GRIM REAPER

At the beginning of summer solstice,
the tall grasses sizzled in the morning heat,

that snapped and hissed like snakes as I swung the scythe. 

When the shining blade bit hidden metamorphic stone,

the pendulous power reverberated back up the arm like an echo. 

My flanks and arms ached with the long history of a slow dance,

as I wielded the ancient tool, unchanged since the Middle Ages. 

Soon the horses will come down to graze on the bright grass. 

The stout oak-handled scythe, long since replaced 

by a plastic lime green battery-powered strimmer, 

to fell the wild oats and rattlesnake grass reaching skyward.

After a long, wet winter, they are taller than me.

The horses are long gone, at night the deer will browse 

and check on my slow progress as I clear the upper fields. 

Generations of tree swallows attempt to return to the eaves, 

sealed off for decades, genetic memory that deeply embedded.

The crows are upset because I put up the summer tent,

at dawn they share raucous displeasure from the safety of trees,

a hawk circles the deep valley and keens for her lost fledglings, 

the woodpecker drills and probes the depths of the dead pine.

Douglas firs grizzled with lichen, encroach upon the vestiges 

of open space where my grandmother once tended the garden.

Poison oak and coyote bush protect saplings of live oak and pine.

I wake to a primeval silhouette of bachelor deer on the tent walls.

Last winter, a limb from the dead pine sheared off the corner eave 

of the old house, leaving it raw and exposed to the elements.

Nothing much left of the garden except volunteer cherry plums, 

a dying pear tree we cannot save, even with severe pruning,

and the golden delicious apple tree is so far gone, 

only a thin cambium ribbon threads the roots to branches, 

the heartwood of the tree exposed, hosting shelf fungus,

the black cankers having already done their job decades ago. 

How many decades are measured in this garden, the cultivation 

of lifetimes, but the wilderness returns of its own volition.

The Milkman

Sometimes I feel like a friggin' gameshow host lost in my own reality show, you know the kind where Vanna White comes out all dolled up, stalking across the set in impossible high heels, and her red polyester dress has its own chorus of crazy going on like cicadas in the wings shrieking up a storm. Only I am never dressed for the part.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering how I got here, why I was chosen for this particular drama, and what the premise is. Someone forgot her notes, luckily for me, faking it is second nature—not like those anxiety dreams when I was in second grade. 

I often dreamed that I took off my snazzy red woolen coat I've had since I was four. It's a bit too snug and threadbare—only I forgot to put on a dress. I’m wearing knickers and one of those wife beater undershirts, trimmed with lace and a tiny bow on my chest to feminize it. It could be worse, I could have been in my pajamas. 

Realizing my error, I hide in the alcove, afraid to come out of the closet—so to speak. I can’t stay in there all day. The teacher is taking role and is about to mark me tardy. Story of my life. Either I’m always missing the bus, or I forget to dress for the part. 

Everyone else is properly clothed and primly sitting at their desks with hands folded, the teacher too. I can’t go out there. Is there a sweater, or a pillowcase art smock I can borrow? She calls out my school name. The I'm in trouble name. Not my family name. All eyes are on me. Stagefright is real.

The teacher is both judge and jury, she calls my name, so I slip on my red woolen coat with its frayed red silk lining and black velvet collar, to join the class. She is annoyed, and will stay annoyed with me for the rest of the school year, no matter what I do. 

She thinks she is hiding it well. But I can tell. I will flub my lines. It will become a familiar pattern. I will become excellent at subterfuge and hiding my inadequacies, always dressed for the wrong part—not like the other kids who seem to have a grasp as to what is going on. 

This fugue state will be my modus operandi all throughout school. I'm a bootstrap kid. Myself and I. And the cats. Only later will I discover that the real director of this particular reality show is called dyslexia, not the indifferent teacher. But no one will cotton onto it. They will leave me sitting alone in a corner, punishing me for what I cannot seem learn, never asking why. And so, I will become an excellent actor, fooling everyone, including myself. The mimic.

Danette and Gail are teacher's pets. They always know what to wear. Cute little frocks nicely ironed, and crisp skirts, so they look like upended tulips sitting in the first row. Dennis, the dreamboat, slicks back his dark slicked pompadour carefully with one hand. Later, I realize it’s a studied gesture probably practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. 

He smells like his father Dean, the milkman who is a stand-in for Rock Hudson. During summer I loved Tuesday mornings when he drove up the dirt road to our house in the old Lucas Valley milk truck. I’d come flying down the road in my PJs with my long pigtails wagging behind me. 

He’d pick me up and spin me into the air until I was airborne, breathless. I giggled and it felt like I was soaring with the birds until he put me down on the ground. Did he also do this with his own kids? The other kids on his milk route? I suspect so. The model was at hand.

