Another Squirrel Story

This morning, standing on the balcony, trying to figure out which redwood tree I overheard the management talking about cutting down recently, I noticed a really rather plump squirrel with a good-sized, still green apple in its mouth rushing around the shredded bark mulch on the ground below me, dithering. It was looking for a place to bury it, for winter, I suppose, though really it's never winter here--perhaps it knows something I don't know. It tried, with its front paws, several spots: in the mulch under a couple of smallish camellias, both of which looked to me like good spots to bury an apple. Then it went through the fence into the next door neighbors' patio and tried their flower pots, eventually settling on a largish one with a geranium. 

Across the street, there's a small house with a couple who collect apple trees, including on the strip of ground between sidewalk and street. Ever since the August some kids picked an apple fight, they hang little homemade pieces of paper from strings in the trees at this time of year: "These apples aren't ripe yet, please don't pick them." 

Earth Tones

ah, the pleasures of foraging for food, one of those frontal lobe things. And the annoyance of discovering that the squirrels are getting all the best apples, at the top of the tree, and wasting them, dropping them to the ground half-eaten, bruised, turning brown around the edges. That would be the apple tree in front of the housing office, next door to the eco-dorm, where the students have gone off and left lettuce bitter and flowering, but also a few tomato plants into which I plunge my nose and inhale the inexpressibly delicious smell of tomato leaves. I picked six small red tomatoes and left another half dozen almost ripe that I will return to check on today.

Then, I discovered a wild plum tree laden with small yellow plums--could they be mirabelles? They are the size and color of, but not quite the almost spicy flavor of. I have two bags full, two bagfuls and I am going to stew them for dinner tonight with Minnesota ex-SanFrancisco in the 70's friends passing through town.  With creme fraiche. Of course, were I more ambitious, I could find a recipe for mirabelle tart--I had one once, the fruit embedded in a quilt of something custardy, but bursting through yellowly, like cobblestones.

And the picture?  Can't resist.  It's one of my friend Susan Cantrick's Ponges.  It's the earth tones.

Keywords:

• mirabelles
•  
• the forager

Bedtime Reading (3)

No, not the second volume in Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose trilogy.  Bad News.  The hero, whom we last saw being beaten by his father with his father's leather bedroom slipper (in my time and place, it was hairbrush), now 20-something, goes to New York to collect his father's ashes--and I grant you there are some very funny passages, as when he takes the ashes on to dinner, and his hosteass asks "Is that your father you've got there?" and instructs the maid or the butler to set another place.  

I didn't want to know this much about cocaine and heroine and Quaaludes, not to mention needles, dirty and clean, bent, straight, crooked, disposed off, and veins and dealers...it was so terrifying (do I feel vulnerable?) that I, as they say in French, read diagonally. It's gone. Gone.

Keywords:

• bad news
•  
• St Aubyn

Hardware

 Just back, sleep-deprived but well-fed and -wined from five days in Napa  at the writers' conf.  From the total silence of a cottage in the foggy woods to the sound of teenagers departing from the houses across the street. They mill around the front lawn moaning "byyyye....byyyye...looove ya".  

Napa = strange mixture of the cute and the authentic. Like the shady front porches,  like the tanned, rotund Spanish-talking  cowboys chewing the fat on a bench in front of the supermarket in Calistoga two nights ago.  About four of them, watching life go buy, and the women, behind them sun setting on a range of mountains I have in other seasons climbed.  Would gladly have climbed again, but this week no time between readings and driving up and down the valley to events.  Vineyards amazingly lush--all irrigated, all head high, undulating, greener than any vineyards I've seen in Provence.  Must be the drip systems.  They say the Valley is running out of water.  Movie memorabilia at the Francis Ford Coppola Winery.

 The hardware store:  downtown St Helena, with everything a hardware store should have, nails to pipes to housewares, happy customers and clerks who looking like they'd been selling U-bends for decades and could not imagine anything they'd rather be doing. 

Keywords:

• hardware
•  
• Napa

Breathing through my toes

Summer activities:  visiting the student garden for herbs.  They've planted less this summer, no--not many--exuberant zucchini, but a few strawberries, a few tomatoes, lots of basil and thyme, which I don't feel guilty about cutting, since really I'm keeping the plants under control.  

