Christmas, having driven up the road of artists, Canyon Road, to the woodyard of Jesus Rios, snowflakes in the air but not yet feathering up on the ground.  We drove to Bandelier often, with all kinds of good things for picnics by little Bean Creek, and she would sit with her thermos of coffee while I walked up the path soft with fallen evergreen needles to climb cottonwood ladders up the cliffs to the Ceremonial Cave, sometimes with thunderclouds bruising the canyon.  I drove it out to Tsankawi the afternoon of many New Year's Eves, the last day of the year, to again climb to Anasazi caves, smelling the juniper and pungent berries on my fingers after, going home to sit by a piñon fire.

And when my mother died we packed it with the last of the Heritage books (Dumas and Henry James, Kenilworth, The Woman in White), and the big round cottonwood drum that years of martini glasses sat on, on careful coasters, while dinner was readying, and drove it back to northern California through Flagstaff, Las Vegas, a couple of California missions, Gilroy.

This morning I remembered at the last minute to take the three-stranded car charm she'd hung from the visor, hoping its blessings haven't worn out like the long-faded blue paint and almost every part under the hood, and can be brought inside with the reluctantly signed Notice of Transfer.

image:  Pinterest, Ancient Car

La Vie en Ambre

Away for the weekend, and gratefully back home here to the coast, where I'm nesting again.

Making a chicken and farro salad with green beans, goat cheese, marjoram.  With shallots—always tantalizingly mythical, redolent of the Victorian poets, alchemizing those Medieval and Arthurian elements.  A kind of amber skin, amber a kind of alchemy as well, fossilized tree resin holding inside it flowers, fruit, feathers, insects, crustaceans, spider webs, healing, history, life itself.

Getting ready to read The Cleaner of Chartres, by Salley Vickers (having loved Miss Garnet's Angel, set in Venice, holding inside its own amber heart the Archangel Raphael and the restoration of a 14th-century chapel).

I have lived by the sundial motto, "Count none but the sunny hours," and am pleased to learn there is a rose for such as me, named Amber Sun.

images:  Christie B. Cochrell, Sundial

Amber Sun rose

Beyond the Dusk

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

(William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury)

With August comes an awareness of summer, summer no longer mid-, but in decline, on its long, slow way out, burning itself up as it goes.  There is a great nostalgia in it, wistful sadness for the waking glory lost, the potential more than likely unfulfilled, fading and making-do begun.

As I have said before, to me The Sound and the Fury captures the feeling of summer as nothing else can, the quintessence of summer.  So I must either read it again now, for the umpteenth time, or try Light in August for a change.

image:  James McNeill Whister, Nocturne, Grey and Silver

After a Hiatus

. . . I can be found sitting on our deck in Santa Cruz with a wellspring of pink roses beside the pinecone lantern, and a squirrel coming inquiring. 

By the time I've finished that sentence the squirrel is gone, and only I am left to inquire.  How did I come here, during that hiatus?  Will the several small squirrels or the one big squirrel eat the herbs I planted yesterday along the fence where they get in, the earth crumbled away below it in a kind of hiatus too?   One tests the chamomile leaves.  What are they so busy with here in this yard?  A towhee hops across the stones I've brought in from that other yard, that other county and climate and time, piled together next to the herbs.  Where is she going, so intent, in the way of her kind?

Birds and words.  I'm back among those small (and great) enchantments, changed but not.

I look for quotes for "hiatus," and am led to "break."  But mostly in the verb tense, active breaking not the absence of action which I have had.  And Jane Hirshfield writes about what binds us—binding and breaking opposite.  Breaking is a letting go, which I have done, yet again not.  I'm in a new place now, with many of the things I'm bound to still with me.  (Bound to stay on.)

I find myself still in possession of the little dish with the Egyptian ducks, or whatever species they are, from a visit to the Legion of Honor.  This dish has spanned the break with me, bound for the coast.  And now it sits on the generous windowsill in my bathroom, the pure white of the paint having invited the deep blue, the near-monastic calm the unanticipated whimsy.

And other things besides the deck and sill are foreign too.  The Monterey Pine full of wind, where there has not before been pine tree, gnarly branches, cones.  Sometimes it shakes out bush-tits, or the pygmy nuthatch, sometimes upside down.  But this afternoon just wind, as if from inside out, the way the ancient Greeks thought it was winds within the earth that caused earthquakes.

Hiatus, the pause or catch in the breath between vowels (the [hiatus] ear, la [hiatus] interrupción).  Japanese aoi:  'blue/green,' Swahili eua:  'to purify,' and Hawaiian aea:  'to rise up.'  Hiatus itself contains a hiatus.

That's all it's been, really, my relocation here where I am now—continuing after a breath with the next syllable, where I left off.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Egyptian Dish

Weighing and Awaying

Preparing to move, I have been living in the future and the past for several weeks—weighing the space available in our new home-to-be and what it will desire or require of worthy owners, and in preparation sorting through old memories (clothes that no longer fit, books that go back to college—The Magus, The Sun Also Rises, high school—Red Sky at Morning, Le Grand Meaulnes, still earlier favorites—Pogo, Eloise, Misty of Chincoteague), getting rid of the fondue pot my parents gave me in my 20s, the doleful red teddy bear my mother's cleaner brought for her from Mexico, my wedding shoes, two hundred plastic lids from every-other-Friday take-out from Janta Indian restaurant, Cat Stevens and Musical Heritage Society LPs that gave way to cassettes and then CDs and then got transferred to iPods.  Clothes that have defined me, skins that I have shed.  With all this weighing going on, I've also been weighing the way forward and the way back, in the two pans of the balance scale; the weight of me, my worth, the grand sum of my life after all of the additions and subtractions, at this moment of reckoning, this juncture between what I've been and what I might yet be when I am somewhere else.  Lady without fondue pot.

Last night I cooked the jerk chicken which I'd been meaning to for months, and in the process of chopping green onions, cutting a lime (a gift, whose fragrance brought back all the limes I used to take to Kona to squeeze on my morning papaya), reeling a little from the habañero peppers whose trace now remains on my skin, I remembered that just before I left my beloved "treehouse" on Forest Avenue, two moves ago, I gave myself a ten-years-overdue housewarming party, with friends from all ends of the Bay Area and all eras of my sojourn here gathered on my leafy deck and wobbly outside stairs and slanting sun porch with its hundred wavy little windowpanes on the second story of the Victorian house I was about to leave, and made jerk chicken along with many other Caribbean dishes.  That batch was hotter than even I could bear—weaned though I was on Santa Fe's hottest chiles.  I'd bought all new spices for the occasion, and so the cayenne and others were at their most potent, not lulled to sleep as I was used to their being after years of sitting shouldered up to other, duller, spices and herbs on kitchen shelves.  Maybe I'm subconsciously replicating that previous leavetaking.  Maybe it's some kind of necessary ritual for me, making jerk chicken before I move out and on, like a Jamaican version of a sage smudge to smoke out the spirits of the dead, the apprehensive ghosts afraid of being left behind.

image:  spices on scale (Can stock photo)