On the way home from the beach, I stopped by my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay (who doesn’t have a website to google but I can give you directions, if you are interested) and bought plants. Not just any plants, but anything that could double its duty as both gopher proof and textural. So I chose a leaf in every shape: oval, circular, fusiform, serrated. And I picked up anything chartreuse and violet, wispy and hugging. In essence, I chose plants that not only worked double time but put in extra hours at playing off one another: purple huechera and silver helichyrysum, lenten rose and bronze fennel, waving yarrow and succulent prostrate sedum. They sit in congragation together on cardboard flats atop whiteplastic lawn chairs, in the shade of two towering cypress beside the house, waiting for me to finish digging vitality back into the cold earth.

A family of quail graze the ground beneath them, black and purple plumes gleaming in the afternoon sun, ebony bobbers wiggling like alien antennae atop their noggins. It’s hard not to grin every time they pass. That’s probably one of those beautiful things about Spring here, although for all I know the quail are permanent residents. But the Robin has started chattering at dusk with the scrub jays around the grapefruit tree’s birdbath, the frogs start peeping soon afterwards, and nothing sounds more like an American Spring, to me.

As you start to spend more time outside, maybe gardening, maybe taking a brisk walk, what sounds of Spring are ringing in the air around you?

With little difference to the stiff neck I felt yesterday morning, I drove the kids down to the beach. All the elation that nearly winded me on the drive down to Half Moon Bay fizzled once I started lifting Chas out of deep tide pools and stretching to capture fossils embedded in the rocks. I remember the swirling panorama of beached seals and hungry surf, thinking, This is a very bad place to be with a stiff neck and two exploring preschoolers.

So I let both of the kids clamber their way back to the beach on their own (Chas is getting surprisingly nimble) and then rested in the tent while they bouldered and threw rocks at the incoming tide. This overexposed shot is taken from my little infirmary. I like the way it captures the heat, unforgiving light and pain (although I might be the only one to look at this picture and feel it). It also has a nice retro tint. What’s your impression? I’m obliged to use these flickr tools for SPC’s current challenge but I’m not sure I’d use these tools in my own. It lacks authenticity. Not sure I like that, although it has a home somewhere.

My advice to anyone waking up in the morning with a stiff neck is to traction yourself to a board for the rest of the day and hook yourself up to an IV and catheter. Don’t drive a long, winding road to the beach, set up a tent, wrangle children across the rocks at low tide and then press reverse. That was a recipe for disaster. Damon says it wouldn’t matter; that the muscle would spaz no matter what.
I wonder if he’s right.

If you want to learn more about online photoediting tools , check out a gallery exhibiting some at SPC.

I am traversing the eastern slope of Fremont Open space, and I’m walking along a terrace once trafficked perhaps by laborers on this former orchard as they roamed from tree to tree during harvest. What kinds of trees? I don’t know. Today their gnarled, leafless, stunted silhouettes stand arabesque upon the hill above me, black and static amid the flowing grasses, beneath the hovering falcon. Birdsong travels like a current over the terrain, bees are busy buzzing in the clover mats, hummingbirds fighting in the treelimbs. I stop along the trail while Seti sniffs the newspaper; it’s Sunday and the weeds hang with dog pee here and there along the worn trail. The entire hillside is tense with new life. You can almost feel the warm ground quake beneath you, a mycelium overtaking winter’s rot, aerating the bedrock, paving the way for shooting rhizomes and weeds. Little yellow wildflowers sway with glossy grass. If I were to try drawing three square inches of this space I might scream; beneath the mat of green urgency lies an even tinier world, a lilliputian army of plants and fungi working together to hold the soil firmly against the hillside. A linear delight, it reminds me of Dutch painting and discovering the architecture of dandelions and drawing for hours on end, without interruption. But today I’m plodding onwards, at times tugging the dog to urge him faster, so I might get back to unpack yet more boxes, and break down more boxes, making space in the mudroom for this naked and young morning light to pour into our house and penetrate the walls with its warm yawn.

