Tag Archives: California

September 16, 2020 · 7:02 pm

Paradise Lost

 

We saw the photographs and footage like everyone else. Forests in red blazes, orange skies over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a mustard gas like atmosphere on the ground in Los Angeles. Runaway wildfires working their way up the coast, California, Oregon, Idaho, and Washington.

In the San Juan Islands, just off beautiful B.C. Canada, we were sailing along under blue skies for a time, feeling grateful. That was last week.

This week the smoke is in our hair, on our clothes, in our eyes, in every breath we take. All we can taste is smoke and it tastes like cotton/wool/flannel. No, it tastes like fleece. Smoke strips everything of color, rendering it flattened and forlorn. Smoke silences our forests.

We should have known it was coming. One evening last week we felt a course wind, “like a Santa Anna,” my husband noted. One by one the birds left the island, taking their songs with them. The only birds I see now are Resident Canadian Geese and Northwestern or American Crows. Resident Canadian Geese are born here, don’t migrate, and have lost all instinct to fly off. And crows, like cockroaches or coyotes, are scavengers, poking through paper plates and napkins left on outdoor restaurant dining tables.

Basically, birds live on the edge. Because of their highly sensitive respiratory system, caged canaries were at one time carried down into coal mines to detect any dangerous gases, such as carbon monoxide. If the canary died, miners would flee the mine. But we can’t climb out of this. Planet Earth is our home, and air quality has no borders. It’s like the ocean.

We’re all living on the edge.

A few years ago a woman I know from Houston, Texas visited Seattle. She couldn’t wait to leave, it was too green for her. “When you’ve seen one pine tree, you’ve seen them all,” was her refrain. Never mind that our forests in The Pacific Northwest are comprised of Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, Western Red Cedar, and Sitka Spruce as well as Ponderosa Pine. They were all the same to her. And they all do their job in being one of the great “lungs” on earth—keeping places like Houston alive.

We cannot afford to lose our forests if we’re going to keep our planet pumping. Climate denialism will never replace lost lives, homes, towns, forests, wild animals, beloved pets, and birds overcome by heat and smoke. What’s in the smoke? My friend, Jeff Smith, retired RN in San Francisco tells us, “Smoke is not just particles—it is all the substances that are burning. It is gases and plastics and pesticides and toxic metals and flame retardants. These get attached to the particles and we breath them in. And we absorb them through our skin… and we ingest them.”

No one survives smoke plumes upwards of 10 miles high containing thunderstorms, lightening, and tornados. Unprecedented drought, soaring heat and strong winds fueled these flames. Meanwhile snowpacks have been shrinking in the mountains just as oceans have warmed.

Mother Nature is pissed.

As Governor of California Gavin Newson put it, “The debate is over on climate change. Just come to the state of California.” Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia, Canada, I might add.

6 Comments

Filed under climate denialism

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 28, 2020 · 6:43 pm

By the Side of the Road

photo by Paul Mayer

 

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

I have been joined by fox on my walks recently. They’re always singular, stepping out onto the country road before me. Red fox, black fox, silver/black fox, we keep an eye on each other as I walk toward him. But before I get too close, the fox jumps back into a culvert along the road or back into the thick of the woods. Since this has happened frequently, I think it must mean something but I’ve no idea what. I do know this however, according to Stephanie Rose in Interpreting the Spiritual Meaning of Seeing a Fox, “as a spirit animal, the fox reveals itself during times of great and unpredictable change.”

And that it is.

Queen Anne’s Lace has begun to bloom on island in fields, meadows, along beaches, and roadsides. I can’t tell you what that wildflower means to me. My first marriage was in a church built in 1846 on an elevated site in Suffield, Connecticut. I had no affiliation with that church, I just liked the look of it. Small, white, wooden, and with the exception of four Doric columns across a portico in front, the church is quite plain, almost chaste. An interior without  ornament, without electricity. A hand pumped organ, a lectern, and pews. And on that day, upon every window sill, homemade arrangements of Queen Anne’s Lace. A young bride in a long white cotton dress—I wish I could stop her, but there was no stopping her. It was all very hurried and quite mad.

