This Rocky Place: They Have Fire Pits Here

I've driven up the coast  a bit from my piece of paradise to this rocky place--a paradise all its own. Colder. Wilder. The motel I'm staying at with my friend Linda has fire pits. It sounds fabulous, but it's cold. For this morning's trip to Hearst Castle I wore two pairs of pants, a tank top, a long sleeve t-shirt, a turtleneck, a down vest, a wool coat, and two scarves.

Last week I was in Arizona with my son and his family. It was cold and rainy there for the most part and my attire was pretty much the same--minus one pair of pants. I am fixated on the weather. Or perhaps more accurately the climate/climate change and our California drought. The drive north to the central coast is spectacular. The ocean stretching out next to the 101 and then the curve inland where, normally, the hills and their soft curves would bring to mind the tawny coats of giant sleeping lions. This trip there was a pallor beneath the tawny hills. Lions undergoing chemo. What green there is in the shrubbery has a black undertone. The uber-elegant Hearst Castle has no running water; the parking lot is clustered with port-a-potties. How long before all of our southern California indoor plumbing takes a crap and port-a-potties are perched on our patios and porches,while hand sanitizer is preferred instead of soap and running water? Maybe El Nino will save us.

In the meantime, art is alive and well. This ancient Greek torso at Hearst Castle has survived centuries.

The elephant seals are still here.

And the sunset is no less remarkable.

La Grande Fête

View from my friend Sasha's sunroof

You might not know that I was once a devoted francophile. Once upon a time I even had a blog about my love of France and things French.  Like other bits and pieces of my life, this particular diversion has fallen into disuse since I began caring for my mother. I have nowhere to speak French. No travels on the horizon, no French neighborhood to frequent where I might eavesdrop on a French conversation.

I was supposed to go to the French fair in Santa Barbara today, but just as a friend picked me up to head north, it began to pour here in the land of drought. We felt certain that the rain was just a momentary cloudburst, but the bad weather continued and when the freeway slowed to a stop, we exited and had lunch HERE.  I had the abalone (for some reason it does not seem to be on the menu a bit farther south) and don't regret missing the fair. My friend and I had a leisurely time and drove back just in time for the clouds to open up again.

View outside the restaurant in Carpenteria

I love this stretch of the California coast.  I need to remind myself that my search for a house near the water where I could take care of my mother is what brought me to this exquisite place. I frequently marvel about the twists and turns life has delivered to me since my divorce. How the end of my marriage seemed to be the worst thing and turned out to be the best thing. How agreeing to take care of my mom required me to move and brought me here. How one thing always leads to another thing and at the moment when all that  change is swirling around, we have no idea what the outcome will be. Those clouds might bring a downpour, but in the land of drought a downpour can mean salvation.

View of my patio. When it rains in So Cal, we take photos of it.

"It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here."

my mom with her birthday martini last month

Holy shit.
Sugar hangover.
Jet lag.
Bad tempered at the rudest drivers in the world who sit on your bumper despite the fact that you are already going 10 miles over the speed limit, and when you don't speed up, they roar around you like what they'd really prefer to do is crush you to bits. Not just one or two assholes. It's everyone.

I drove my mom down to my cousin's house where she used to have an apartment in his basement, and for the second time in two years we wandered around opening drawers with dozens of hats, and scarves, and gloves and talked about how we didn't want them. We fingered books, and crochet patterns, and cigarette lighters, and stood there overwhelmed with how much stuff there was.The one thing I did want--a tall and thick brass candlestick--I left behind as I carried the shopping bag of stuff my mom chose.

Stuff.

This trip back to the apartment was the first for me and the second for my mom since her twin sister died. Gone just over a year, it's just plain weird to be back here with my mom, but without her sister. It's weird to be here too without Dan to phone at night. With the time difference, I'd lie in bed here in my brother's dark and quiet house and call Dan and whisper about my day. Today I would have told him how I missed my turn on the way down to my cousin's, but found a good route anyway. About how the way home was much easier until my exit two miles from my brother's house where I found myself in a newly constructed wedge of suburbia that is so fresh that Google maps knows nothing of its existence. Make u-turn. Make a u-turn. Make a u-turn. Uh-oh.

My mom (on the right) and my aunt in September 2013
and
many years ago

But here I am. In the bed where I've slept dozens of times when I visited my mom here. Tomorrow I take her back to California with me. While it's been hard these past two plus years to be so completely responsible for her so far away without any support from siblings, it's okay. I'm happy to be going back and to have her back. Thrilled actually.

Both she and I have agreed that we're not doing this again. It's hard for her. She needs to pack so many things that the average not-90-year-old person can do without. She has her zip-lock bag of toiletries AND a gallon size zip-lock of over-the-counter stuff and take-as-needed meds, and a shoe box of the must-take meds. She has hearing aids to keep track of, essential medical paperwork, her cane, her this, her that. Tonight she stood in her room here staring at her stuff, paralyzed. I stood staring at her stuff. Which was the stuff from California we'd packed for the trip, and which was the stuff that we left behind here on purpose. Wait. Are you taking all these pajamas? Wait. These don't have pockets. You hate pajamas without pockets. That's why we didn't take them to California in the first place.

We all have stuff we need on the plane. She has stuff she NEEDS on the plane. Do I have it all? I hope so.
California, I need you. Cue the Joni Mitchell.

My mom in action on our patio. Binoculars. Good for watching birds, boats....and neighbors.

