Thursday, April 29, 2010
moonrise
Driving out of the valley, singing along with the Beatles, heading northeast: a bright orange gibbous almost-disc nearly made me lose control of the car when it burst into view through my passenger-side window, suspended just above the oak-lined horizon next to the narrow mesa my kids like to call a volcano even though they know it really isn't one. It stayed in position, skimming along the treetops, until it hid behind an embankment as the road curved into the grade up into the Real Foothills from the Almost Foothills, and then there it was again when I reached the top, caught in closer trees and looking whiter and if possible even larger than it had from the valley. Whoosh! around a turn, and it was perfectly framed at an uphill bend in the road so that it looked like if I chose not to turn I could jump over it like a nursery-rhyme cow or a fairy-tale fairy. Back in the trees, clattering silently through the branches, laughing at me from the other side of the road -- can't catch me! -- as I dipped down into town. Top of Spring Hill: the lowered horizon left it hanging serene and still and solemn in the sky, behaving for all the world like as if it had never done anything so undignified as playing hide-and-seek-tag with that little black car speeding along toward home.
Friday, March 05, 2010
springing
Winter is going out in lush, uplifting loveliness, like it always does here. When I was a schoolgirl and I read the Anne of Green Gables series for the first time (cue heavenly chord), I was bewildered by Montgomery's unfavorable description of late winter. Late winter is quite possibly the most beautiful thing in the world in central California, because what it really is is spring.
Fiddleneck, always the first wildflowers that can be seen from your car as you go down the highway.
Lambs! Squee! I wonder if the rancher would miss just one little lamb if I put it in my hatchback and brought it home with me?
This is a roadside weed with its best clothes on, lit from behind by grass-filtered sunshine reflected off a pondy puddle (or a puddly pond; cattle pastures in the valley are dotted with them after a rainy spell).
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Satisfying things du jour
ooh goody! a list!
- I finally, finally opened and sorted the box of Miscellaneous Kitchen Things that had been occupying too much space in a high cupboard in my pantry since we moved into this house two years ago. Lo and behold: shelf paper! Drawer liner! Candlesticks! Cookbooks! The last of which reminded me that oh yeah, I'd been wanting to switch the cookbooks and the portable coffee mugs* places in my kitchen cupboards, so I did, and then I decided that I really should sort through my recipe binder and tidy it up, and two hours later here I am, still in my pajamas (they're workout clothes, excuse me, and I just haven't worked out yet today, see), but with a tidy cookbook cupboard and a serious craving for every kind of food I've ever made during the entire course of my sixteen-year marriage**.
*One (1) person in our house drinks coffee and yet we have enough travel mugs to outfit an LA freeway at rush hour, I think. Give or take a few, maybe. It has always been this way. I have given up trying to cut down on the quantity, as I am always met with Very Firm Resistance from certain quarters.
**holy dang, SIXTEEN YEARS (in two weeks). That's, like, the amount of time people's parents have been married. How does this happen?
- This organizational spree was brought on by the fact that last night I canned seven quarts of beef stock, made from the bones and scraps of chuck roasts ($1.27/lb on sale!) used to make and can fourteen quarts of beef stew on Monday, and I am quickly running out of space in my canned-goods cupboard. Which (running out of space in the canned-goods cupboard) is one of my minor goals in life. I would love to have to add on to my house to make room for things that I have put up in lovely secondhand Mason jars. You know which ones are my favorites? The ones that have old labels clinging to them. I bought some jars at a rummage sale once, and when I brought them home I found a label that said "Tomatoes 1966", in that immaculate careful handwriting that girls learned eighty years ago, still barely adhering to the outside of one jar. For some reason, that almost made me cry. I tried to keep it, but it crumbled into pieces when I touched it. (1966 was not so into acid-free adhesive, I'm guessing.)
- After I work with the kids on their school projects just a little more, and after I spend an hour thrashing around on the elliptical machine, and after I shower and change out of my workout clothes, I am going to sit down with a novel and read it. Because I have to, see.