Queen Anne’s lace smells like carrots, by the way.

Just beginning to appear, right behind Queen Anne’s Lace, is the wild lavender/blue flower I mistook for an aster my first few years on island. In fact it’s Common Chicory, a woody perennial herb in the dandelion tribe. It was at the Master Gardener Demo Garden that I stood corrected, and I remember shrieking with joy that this little flower, all over San Juan Island, is chicory. What came to me then, and what comes to me now every time I stumble upon it, are memories of a couple days spent in The French Quarter in New Orleans with my daughter. Dishes to die for—“first you make a roux,” bougainvillea growing to extraordinary heights on wrought iron balconies and gates, folds of old velvet drapery in deep reds, spider webs in chandeliers, the texture of crumbling brick walls, squares and courtyards and patios, street musicians, the smells of mossy trees, gardenia, and sweet olive, and the distinctive taste of the coffee. The ground root of Chicory was used as a coffee substitute in The Depression, and still today in New Orleans, as a matter of preference, it is mixed with dark bean coffee.

One glimpse of the pretty Common Chicory and I am there, at Café du Monde, powdered sugar on my fingers and upper lip.

And growing in sunlight where everything else gave up ever trying to grow, for they seem to come out of rocks, the California Poppy. Distinquished as the state flower of California, but native to the entire Pacific slope of North America. A flower so small and demure, with a vibrant explosion of yellow/orange color, the California Poppy expresses the optimism and free spirit of the state, reseeding itself if happy. Flowers that close at night and on cloudy days. I experienced that when I first moved to California from New York. I was continually calling people too late at night, not realizing that Californians more closely follow the sun.

Come fall, I am going to sow some.

I have completed the loop and am coming home from my walk. This is where I turn in: a shrubby lot by the side of the road and by the side of the sea. The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out—and everything comes back to us. It never leaves. A great state in a seed, two days in New Orleans pre-Katrina, a brief marriage, and a knowing fox.

5 Comments

Filed under fox

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

July 7, 2020 · 8:40 pm

The Nest

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

A hanging fuchsia basket recently sold at Julie’s Nursery on San Juan Island and was promptly returned when the customer found a nest in it at home. The nest was built in a hollow at soil level and contained three little eggs. Julia exchanged the basket, and hung this one where it had been hoping the mother bird would not abandon it.

“Sure enough,” exclaimed Julia, “soon there were four eggs!”

Four eggs, it turns out, is the normal clutch of eggs for a Junco, who usually lay one egg per day. Thanks to swift observation on the part of the customer, the clutch is now complete and Julia watches over the nest in her nursery today.

My childbearing years are behind me, but I will always equate nests with homes.

Once I lived in a perfectly beautiful house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. How we got there I haven’t a clue, for we deeply loved the town in California we had to leave for Bryn Mawr, and were as happy, settled, and committed as we had ever been, anywhere. Then the next thing you know we left this perfect house because my husband’s job was moving us west again, this time to Seattle.

It was at this point that a friend of mine gave me Louise Gluck’s poem “The Nest,” torn from the pages of The New Yorker. I carried that poem with me. It worked its way into my very being. “The Nest” spoke to me so much it was as if I had written it. In the end, that poem was a springboard or prompt for a memoir I wrote. A memoir that has everything to do with nature, homes, and moving.

 

A bird was making its nest.

In the dream I watched it closely.

 

I mention this because my youngest sister in Boston is looking to move. No one’s job is requiring it, for they both work remotely. They just want to find a place where they might like to retire. Which is what we did on San Juan Island from Seattle, and now I can say I live in a perfect place. And having written a manuscript about new starts, I am trying to help her with this.

 

It had it’s task:

To imagine the future.

