Sunday Afternoon Beach Report

The sand was a tangle of things this afternoon.

The ocean churned up, the breakers murky with sand, or algae, or crud washed in from the rains.

Looking back toward the dunes, clouds towered like mountains.

 A group of adolescent boys jousted with bamboo. The frightening whack and thwack of the branches was undone by their shrieks--voices still undistinguishable from the voices of little girls.

Beach goers found other uses for the bamboo too.

Some of us were content to sit and wonder at all of it.

Sometimes I wonder how things might have turned out if I'd raised my children here.

Thursday Morning Beach Report

BETWEEN THE STORMS

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.

Tuesday Beach Report

Gray-green water. The storm gathers itself.

One day you're standing on level ground, the next at the edge of a precipice.

Meanwhile, the flowers are drinking.

The Rain Falls Gently on My Brain

Caffeine is a wonderful thing. Until you've had so much that your brain is twitching its tail like a crouching lion, eyes fixed on its next meal. I've pounced on chore after chore this evening as I wait for my mom to settle into her night. Laundry, dishes, scrubbing the kitchen floor, making my to-do list for tomorrow, laying out the papers to fax to my mom's new primary care doctor. What else, what else? the hungry brain asks.

I'm on the couch with the ancient cat (who has never stalked much of anything,) and  I'm hoping this glass of wine and her purring will undo the injection of artificial energy. Last night I slept for only a couple of hours--maybe three if you count the time I spent on a pile of blankets at the top of the stairs, waiting for my mom to go back to bed after she woke around midnight. She accidentally pushed her Lifeline button when she woke, and M and I scrambled down the stairs to assure the Lifeline monitor that she was okay. M won the race by a mile. My brain was still trying to decode the strange voice in the kitchen calling my mother's name by the time M had already taken care of things. I tried to go back to sleep, but my mother was up and moving around--now without the button on, I realized--and I didn't want to put the button back on her and risk it being pushed again and waking up M before her crack of dawn 100-mile drive back to school, or the man who loves me who was in my bed in his own fitful sleep.

So I waited. Then I intervened. What was she doing? She had to clean off her desk, she told me. She wanted another empty chocolate tin like the others I had given her for the dimes she'd taken out of her wallet. She needed to put safety pins away, file papers, rearrange this and that. "Go to bed," she told me. So I pretended to.

When I really did get back to bed, the man who loves me said, "We have to activate your mother's pills." Activate, I thought. Activate? Activate what pills? He was half in a dream, half trying to help with the real-life chaos. "Is she going to be okay?" he asked. I told him she was fine. That everything was fine.

This morning, I swear to god, my mother was singing a song that seemed to be about baseball to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner. I looked in her room and she was sound asleep...singing. "Hah-ha-ha," she laughed. "I don't know many songs," she said as she twitched and tossed, eyes closed.

The man who loves me used to frequently laugh out loud in his sleep. I haven't heard him do that in a long time. And I'd never heard anyone do that before him. If my mother wants to sing, I suppose that's okay too. I'd prefer to dream an interesting dream rather than sing. I'd prefer to sleep, rather than sit here typing. It's started to rain. Maybe all this crazy energy will be washed away. Sleeping to the sound of rain is a rare pleasure in Southern California.

Wednesday Morning Beach Report

Rain Predicted

Sky like chalk above a silken sea

Pelicans, sharp strokes of ink 

as the sun struggles through

And now all residents of Pillville head to the mall. Story at 11:00.

Mother Nature and Rejection

There's severe weather honing in on the San Gabriel Valley again. As I was checking my email only to find that I did not make it into a writers' residency I'd been hoping for, my entire house shook and rolled. That was too loud to be thunder--or simply the shock of rejection--I thought as I saw the flash. I waited for smoke or a fireball thinking that maybe a plane had crashed, and then the rumbling began again. Two more crashes came in rapid succession. Two more flashes. It rained enough to get the pavement wet on my patio, then stopped. It's deathly still now--like Mother Nature is holding her breath. Not one leaf is moving. The birds are mute. But there's a low growl from time to time as if some beast is crouching for an attack. Batteries? Check. Phone charged? Check. Water? Check. Ipad charged? Check. Computers unplugged? Check. Disaster plan? You mean like a plan for my future? Um. Well, no. I don't have one of those.