One time he asked if we want anything other than the usual 2 quarts of milk standing tall in glass jug. I dreamed big and added orange juice and cottage cheese to the list, not realizing my grandmother would have to scrabble next week to pay the bill from my impromptu purchases. Math was never my strong suit.

I sat on the wooden milk box and ate the cottage cheese with two fingers, washing it down with orange juice straight from the bottle. I had no idea how I would explain any of this to my grandmother. See, it was my job to collect the milk before the crows got to it. They would flip open the milk box and peck off the foil and cardboard cap to get to the cream. Strange to think of those black crows wanting white milk. The cats lined up waiting for the spoils.

Sometimes we forgot to collect the milk. It would turn to cottage cheese right in the bottles under the hot summer sun. She’d complain about it, and then strain the curdled milk in cheesecloth, feeding the whey to the hungry cats who scrambled into a furry pile with spats and hisses. Sometimes she made paper-thin pancakes for dinner stuffed with cottage cheese laced with lemon juice and sugar. It was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned.

Sometimes in winter when we forgot the milk overnight, the little foil caps that were perched on top of frozen cream expressed out of the bottle, looking like long-necked swans. I didn’t have a father or a mother figure so Dean the Milkman was like a surrogate practice dad. He was a model, so I could be like the other kids. He said he didn't have a little girl, just two boys, Dennis and Steve. I tell him that Dennis is in my class. Can I be his little girl?

I always looked forward to seeing the milkman. A story that his son, Dennis, would never learn. He will also never know that I had a crush on him all through school. I didn’t want to jinx the situation. But the situation jinxed itself. Driving back up Lucas Valley Road after the bars had closed, Dean flipped his beautiful boat of a white convertible into a ravine.

Dennis hid behind a curtain of grief, dressed in black for the rest of the school year. He still smelled like Dean. I was in a fugue state and thought of my red coat. What about the milk, who would deliver the milk to our door? Who would toss me into he air? It was a closed casket ceremony, said my grandmother. The spotlight shone on Dean like a reality show before the final curtain dropped.

6/6/24 WOW—Wide Open Writing with Franny French

The detritus of memory

Lately I’ve been writing this story in my head from the days before I became a writer, always reminding myself to remember, remember. Whether it was the way the fog rolled in over the mountain, with its chill breath, or the litany of things I saw during the day. Wild animals carried the highest tally, or something my grandmother showed me: how to build a Saint Bridget Cross from the tule rushes that grew in hedgehog clumps following the water table in the upper garden.

I’ve been writing this since I first began to wander afield, collecting an inventory of plants I had no names for, leaving off from where my grandmother, no longer able to accompany me on our early morning walks, no longer instructed. For example, the names of plants. I had to wait an entire lifetime to label and categorize them. All of those jigsaw puzzles of memory became placeholders, waiting for identification, for what knowledge I did not yet have a place for in my head. My eyes remembered those nameless plants, I tucked them away in my mind, a treasure chest to unpack at the end of a long life.

I’ve been waiting for the circle to find its beginning and end, the Ouroboros of memory and history jockeying for position during those liminal moments where you’re neither neither awake nor asleep, where dreams and reality merge like mist, and you can’t tell where one memory or dream left off and another one began.

I’ve been waiting all this time to live my real life, though I’ve been living it all along, but it always felt like it was on hold, waiting for the right moment. What right moment? Maybe it was because I was afraid of change and caution was my handicap, I was always keeping things in obliettes because nothing is ever guaranteed, other than life nor death—other than the struggle between the here and now and the there and then.

Lately I’ve been sharing the stories of the past with new old friends, thinking surely that wasn’t me I was describing a lifetime ago. The inside and outside worlds colliding, head on, and I wonder about all those dropped stitches constantly unraveling the tapestry of our lives, those dropped threads leading us in other directions.

Lately I’ve been gathering in the narration of a life hidden in the dungeon of memory, wondering why I am still here. It seems like there is little to look forward to, but then I realize it’s a habit I’ve dragged with me from the earliest days. The if not now, then when, the what if motif of regret. But there is always the now.

Lately I’ve been collecting the detritus on the shores of darkness, finding odd solace there. The creatures I see become unnamed talismans: a lizard, a young gophersnake or the tree swallows seeking the eaves of my grandmother‘s house. The vents were closed off a half century ago, but home is genetically imprinted in their memory banks, and though untold generations have come and gone, they still swoop and practice landing, banking upward only to be met by steel mesh. I remember the day their babies fell out of the nest and we found a tall ladder to return them to the eaves and the inconsolable parents, swooping and crying.

I am lost and have no ending for this piece. The mosquitoes have been drilling into my forehead, reminding me of the fallout of a wet winter.  I can’t stop thinking about pipevines, for example, the only source of food for the pupae of the rare black swallowtail. How slender the thread of life is. Or the return of the bluebirds after a half-century of absence. The partial reversal of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Near extinction is always at hand.