 

So how is it happening that I am falling in love with Cape Cod? I’m smelling salt air, suntan oil, seaweed, and lobster, all swirled into one. It’s knowing that all those barns on 6A are filled to the rafters with antiques, a browser’s paradise year after year. And all the writers and poets and artists who migrate to Provincetown. Perhaps the grass really is greener… Afterall, Annie Dillard moved from Lummi Island, Washington to the Outer Cod.

 

I had nothing to build with.

It was winter: I couldn’t imagine

Anything but the past. I couldn’t even

Imagine the past, if it came to that.

 

This is exactly what gets me every time: this desire to change my life. I think, what am I doing here when I could be there? Or there? Or there? Sometimes it scares me. And it should really scare my brother-in-law because before we knew it, our other sister was seeing herself on Cape Cod as well. The three of us residing in a community of small shingled cottages just steps from the beach and just steps from each other.

We had it all worked out, aging together. Our younger sister would get a foothold in the first cottage, and let us know as other cottages become available. We’d start our own book group there, opening it to others as we met them. We’d help each other out with guest rooms when one was experiencing an overflow of guests. In time, we would come to be known as “the older sisters” in our new seaside town.

 

And I didn’t know how I came here.

Everyone else much further along.

I was back at the beginning

At a time in life we can’t remember beginnings.

 

What our husbands were going to do, I don’t know. Fish?

12 Comments

Filed under homes

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

June 7, 2018 · 5:58 pm

Bonanza

photo by Paul Mayer

 

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

After her divorce, my youngest sister moved closer to the center of town. Her street is a cul de sac primarily of duplexes, inhabited by highly educated, multi-ethnic, mixed-aged residents, both married and divorced. This is where she now rents and where she has found a real neighborhood.

A small creek runs behind my sister’s house, visible from the window over the kitchen sink. And just beyond the homes at the end of the cul-de-sac: train tracks. Where a commuter train frequently comes whistling through, connecting ‘burbs such as hers to downtown Boston.

The sound of the train gives me comfort when I visit. Day and night it’s a type of clockwork. As in Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, everything seems to be running on time, as it should. But I know I derive more pleasure from this than my sister, for train trips had filled our family’s earliest vacations. By the time she was born, our family was flying.

After my divorce, I flung myself out to California. The seed for that, I believe, was planted long ago on those family train trips west to explore the national parks and reach The Pacific. I will always credit the railroad for opening my world. Whether the seed was planted in me, or I left a part of myself there, I don’t know. But I came to live out west and have given it the greater part of my life.

A seed knows how to wait. Most seeds wait for at least a year before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait for a hundred years with no problem. What exactly each seed is waiting for is known to only that seed. Some unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light and many other things is required to convince a seed to jump off the deep end and take its chance—to take its one and only chance to grow. 

Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited. Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

The west calls to me with its wide open spaces and quietude—even in the cities, where drivers don’t lean on their horns and honk. I applaud that. When I fly back to Seattle from Boston, even the freeways feel like meditation. After all that honking and yelling and road rage.

One girl’s Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood; the other girl’s Bonanza. In one scenario a track runs round n round an idyllic village on a model train table. In the other, the tracks go the distance and seem to disappear, only to start a whole new life somewhere.

What calls people west? What makes some New Englanders stay and others go? Come to think of it, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was not only what my sister needed at the time, but what she has always wanted. Whereas I was always pushing out.

We are each given one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable.

My husband must be the same sort of soul. We recently recounted to a friend all the places we had lived since marrying, and how long now in The Pacific Northwest. “You are like the pioneers,” he smiled and said, “who settled here because this is where the wagon wheels fell off.”

I think that’s it. We age and we slow down or find ourselves at last.

Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

13 Comments

Filed under moving west

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

March 8, 2016 · 7:13 pm

Walking in the World

White Point sign

BY KIMBERLY MAYER

There are people in our lives who have an influence they’d never know. My parents instilled a love for Cape Cod that we find in many ways living here on San Juan Island in Washington. The friend in California who suggested a year or so ago that I rein in this blog to a remodeling theme: remodeling a house, remodeling a life—the same thing, in my book. Our daughter, now living in Argentina, who upon visiting before her departure grew my daily walk by a beautiful mile or two. And in sending me a video of the works of sculptor Anthony Howe on neighboring Orcas Island, my cousin in Atlanta reminding me to stay with art every day. And to try not to stray.