Why I Hate You More When it Rains

I hate you, Mr. Ex.
But I hate you more when it rains.

I was in a hurry to buy my own place. The Little Missus (she was still "Miss" then) had already slept in our bed. She'd cooked in my kitchen, stuffed her leftovers into our fridge. The candles on the dining room table were burned lower, and two empty ice cream dishes flaunting pink plastic spoons basked on our patio. A bar of sandalwood soap perfumed our shower.

Yeah, I was in a hell of a hurry to make my escape. Running for my life, I looked at twenty townhouses searching for the one that could accommodate two big dogs. I pondered hallways and elevators, stairs and patio walls, neighborhoods and parks. It was September. An easy time in Southern California to forget about rain. In September we think of wildfires and smog and is the heat ever going to break, and why do some people say "Santana" while others call those evil winds "Santa Anas" and we know  it doesn't really matter because we're all thinking of The Devil and praying that hell hasn't burst  through some fault line to colonize the City of Angels. In September.


I didn't notice the place I chose had no kitchen door. No island of tile or linoleum on which to coral a soggy dog.

And now it's another December. My patio is a sewer.

And I wish you were floating in it.

After a November Rain

Buried under a stack of reading, the couch is your burrow. 

But then you look out of your window and see this.

You catch a glimpse of your  rose bush, an orange flame tilted upward at the same sky.

You can't resist.

 You are taken in by 

lemons

and 

kumquats

not yet ripe, but promising something

So now you have the courage to leave your house and visit your favorite neighborhood tree--

a tree you think of as a vanquished giant rammed headfirst into the earth by an enemy

 strong legs visible while his heart beats beneath the ground

eyes and mouth and nose filled with dirt. 

The leaves he drops are offerings 

and you bring one home to remind you of something but you're not sure what

so you make an offering of it too.

And when you stand at your patio gate

you see the beauty of all of it 

and you give thanks to your made-up gods--

to the guardian of the camellias

and to the god of yellow

and the gray god of rain

because when he stops hurting you

the world looks like this

SNOWMAGEDDON

I was there.  

My brother was actually in that snowplow and drove it through the night at the mobile home park where he lives and works. It started snowing at 10:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and it didn't stop until Saturday around 3:00 in the afternoon. I was a little nervous about losing power and having to huddle in my coat and scarf, trying to keep my mother warm in front of my brother's wood stove, but we were lucky. We were warm and dry and had cable TV with movies on demand, beer and bourbon--and a fridge full of home cooking, thanks to my brother's girlfriend.

 Thanks to my brother's can-do attitude and his 4-wheel drive truck (the '57 Chevy is his "IRA"--not his everyday vehicle) I managed to get out of  Baltimore Washington International Airport last night in a brief window of clear weather and plowed runways even though the roads were a single-lane slip and slide with trees down under the weight of the snow. A back-hoe was on the roof of an airport parking structure when my brother and I pulled up in his truck. It was dumping snow on a 4 or 5 story-high pile shaped like the Matterhorn.

Now I am back in the Land of Too Much Rain. But I'm grateful for these experiences with Mother Nature that remind me how little control we really have in this life.

Ice-covered country roads, blizzards and deluges make me a weird kind of happy. They bring on a savoring  that is so full and sweet that it can keep me awake at night as I lie in my bed wide-eyed at the  power of love.

Here Comes the Sun

After six days of weather that made me think the perfect man might be a builder of arks, the sun came out yesterday morning.

The aftermath of the storm is that my street now looks like a papier maché project.