Despite my occasional irritations with way the boys continue to remain so close by my side, there are upsides to their lingering dependence on me. I can still redirect muddles between them by simply leaving the room, a perfect curveball. This morning, I quelled an escalating feud between them in the living room, one I was almost ready to fuel with my own frustration, by halting mid-step, turning round and retreating to the mudroom, where I silently baffled them as I put on my socks and boots and headed out into the yard. They watched me from the stoop as I opened the shed door, near the garage, and began excavating hoes, cultivators and shovels from an ethereal matrix of dusty cobwebs, spreading them like battle artillery, single-file, to rest along a low-lying branch. And within minutes, both were eagerly digging into the understory of a giant oak tree in the front yard, heaving shovelsful of composted peat into random piles around me.

Chas soon began to look for earthworms. Crouching over the dugout, in the space I’d carved beneath the tree, he picked fat glossy creepers between his fingers and carried them around the yard, through the house for a little while, taking them on a helpless tour of distraction before returning to my side. As if he’d forgotten it was still in his hand, Chas would ask to take another bath (perhaps his third?), doe-eyed and head tilted, and I’d look down at his hand to find another gleaming, limp, pinched annelid. “I wanna put him in the bathtub,” he’d say, quite matter-of-factly. And I’d have to disagree, smiling apologetically, as I turned the compost in the drizzling rain.

I read somewhere, ten years ago when we were puppy-surfing, that a Jack Russell Terrier is like having a perpetual three year-old in the house. Well, that’s pretty true. Seti, our dog, is all about the “now” and the “me” and balls and toys. He doesn’t always share; in fact, he’s always hoarded his own ball at the dog park, fending off dumbfounded pit bulls and retrievers five times his size, just by the obnoxious tang in his snarl. And, just like any preschooler, you can distract him off the nasty scent of a dead rat in the backyard just by saying the magic words “where’s your ball?” It’s so easy.

Ball. Ball is life. Well, ball is second to frisbee, but we’re out of frisbees right now. We have two chronically wet tennis balls (you can see why, above) and one racquetball (a far superior choice to all manufactured dog toys for the medium dog set). Seti will carry the ball around the house, right under your feet, hoping you will throw it. When you sit down to talk on the phone, he will drop it at your feet. When you try disapppearning into the bathroom for ten minutes, he’ll unlock the door with his razor sharp Jack Russell perserverence and drop the ball at your feet. And certainly, when you slip into a nice warm bath, ready to erase the day’s grime off your body and soul, Seti will come and drop the dirty ball into the bathwater. Then he’ll sit and stare at you imploringly, his brown eyes now big obsidian orbs, penetrating their voodoo into your weariness, and there’s no way to resist him: you find yourself throwing the ball this way and that, trying to outwit the bastard but damned if he doesn’t catch your every curveball! He’s a machine. He’ll do this all day. And here he is, twisting Chas’ arm in the new bath.

Birthdays. They just keep getting sweeter. Alis and I celebrated our birthdays tonight by having a fondue party up at her place in the Santa Cruz mountains. I think we both might be missing the absence of the yearly Red & Chocolate party, which used to include a few more guests than just the ten of us that were there tonight. It’s normally such a wet, cold time of the year here, especially up in the mountains, where the rain freezes and sometimes turns to snow. But the weather is warmer this year. I cut a quince branch, already in flower, and attached it to the bow on her present. Fruit trees along the Saratoga avenues are white with blossoms, rolling hills at the open space preserve, where I run, are adorned in special corners with tiny pink and white buds, showering petals along the path. It’s already Spring and it’s righteous.