I confess: I'm fickle

The Glendale train station is an architectural gem

Cheating on the freeway system that I professed my love for yesterday, I took the train to see the man who loves me this morning. I awoke at 3:30 a.m. (and yes, that's when he awoke, too, I learned) and couldn't get back to sleep. Brimming with worry, I decided I would leave my mom home alone for a few hours and pay a visit to the hospital.

More train station architecture

So I trained past green fields and fallow fields.

Suburbs where horses reigned,

Orchards....

Barren rocks...

The weird temporary plastic green houses sheltering some crop or another that you see around here,

and strawberry fields...forever

Back to this.

Early this evening, I learned that the man who loves me was finally moved out of the critical care unit.

Dear Ozzie,

Your bed is ready.

Love, Harriet

California is Burning

"Every story happens in a particular place at a particular time," a writing teacher of mine once said. Place has always loomed large for me. I long for places I've lost and yearn for places I haven't yet seen. California was just blot of color in my grade school geography book--one more thing I had to memorize until I heard the Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, and Jan and Dean. That music and those silly romance/surfer movies transported me to an imagined beach blanket of adolescent perfection. 

I was 22 years old when I finally got here. The palm trees were real--not cardboard prom decorations, the ocean was surprisingly salty, and people ate strange green-fleshed things called avocados.

I've travelled  the entire length and breadth of California. Driving, camping, backpacking, touring, sailing, eating, drinking. Coastal redwoods, Yosemite, Sequoia National Forrest, Mineral King, Mojave Desert, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Visalia, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield, San Diego, Monterrey, Big Sur, Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, Mendocino, Cambria, Anza Borrego, Montana del Oro, Anacapa, Catalina, Calistoga, Lake Tahoe, Lake Arrowhead, Lake Shasta, Big Bear, Death Valley, Ojai, Oxnard, Ventura.

Each day when my feet hit the sand for my morning walk, I renew my sense of amazement at what a stunningly beautiful state I live in. But while it's a balmy 75 here in Margaritaville, there is beauty burning farther inland. Fire season is a given in Southern California. But climate change is making it worse here and in many dry western states. There's this from a piece in Mother Jones: "Thomas Tidwell, the head of the United States Forest Service, told a Senate committee on energy and natural resources recently that the fire season now lasts two months longer and destroys twice as much land as it did four decades ago. Fires now, he said, burn the same amount of land faster." 
My mother is always cold here where the coastal breezes blow. "It's never summer here," she grumbles to everyone. If she gets her wish and breaks the family record by living to age 99, we may have to send her long underwear back to relatives in Iowa as the climate gets hotter. But then again, if a mile of coastline disappears as the seas rise, we'll be living on a boat. It might be drafty.

Visualize rain clouds, everyone, and send them to the fires burning around Yosemite National Park. And while we're at it, let's visualize tall corn, waving wheat, healthy livestock in green pastures, plentiful fish in pristine waters all over this land which is your land which is my land. Let's visualize stories and places that speak to us. Let's visualize politicians and people with some wisdom about climate change.

photo credit: Ansel Adams photo from the Yosemite National Park website

Dear California

I miss you, California. Your cool nights with the scent of jasmine in the air. Waking to wild parrots, the tapping of the woodpecker in my grevalia tree. I miss my patio, my barbecue, my juicer, and my own bed.
Oh, things are good enough here in the land of 10,000 lakes. Pairs of finches on the telephone wire outside my kitchen window. Pristine skies and flower boxes dripping with humid color.
What would it be like, I wonder, to have the people I love most live in the same place--across the street or down the road? What if there could be no future parting?

My Life in the Land of 10,000 Lakes

I consider it a gift when I am seized by a surprise surge of emotion. It happened this morning at the airport in the Twin Cities. There was Native American chant piping from an airport store that sells things made by Native Americans (and probably some cheesy touristy stuff too.)Right next door was a store called "The North Woods" or something like that. A lake-y vibe. Canoes and snowshoes and moose. Minnesota, I thought, and suddenly my eyes were like lakes. I meant to spend my life in The Land of 10,000 Lakes. That had been the plan Mr. Ex and I had made. Have our So Cal fun in the sun, and if we started a family, we'd move back to Minnesota when the kid was ready to start school. "We" started a law firm instead. Our daughters are California girls.

There was a high winds advisory in the Twin Cities last night. The old windows in my condo rattled all night long. I was alone in the house, and spent the night with my iPad next to my bed with the a local weather website open and one ear cocked for the tornado sirens. The weather is still gusty with turbulence at high altitudes, and the airplane I am on as I write this post is practically skimming the ground at 15,000 feet instead of its customary 30 or 35 thousand. It's like a giant-screen interactive video game with no clouds obstructing the view of the ground on this sunny clear day. The lakes in the Twin Cities look like silver-gray silk and the terrain is so so green that the roads slicing through it seem to be tinted yellow. The green in Minnesota always makes me feel as though we Californians are being deluded. Minnesota is genuine green, it seems, while the hues of California green are some kind of tinsel-town fakery. Seen from the air, Minnesota is a marvel of lakes set into an emerald carpet, and it positively swept me off my feet this morning.

I've joked that I've been trying to repatriate my daughters to the Midwest. M. says, that in her case, the mission is accomplished. I heard her say "pop" instead of "soda" just a day or two ago, so I think if she learns to fish, she might be able to pass. C. detested her one year of college in Wisconsin, but now she's working on Lake Michigan in Chicago, and has nothing but praise for the boat, The Windy, and The Windy City itself.

As for me, California still has me on my knees--um...quoting a Joni Mitchell song, but yeah, I'm comin' home.









vintage photo of St. Paul: Lakesnwoods.com
current photo of L.A. is my own