Lately I’ve been letting go, perhaps returning to the void where we no longer matter. As I face the deep grass of the upper field that must be cut before the arrival of summer, is a race against time because after a long wet winter, the grass is still too wet to cut. And when I when I was young, weed-eaters didn’t exist, so I used a scythe—that father time image—and that zing and waltz of felled grass became an ingrained song of the field..

Lately I’ve been remembering about all the almost lovers I was too afraid to let in, let alone, to let out. I mourn for my amethyst earring gone missing—something I’ve had since I was a teenager, whoever finds it will not know the stories it carried from Inverness. Or the ring of Italian gold, the band so thin after a lifetime of wearing it, like a shaft of sunlight, the chip out of the stone reminds me of a playful kick meant for my rear from Neil as we walked about around above Lake Merritt. I should have left him then, but I waited 20 years to make a move. I wear it to remember, and the pungent odor of wcut grass brings it all back home.

6/6/24 Write On! with Susie Terence

Measuring the sun

When I was a child, my grandmother measured the seasons by where the sun rose on our hill, the long ridge served as a fulcrum. In summer, it rose over the big rock to the north, and in winter over the tall pines along the fence line. In this way, we measured the seasons using the natural world, not man-made monuments. I was fascinated by the way sunlight raced along the tiles by the front door. Ours was an old house that kept to the old way, with the house aligned to the cardinal directions. So the morning sun shone through the front door, like a portal, or one of the gates of Stonehenge. We even had a big rock, a knob of limestone, or a chert reefer, perhaps blueschist sticking out like a menhir. She carried the old ways with her, the stones circles of her childhood landscape conflated with portals of time in the new world. I was an odd child, always measuring the world by criteria I didn’t quite understand. One morning, I got the idea to measure how the fast the rising sun over the ridge rose, so with my plastic ruler, I measured the speed between sunlight on tiles versus the advancing shadow. Each line on the ruler was a two-minute marker. I had half the equation but not the other half. In that moment, I realized how the shadows of a sundial worked, and suddenly I was connected to time in a timeless manner. Past and future fell away until there was only time present.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo

NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

I imagine tomorrow’s house as a place 

of four walls invoking the four directions, 

instead of the sagging skirt of this tent. 

A roof, where stargazing is mandatory, 

where we once again travel the Milky Way, 

Orion’s sword cleaving the winter sky, 

though my eyes are always in need of reading glasses, 

to navigate the labyrinth of words that deluge us daily.

For a moment, it comes into focus, and I rejoice.

I may not be able to align a triple junction of tail-lights 

while driving down the road, astigmatism’s gift,

but for a moment, a constellation springs into focus, 

the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the Gazelle Leaps. 

Once I could see more stars with the naked eye, 

like the time we hiked up Mount Whitney, 

and the Milky Way was truly a sea made of stars. 

Or as we gazed up from the loft of the Andes, 

the sky was occluded with wildfire smoke, 

so I wasn't aware the constellations had shifted. 

A consolation was a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

The Big Dipper hovered on the horizon 

like an afterthought pointing to the direction of home.  

But I’m thrilled that I can find any constellation 

at all in a vast wilderness of sky lonely as ice. 

When the Big Dipper emerges overhead from the blur, 

it steals my breath away, and once again, 

I can find true north within the void, 

not easy to do in a sky filled with industrial light, 

not like the dark nights of childhood, where stars 

shone with a brilliance rarely witnessed. 

All the cells that I have ever been in the past, 

are annealing the starlight like folded iron 

at the smithies forge into a sword of light 

as I fathom these four walls called home, 

then I realize that the idea of home is held 

deep within the memory of self.