They are all part and parcel of who I am, why I’m here, and how I see it.

“Walking the loop” began as a tradition while living on upper Queen Anne in Seattle and continues out here today. That first loop took me around the perimeter of the hill, overlooking the Space Needle and downtown Seattle, Lake Union, and Puget Sound. Today’s loop takes me alongside Westcott Bay, and through the red, white and blue nostalgic quality of Roche Harbor Resort where everyone looks good in the light. Finally, the road meanders through an old growth forest of cedar, fir, and pine where everything grows dark and green, and back to my home on the bay.

Where the road dips down to the shoreline I experience what I call a Cape Cod moment, framed by flatlands, grasses, marshes, and horizon. In the course of this walk I may pass only one or two cars on the road, a few more in summer, on an island where every driver waves.

This is the walk my daughter grew, taking it out on a point to new terrain, the posh end of White Point Road. Here I pass tennis courts where nobody’s playing, a pond with a dock establishing someone’s swimming hole, and a private golf course back in there somewhere, for I’ve seen it from the water. Horse fencing and regally high pampas grasses standing like sentry guide the way. Crushed white shells underfoot line the one-lane road at sea level. It’s as private as private can be, except for me, out on this point.

Here I gape at houses, something that seems to be my lot in life: the desire to see myself in other spaces, other places. On walks I finish unfinished houses in my mind, or tear them down and start again. As anyone in the field knows, design is never done. When the bones are good, I may mentally repaint it, or envision it clad in cedar shingles, dark, red, natural or a weathered gray.

At home, the short video on the kinetic sculpture of Anthony Howe awaits me. It’s mesmerizing. How did my cousin know to send this now? I needed it. Isn’t art what ultimately pulls us through? All the arts, always. And art as balm, particularly in troubling times. Which is where we are today.

“After reading the newspaper on Sunday, I sit quietly and simply look at art books.” Michael Graves

10 Comments

Filed under art, design, remodeling, walking

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 6, 2013 · 5:09 pm

White Gloves

Following a visit to New England this winter, my daughter mentioned how dry her hands were there. How well I know, I thought. I remember living in a railroad flat apartment in NYC where the radiator heat dried my hands such that they would crack and bleed. I treated it by applying Vaseline to my hands at night and  wearing little white gloves to bed. The gloves must have been left over from the days of my dreaded ballroom dancing lessons in a large formal hall in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where girls were made to dance with boys, and boys with girls–before we wanted to. Round and round the ballroom we’d go, and when one of the boys stepped all over a girl’s feet, the instructor, Mr. Ryder, would single him out to the center of the dance floor and make the boy dance with him. Oh, the look of devastation on the boy’s face–and the look of delight on Mr. Ryder’s.

The ballroom dancing lessons were scheduled on friday nights, the same time “The Twilight Zone” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” aired on television. T.V.’s best night bar none, and there was no taping then. The only redeeming thing about the evening was the requisite stop at a Friendly’s Ice Cream shop following the lessons, which whatever mother was driving the carpool that week had to make. There, having missed our favorite television programs, we felt entitled to gorge on Friendly’s Big Beef hamburger and fries with a Friendly Cola, or their milkshake, the Fribble.

My bedroom at home was papered in a bright yellow with green leaves and stems and white flowers flying around on it, as if tossed into the air. It was always spring in that room. Not so in New England. Maybe I was meant for more temperate climates, as I insisted on open windows and fresh air no matter what time of year.

Our house was a big old colonial in which every room was heated by a radiator. An oil furnace the size of a Model T automobile churned away in the basement to keep it all going. I liked my corner bedroom for the cross currant of air I could create in it. At night I’d burrow under layers of blankets and read into early hours with a flashlight: Gone with the Wind, On the Beach, Bring Me a Unicorn, and all the journals of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, falling in love not so much with Charles Lindbergh, as with Anne. I loved the way she wrote.