Every time I think it’s a beautiful day down here in the valley, I’m blown away when I step out of my car in her driveway up on Skyline ridge. For starters, there’s the quiet outdoor air there that’s almost deafening, like the sound of nighttime in the suburbs after two fresh feet of snow. After the birds have gone to roost, near dusk, I can almost hear my ears ringing (thanks due in part to Chas and to a lesser extent, Ford, the loudest children I’ve ever known). And then there’s the view. The breathtaking view that, were it not for the fog, would include the Pacific, beyond Santa Cruz.

Birthdays are sweeter and sweeter. I can cook in the same kitchen with my college buddy, smile about where we are right now, and look into the living room to see benchmarks we’ve left over the years since we met: solid ties with men that became important to us along the way; the three beautiful, vibrant children that this love made possible; our two little dogs who are getting older, followed by the ghosts we’ve grieved to tell goodbye, recently: three other dogs, a horse; a mother, a grandfather.

Turning 35 this year is the sweet little nudge in the arm, reminding me about babies and books and other priorities that can’t wait behind my hedonism. But I think this year I might start lying about my age. Alis and I made a deal: it’s not important for anyone to know. Except for the clerks at the grocery store, but I’ll tell them my age any time because they still card me when I buy groceries (which, I now realize, tells me that I buy entirely too much booze). 35 used to be old. But I’ve never carried myself better (thank you, yoga. why didn’t we meet sooner?) and my smile, most often, has a careworn grace to it that I am proud of, suggesting achievement and the attainment of purpose. I think motherhood did it to me.
…The rest of time I think I’m frowning, though, and I can attribute that to motherhood, too 😉

Damon, thanks for the photos! You’re getting gooood!

The big difference I feel, being in this house, is the announcement I make with every move within it; the floorboards do most of the talking, try as I may to pussyfoot from room to room, as I imagine what will go where. Our belongings arrive within the week. I’m enjoying the graceful expanse of sunlight across the hardwood floors, this immensity of personal space, after being in a hotel room for one month.

Arranging our nature walk loot on a quiet surface in the sunroom, I look out the window to spy quail silhouettes scampering beneath the rhododendron and a scrub jay punctuate the clover in blue. Unknown bulbs peep through pine needles. These walls, this acre, is filled with hope for the coming years. I’ll complain a lot about the Los Palo-Gato-Altos-View smog of silicon valley, but I’m amazed at how we manage to still smell grass and trees here in Saratoga, at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains, who are (these days) obscured through milk glass. Here, the cleansing respite of a eucalyptus grove: towering twisted trunks with warping bark. Although the blossoms are brown, the hummingbirds are still fighting among the drooping boughs.

Ford is rediscovering the coast and he asks to go back, time and again, to Santa Cruz. However, I’ve blissfully started introducing him to different shoreline habitats and today I figured was the perfect time to indulge myself, and the kids, in a low tide experience along the rocky surf at Moss Beach. I’d actually never been before. As it turns out, the park is a refuge for the Harbor Seal, who swims between this beach and the harbor, in lower Moss Beach; and, during low tides, this is the safest refuge for them to rest, atop the black rock that crops up through the crest of low tide. In fact, the rangers set up construction cones around the rim of the beach to give the seals privacy. Otherwise, they might flee the beach and swim to exhaustion, unable to find the refuge they need anywhere else along this shoreline.
We had just reached the beach, at the end of a short trail, when the camera battery died.

Ford was so anxious to recall what we saw today once we returned to the hotel. He quickly synopsed the visit with a drawing of his favorite finds (which deserved better light when I took this photo, but this will have to do):

With a stick, we had turned over an organism in the sand that resembled an enormous, wide cow tongue. On the underside of the orange beast, a flat foot with a central groove, in the shape of a U. On the backside, a row of partially hidden plates under thick hide-like orange flesh. A chiton relative? A grapefruit from outer space? Actually, I was right: Cryptochiton or Gumboot chiton (named after the color and texture of its flesh). Way cool, but also very dead and intensely rank. Next!:

Ford’s favorite of the day: the Green Sea Anemone. He discovered that he could stick his finger into the flowery nubbins and make them close up, squirting water out in a tiny little stream clear up to his nose. Very entertaining, he did this for the longest time until the tide started swallowing us. But not before we investigated Turban snails and rescued a parching Pisaster.