"Did you notice the mountains?" I asked a little old lady I encountered while walking my dogs.
"No English," she told me. (I think she was Chinese).
"Snow," I said and pointed to the hills behind her.
"No," she said, nodding her head yes.
"Snow," I said, trying again as I fluttered my fingers delicately and let my hands drift downwards. "Snow on the hills. Look." But I couldn't get her to turn around. It was startling to see the snow so close and it made me giddy to have no one to share it with. I restrained myself though as I finished my walk. I did not bound through the neighborhood embarrassing my dogs exclaiming about the snow.

Today, the second day of sunshine, there are still rogue puddles in the park that look like small lakes. But my patio  is now no longer a cesspool of floating dog poo. It's clean and dry, and the sandbags have been moved to the side so I can use my back doors again. Inside, my floors inside have been Roomba-ed for about the 50th time (does anyone else love their Roomba so much they talk to it? I think if they made little outfits for Roombas like they do for those plastic lawn geese, I might dress mine up.)

I'm so happy about the sun that I don't even care that Mr. Ex did not return my latest phone call which I made to him after my attorney emailed me on Friday, telling me that Mr. Ex and his attorney are still refusing to address the issues of his bonuses & reimbursing me for half my attorney fees-- and that they are still trying to divide the irrevocable trust. I'm not sure if it was desperation or optimism, but I called Mr. Ex up and asked him out for a drink so we could talk. Maybe mold spores have taken hold of my brain, but I really think if we were seated in a dark bar with Margaritas in our hands we could work this out.

Water

I don't know what it is about me and water.
There are sandbags outside my back door and it's been pouring so hard for the last couple of hours that it's like looking through a scrim.
I can now claim that two men have crawled around in the water to rescue my abode. Mr. Ex was the first one. Several  years ago after a pipe burst in the middle of the night and flooded our downstairs, I walked into our kitchen to discover him on hands and knees, wearing only a t-shirt, sopping up the mess with pool towels. Then came an invasion of mold that required a re-do of our entire downstairs, and we ended up moving out--or, more accurately, our daughter and I ended up moving out. Mr. Ex elected to stay at the house. Which I find very interesting in retrospect.
This morning the man I love lay on his belly on a tarp on my sodden patio in the drizzle, a hammer drill sheltered in a plastic bag as he bored holes into my patio wall so the water could find its way to the slope on the other side.
It was water that called my name after the divorce when I thought my life should end. Bridges were so enticing that I kept my curtains drawn during one entire stay at the St. Paul Hotel. At night when it was quiet, even with the windows closed, I thought I could hear the rushing of the river. The sound of the water was like a voice asking me to come to its side.
I love the water. Traveling by boat. Swimming in a pool or a calm sea.  I recently purchased a travel snorkel that curls up into the size of a bagel. I have a special bath mat with a pillow for soaking in the tub--but I love long showers so much I hardly use it.
I'm just not sure how water feels about me.

Over My Head

I swam for a while today and outside it's raining.  Under water inside a building in the rain. Which is how my brain feels and my heart, too.  All the other writers here seem to have books on the shelves while I'm thinking it's me on the shelf instead of a book I wrote. We've gone from overripe insect humming summer here to a dirty white sky and a crow outside my window who must have eaten all the other birds who really know how to sing.

But it's quiet under the water in the second before you come up and hear your own breath and the splash of other swimmers.  And the rhythm of it all is soothing.  Strokeandbreathe, stroke. Stroke andbreathe.  Stroke.

Except I don't think it's quiet that I want.  I'd rather have the wail of some guitar, some serious crack of lightning instead of plink and drizzle. I want the clinking of wine glasses, banging of drums, pans in the kitchen, cooking with a lover, chanting or ranting.

Most of my damn post-its are still on my wall, I haven't yet sent my memoir back to my agent, the submissions I have out are like some cellphone call in a tunnel.

A friend said it's a myth that lighting doesn't strike twice in the same place and I said I'd stand out in a storm in an underwire bra.  I'd buy some serious lingerie rightnowtoday but there's only CVS and  Food Lion.