Meditation aka Stress Reduction.  This is something I believe I first took up in preparation for giving birth.  I might be getting better at it (meditation), though I confess that there comes a moment in the tape when I wonder if I couldn't be doing something else with my time. However, part of the purpose is to develop a different relationship with Time, so I'm hanging in there.  What do monks do when their right leg, folded over their left leg, falls asleep?  Do they really manage to "breathe into it"?  Why do I feel I'm a failure when I shift position?  (But, I know, part of the purpose is not to feel like a failure:  "nothing is good, or bad'). Afterwards, ok, I do feel swept clean of my obsessions, as if I'd had a good session with the dental hygienist.

Keywords:

• meditation

Adornment

In January, returning from Vancouver, I tried to smuggle a polished lump of jade green beach stone through Airport Security.  A polite young man asked me to open my suitcase.  "Did I have a large rock inside?" he asked, puzzled.  Well, I did, in the toe of a sock, and he was chagrined to confiscate it, though if I wished to return to the airport concourse, he said I would find everything I needed to mail it to myself.  But I wasn't that attached  to the stone, even if it did feel good in the palm of my hand and came from my parents' beach.  It was a stone with a history.

I thought of this yesterday, going through Security at Vancouver Airport again. This time my socks were full of sea-polished oyster shells:  tools, not weapons, my inner primitive told me, though my stone would have made a nice tool as well, raw material for a stone blade, maybe a hammer to break open a live oyster, or pound a teepee pole into hard ground.  My oyster shells made it through Security.  I have given them to my Park City, Utah (I have travelled from sea level to Katmandou) granddaughter; like good primitives we have made them into a necklace.  

Bookaholics Anonymous

I am thinking about a friend who buys books without having any immediate intention of reading them.   He sees a tempting-looking book and he buys it.  For future use.  When he retires he says he imagines he will have time to read the books he has accumulated, unread, over the years.  He sees himself in a comfy armchair with a fire in the grate and a tower or two of books leaning from the floor beside him.  I am adding a bottle of whisky in case he hasn't thought of it. 

In the meantime, I wonder, what does he do with them?  Does he shelve them, in their rightful place, alphabetically?  Does he have a special shelf he keeps for unread books:  Books I will Read Some Day?  If he puts them in the literature (or philosophy or non-fiction (assuming he can keep these categories apart, I know I can't)) section of his library, will he remember he hasn't read them and will he ever read them? It gives me nightmares to think about it.  As it gives me nightmares to go into the stacks at the library and look at all the books I will never read.

I have almost finished my Christmas books, including the Stieg Larsson books my son handed down to me, third or fourth hand. One I read on a transatlantic flight and on into jet lag nights in Paris.  Mr Larsson, you shouldn't have climbed those seven flights of stairs, you should have gone to the gym more, you should have smoked fewer cigarettes (I know, I'm confusing you with your journalist-hero), because I couldn't put The Girl with the Hornet's Nest down and now I have no Larsson books about powerful women.  You should have seen me stamping around the house.

Keywords:

• Anne Carson
•  
• Derrida
•  
• Stieg Larsson

Pensées

1) I don't get why over here in France we are storming the Bastille again while across the Channel, faced with more drastic budget cuts, the British get on with it.  (A nation fond of hyperbole versus one that prefers understatement?)  And who should I admire?

2) My friend's blog comments on the quality of academic writing.  I've been logging on toARCADES, the Stanford humanities website for a few months now.  Intelligent, and interesting for someone curious about what goes on in the back rooms of academia, but--with a few notable exceptions--it proves my friend's point.

3) Getting dark.  I love it when lights come on in other rooms.  Love the rectangles of light I can see across the street through the imbrications of buildings, shadows on the outside walls.  Love it most when I can look in.

4) Sounds.  My husband ironing.  Setting down the iron.  Water gurgling.  Breathing steam.  We're going to Barcelona tomorrow.  A place I've never been.  And then Madrid, the Prado, Goya and dinner with our friend, a painter, and his partner.

Keywords:

• Demonstrations etc
•  
• Paris