One night–it must have been a Nor’easter outside–wind was whipping through my room so hard the radiator went into overdrive. Hissing its head off and spraying hot steaming water all around the room, I had more reason than ever to stay buried under blankets, head and all. What could I do but scream for help? It was my father that heard my cries and came in and shut it all off (how’d he do that without getting burned?), closing my windows too most likely. An old camper at heart, he understood my craving for fresh air and had no harsh words for me, not that I remember.

Years later, in that railroad flat apartment in NYC, the radiator heat was even worse. Well, everything was. I was trying to recover from a broken marriage and deal with a divorce at the time, and not doing particularly well with either. That might have had something to do with it. So I moved West, choosing California, to put my life into some sort of sunshine. And to get out of those damn white gloves.

2 Comments

Filed under ballroom dancing, dry hands, radiators, white gloves

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 11, 2012 · 5:41 pm

Goodbye to a Market

Warning: I’m in a dirty rotten supermarket sort of mood.

A sad thing happened this week in our Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle: the dear little Metropolitan Market closed its doors. Let me say, Metropolitan Market was one of the reasons we moved here. We drew an area about six blocks around “The Ave” and confined our house hunt to that. The idea was to live where we would always walk to town, whatever the weather, and no matter how old we may grow to be. We had found our village in the city. “Why drive, when you can walk?” is our motto, and Metropolitan Market was central to our lifestyle.

Now I don’t know what is coming in, but I do know that recent development in town would have it that every block look the same. Metropolitan Market was different, mid-century architecture, impeccably kept, the staff most personable, produce you could trust to be organic (vs. the supermarket trick, or so I’ve heard, of replacing an empty organic bin with the other variety), and the foods they made, the soups, cioppino, sushi, Dungeness crab cakes, and bakery goods, splendid enough to go on the finest dining table. It was where we all placed our order for fresh turkeys every November, and could find quality kitchenware, chocolates, magazines, and even literary journals. Outside, a plant stand to rivel any street corner in Paris. Come to think about it, Metropolitan Market was our only local nursery too. Now I really am depressed.

Plus I have just come back from a very crowded Safeway where the music is sick, the loudspeakers are loud, the prepared food is fried and the like—although nobody eats like that except maybe the construction workers on their breaks (the ones who are tearing the town down). I don’t know who is employed at Safeway or where they come from, and as for the floral department, their way with plants is to dye phalaenopsis orchids blue.

I simply have to find a way around supermarkets. Something I can walk to, such as the bucolic farmers market on Thursdays. Come winter, move downtown and shop Pikes Market? Everything that is anything is so much further now and it’s time to go from carrying totes to using that cart I bought. A rainproof canvas shopping cart, bright red so cars can see me on gray days. I haven’t taken it out yet because I have some things to work out. My cart questions: do I push it or pull it? Do I push/pull it down the aisles and put the groceries I want to buy into my cart, and take them all out at the register, or will I look like I am shoplifting and be apprehended? Or should I fold up my cart and put it in the grocery’s shopping cart when I arrive?

Didn’t I know this would happen? A long time ago, after my first marriage fell apart, I lived in NYC for a year. I wish I could tell you it was marvelous: The Met! Lincoln Center! Central Park! But it wasn’t. Not that year. I was half crazy with a broken heart, and Central Park wasn’t even considered safe in the daytime. I don’t know if you could call it a phobia exactly, but I developed an irrational fear of bag ladies that year. Not a loathing, more of a trembling. An apprehension that it could happen to me. I knew that there had to be a story behind each and every one of these ladies, and my best guess was that some man had left her in the lurch. I am not sure if I ever got over this fear per se, but I up and moved to California. And now, here I am, thirty-something years later, further up the coast, and about to take up a cart myself. Didn’t I know it?

5 Comments

Filed under bag ladies

Tagged as , , , , , , ,