I couldn’t properly toodle around until we found ourselves a home and signed the paperwork. Fortunately, we found a lovely home in saratoga last week. It’s sunny and quaint and sits on a terraced acre where an orchard once stood. The road bisects the farm from the field. We live in its vestiges: a tower hung with vines, once for water, stands beside the driveway. What happened to the orchard? In the excitement of finding ground for roots I forgot to ask. There’re more history behind the house, too. It was the retirement home for the owner’s parents. I recognize the 50s mint cream bathroom tiles. A real breakfast nook. And it was home to two young boys, before we came along last week. There is a fading basketball hoop in the driveway with a piece of paper taped to the backboard, claiming “FREE.” Two belay ropes hang from a large pine tree in the backyard, and as I look around, I see other swings hanging in other trees. A treehouse in an alcove of the lot, tucked behind soft green corners.

We move in february 1st. The owner, who lives next door, is my new town historian. She has a playground of her own in her backyard, standing attention under the eaves, awaiting her seven granddaughters. In her pool she has taught all the neighborhood children to swim. Ford is on her list for Summer 2007. She even has an Araucana chicken.
Home, indeed!

In the meantime, back to toodling:

Shoreline Park shenanigans

Natural Bridges driftwood

cleaning our lungs at Castle Rock SP

budgeting a membership

We lived here once and it was never so sunny. Kids change everything. Baker beach, the Presidio, SF

Noodles on Haight

Tired on Haight

all toodled out on Twin Peaks.

The hotel is quiet and mellow, and the ebb and flow of Googlers from Sunday afternoon to Friday morning keeps me regular. Otherwise, our life is crazy and chaotic and loud. I come and go through the lobby apologetically, always on some pretense to avoid conversation with the concierge, but the reality is that they are all cool with our presence. They love the kids, and they laugh when Chas climbs all over the fancy retromodern furniture in the lobby, reaching out to grab bottles of wine from the rack on the wall. But someone has to hear them downstairs when they jump off the bed like kid goats or stampede across the room with the foam basketball towards the net I hung from the minibar closet. And if I don’t get out of the hotel room by ten o’clock, all of us reach a critical mass and someone has to have noticed the screaming tantrums when we’ve missed that deadline. Half-dressed baby dolls on the floor in the corner of the room. Marbles in the toilet. Cream cheese on the rug. But every day we return in the evening, after a long day of house hunting, to find Petey and Baby (the boy’s dolls) tucked properly back into bed, and a replinshing set of little toiletries standing in array in the bathroom, telling us to go ahead, shower off, relax. There’s an apricot beer in the microfridge. This isn’t so bad now, is it?

Friends. We return to very loved friends here. Alis is now a mother and I enjoy watching her on her home turf. She’s beautiful and photogenic and while she may wonder why I chose this photo out of many others, it is because I just love it for some inexplicable reason. She’s thinking about something while we wait for food at the Upper Crust Pizzeria in Santa Cruz. And this is Seth, Chas’ partner in crime, so you’d better look out.

Jim is Alis’ husband and is telling me that I have a sweet camera but that my fisheye lens is really not a fisheye lens. And I’m about to tell him that it is a fisheye lens, but that it cost less than $800, so it’s just not an expensive one. Santa Cruz, at a popular local coffeeshop that I can’t remember the name of.

Jerry, our best man, bester than ever. In counting our blessings, having Jerry back in our company is at the top of the list. We pick up just where we left off, just like that, and it’s fun to watch him study our new parental habits and hurdle the chaos we create around him. Always benevolent, here he is with a peace offering for his girlfriend, because we kidnapped him for an entire day down to the beach to skateboard and watch clustering monarchs and buy panoramic cameras at SwapMeet.