Rhubarb Pie

Not just the roof.

My city is shrouded too, but it isn't fog.  The smoke of eight hundred fires is covering our town, turning the light thick and orange.  This isn't right.  I know the fire-light, where you step outside and your town has turned to sepia and the smell of smoke sets off your body's alarms until you remember that it is fall and time for the mountains to burn.  You look at the sky to be sure.  If it is completely yellow, the fires are far.  If it is blue and you see a plume, then you should probably try to locate a nearby fire.  Or you can tell by the smell, because the wildfires smell like sage and oak and cedar burning.  If you're downwind and close, ash wafts through to smudge your books.  We're not close, it is just that the hundreds of miles of the Central Valley have filled with smoke.  In June!  This is terrible!  Only June!  The fires shouldn't start until August or September. 

But Spring was dry, so our soils are parched and the winter grass is tinder already.  Lightning struck us. My state is burning.  My town is full of smoke.  My eyes sting.

Weekend of Fog

I spent the weekend out on a boat, helping move big inflatable buoys around.  The buoys are called "marks" and they are for sailboats to race around.  You need to move them when the wind shifts.  It wasn't a terribly shifty weekend, so I did a lot of idling around, looking at the scenery.  But the scenery was mostly just ghostly white fog. 

I suspect you've never been out in a boat in the fog.  I would have taken pictures for you, but there's nothing to photograph, just various degrees of bright white or dull greyness.  It's impossible to convey the spooky quiet as landmarks disappear and reappear.  You're in a boat, so you're drifting and moving, and as the curtain lifts it turns out the landscape isn't where you've imagined or remembered it to be. 

I had a brass bell and for a while I stationed myself near an inflatable buoy and rang the bell, so the sailboats I couldn't see could aim in the right direction.  It was a small, clear bell and I held it over my head and let it ring and ring.  There's no way to take a picture of that: dampness, white, a sense of dislocation, a ringing brass bell, and the sudden appearance of six sailboats, right nearby, racing towards me.

Over on the Continent, we do two kisses.

Had a breakfast date this morning with a guy from CL.  Not a breakfast date that started the night before, but a breakfast date that we fit into his schedule.  Wasn't sure what to make of him: neutral emails, definite points for getting straight to arranging the date, nothing incriminating on the internets.  Those were all good.  The thing that concerned me was that he signed his emails Ciao.

"Ciao"?  Ciao isn't the regular close around here, which means he picked it.  He picked Ciao.  Ciao!  Air kisses, darling!  Ciao!  I said Ciao when I was in Rome.  They just know how to live better over there.  Ciao!  I said Ciao when I was in Argentina, leaving my friends in Buenos Aires to go on my trek to see the First Peoples.  They are totally unspoiled, so in touch with nature out there in the jungle.  Ciao!  Ciao comes with some pretty heavy baggage.

So I went to the date all snarky and cynical, having parsed the guy out from five short emails and his choice of Ciao.  But the universe laughs when we think we've figured things out.  First, the guy was beautiful.  He wasn't beautiful like a Korean astronaut, but beautiful like my other tastes.  Beautiful like he'd walked straight off my description of my type.  My height, dark curly hair, blue eyes, good voice.  So pretty.  And he was easy to talk to, bright, does good works.  I laughed at myself the entire date.  I don't like judging people by looks, and here he was, making my knees weak.  I'd been suspicious about Ciao, and yet the guy was more than pleasant.

I don't think I'll hear from him.  I got a pretty final handshake at the end (which I also laughed at, internally).  He might just be self-possessed, but I didn't see any sudden surge of interest, no leaning forward to hurriedly ask a question.  This is fine.  I had a good breakfast with a beautiful man and I got reminded to stop the incessant parsing and pre-judging.  A good morning's work, I say.

Oh, look at it!

Honey, we are going to have a very boring blog, where you say things and they are exactly what I would have said, and so I say them again in the evening.  You picked Rhubarb Pie! which I was secretly thinking of for three weeks, because we made one together, and because we are sweet and tart, and work on the flakiness.  I'm so glad.

Eventually we will have to stop the rapt adoration of the other person, because readers will finally, exasperatedly tell us to 'get a room already'.  We can't get a room already, because you are all married and we are both too stubbornly attracted to men and because you keep living far away even though I've explained to you that you should live close.  This means that I will not keep writing indefinitely about how you are the bravest writer I know, the standard I hold myself up to, how I am so inspired to write with you.  I won't always be saying how you have the most amazing eye for specificity, and that I helplessly wish I could do that.  Perhaps we will specialize, here on this blog, you with the beauty and truth, pragmatic me with whatever's left.

I promised you I'd get a camera, and I will this weekend.  I don't know if I can find small dens in ferns for you.  I will find something, though.

Megan

What I Saw On My Walk

I was in the secret local nature preserve and the dogs were thundering ahead on the dirt path, and the whole place smelled mossy and ferny and sweet and brown like decomposing leaves and damp pine needles and I was hearing the sounds of the first mosquitos of summer when I saw this thing.  Some bug has made a home in this fern!  I wanted to take a picture to send to you.

When you go for walks in the woods I bet you notice things like this, just like me.  Furthermore, I bet you get curious about what makes them, just like me.  But I bet you do something else, that makes you different from me.  I bet you actually sometimes learn the answer, and I bet you sometimes remember what you've learned.

I'm starting to figure out that what I like about walks and being outside is the noticing, and the getting curious.  I love to notice things, small differences, changes in the way a tree grows or a rock face is patterned.  I love to sit still long enough to start to see very small bugs, and to watch them long enough to notice where they are going and what they are doing.  I can be transfixed in an outdoor place, almost anywhere, actually, just noticing.  And I get curious about what I notice -- what made this little den in the ferns, and what will emerge from it?  Where are all those little ants going, and what will they do when they get there?

For years I've been ashamed  that I don't seem to have the other impulses that come with noticing and wondering.  Sometimes I do follow through and actually learn the answer.  I've read more books about bugs than you have, I bet.  I ask people things, I look things up on the Internet.  But I never ever go to the next step and remember what I've learned.  I think the ant lion digs a pit in the sand with the walls angled just so, and traps other bugs in it, but I can't remember what an ant lion looks like or where they live.  I became a geology major just because I liked taking walks and noticing things, and wondering about how they got to be that way, and those attributes seemed to be rewarded in the study of science.  But instead what I got was a sense of shame for not remembering what I learn, and for (worse) not particularly caring that I don't remember.  I'm great at noticing things and wondering about them, and not half bad at learning and explaining.  Just completely uninterested in knowing, permanently.  I know that's not the right way to be.  Smart people who are curious and good at learning are supposed to want to know things and become experts, and I never ever ever have wanted that.  What I'd most like is to have an expert friend to invite on walks sometimes who would say, "oh, yes, what sharp eyes you have!  I'm glad you noticed that!" and would then tell me a story about the little fern ball.  And who wouldn't mind if I had to ask again, the next time I notice one.      

Suddenly Shy

So when we talked about doing this it felt like such a good idea, like I would get my voice back, like I would have a place where all the things I notice or wonder but do not say would find clarity and a way out.  I thought how fun it would be to collaborate with you, my friend, because I think you are so very bright and honest, and because I would learn so much and ride on your coattails to glory as all kinds of smart people come flocking over to converse with you.  It would be like being at the table with a celebrity, where everyone comes by to pay their respects.  (The closest I've come to that was dinner in Ennis, Montana in 1994 with my grandfather's college roommate, Turk Orr, who was the big man in that town.  Townspeople kept coming over to say hello, and to kowtow in a friendly but deferential sort of way.  Magnanimous Turk and wife Carol would graciously acknowledge and dismiss them and turn back to the big cut of tender beef on their plates, and to me, their dinner guest, and it felt very special.  They may not be celebrities to you, but in Ennis, Montana, sitting at that restaurant table was definitely the place to be.)  Anyway, that shared glow in the presence of someone else's earned goodwill sounded fun to me and filled my head when we started talking about blogging together.

But here I am trying to think of something to say and it seems hard.  I've forgotten how to do this, oddly enough.  Nobody's going to come by our dinner table and say hello if I can't be witty and brilliant and effortless.  Too much pressure! 

So I have decided to go for a walk with the dogs, and take a picture, which I will post for you when I get back.