12/6/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

A long night with restless critters

What an effing long night it was last night, I was sleeping in the tent when the coyotes all went off, singing arias a little too close to me for comfort, followed by a fox coughing in the valley, and as the rutting deer blundered past my tent, one of them knocking down the tent ropes, so it sounded like I was inside a large harp, booooiiiing! Zing! the roof was shaking like crazy. Then the wind came whipping down from the mountain (thanks to Karl the Fog—that heat spell was something—and extreme heat in October is cause for alarm—as in wildfire) and the gust of wind shook the tent like terrier with a rat. I could hear the tall fir trees cracking and groaning which set off the hoot owls. They sounded pretty feeble as they still don’t have their mature hoot down yet. The deer insult was followed by some largish animal attacking the side of the tent, three times with lots and lots of claws getting stuck in the tent wall. Of course, my first thought was Oh my God, a mountain lion or a bobcat is trying to get in—surely it’s not the coyotes. Not what I wanted to think about before drifting off to sleep—especially after coming onto my sleepytime gummy bear. Speaking of bears, by this time, I was really quite cross, and I begin yelling for all I was worth, which scared it—whatever it was—off, and it also brought out the neighbors bearing torches. Meanwhile, my cousin’s crazy cat was zooming around the inside of the tent like a well-oiled lunatic. Whatever was attacking the tent must’ve been trying to attack her. I no sooner got back to sleep when that episode was followed by two raccoons having it out and literally rolling like little fat fur barrels down the slope into the creekbed where they caterwauled and quarreled some more. This performance was repeated throughout the night with copious snarling and fearsome growling and snorting as they made direct contact several times. And at dawn, I had to rescue my cousin’s crazy cat (the one that was racing around the tent) singing her three-note Siamese cat opera, trying to get away from a large puffy stray tabby Tom who was trying to beat the crap out of her. They are all nuts. I chased him off, she was stuck on automatic hiss mode so I couldn’t pick her up and put her in the house. She usually doesn’t sleep outside, so she was pretty freaked out. I am so tired, I am cross-eyed. And now it’s raining. No need to do a rain dance. I’ve been dancing around the garden all night long in my PJs like a dementor screaming at all the wild animals.

The doe’s breakfast
Morning aubade

Missy the Deer (photos)

Missy the deer I caretook last year munching on chicken feed & rolled oats in the garden.

Last year I clandestinely took care of a young deer who was hit by a car. She was one of our deer, born and bred in my grandmother’s garden. Well, the other evening I had an interesting interlude with her. I haven’t seen her in nearly a year, and she came right up to me, almost expectantly, as I was getting out of my car—like she knew me. I was so shocked I just stood there. I rolled some lemon cukes her way, and slowly walked away. We tend to talk to all animals, she was no exception.

So later, she came to the back door and peered in expectantly. Her enormous ears swiveling like semaphores. It was as if she were saying, I know you. C’mon! She had also brought her twins. I thought, oh, great, she was somebody’s pet. She’s so tame someone’s been hand-feeding her. A practice I condemn. They’re gone and interfered with the boundary between keeping wild animals wild and leery of us. I also thought, there was no way it was last year’s deer I had taken care of. I looked for a limp. She seemed to favor her hind leg, but I couldn’t be sure. It was clean.  Deer movements are sporadic, at best.

Then, the day before yesterday, she came up right to me again when I was in the garden. There was no mistaking it. She was wanted a connection with me. I stood stock-still. There was only an old Adirondak chair between us. She kept watching me and edging closer, so of course I talked to her. She pricked those marvelous ears at me, never taking her eyes off me. 

This time I saw the big scar on her hind leg where the bone had broken through, and realized it was the same deer that I had secretly fed last year. I suppose I could anthropomorphize a bit here and say she was thanking me, but I think it was hunger talking. But most animals tend to like me and will often approach me. Do I stink, or smell like the forest? We had just returned from huckleberrying so we were manky. Maybe I should bathe more often.

She hardly limps at all now. And there is no doubt that she definitely remembers me. It’s uncanny. Apparently my cover has been blown. She has no fear of me, but her fawns are afraid of us—and that is good. Despite my best intentions not to interfere with her wildness, I’ve gone and named her Missy. But her guardian, Bucky the mascot is missing, so I fear the worst.

It was Alex Call who told me to get her some high energy corn to help her survive. I couldn’t find any cracked corn, so I got a sack of chicken scratch with corn in it. I think she found it an odd choice, so I added some rolled oats too, which she gobbled right up. She loved rose petals and leaves. I tried to stay within her food range but spinach, bok choy and squash were a no-go.

Since I still had some chicken feed left over from last year, I sprinkled in the dry grass for the birds, I gave some to her. She ate it, plus the apples we left in the grass. I put out some other greens too as she’s pretty thin. She still won’t eat spinach. So I sprinkled more oats and chicken feed in the grass. We shall soon see if she will lay eggs, or begin to crow like a rooster at dawn.

You can see the wounds on her hind leg, she figured out how to walk, but it must’ve hurt.

For the most part, last year, I kept out of her line of sight, only putting food out when she wasn’t around. I was hoping she wouldn’t make the general fatal connection between humans and food—but still she figured out who and what I was—the feeder. So, my scent was probably the main clue. It was either that, or let her die. I think Bucky’s trust in us put her at ease. But she was still very leery of us. I never approached her. I didn’t want her to become accustomed to us. 

Some a-hole hit her with a car or truck, probably one of the day workers up the hill, and he left her to die. Didn’t even call the humane society. Coyotes smelling blood and opportunity, were trailing her, mama and cubs were waiting in the wings for an easy meal. Over my dead body. We drove them off yelling like banshees. Sean permanently scared them off with an air gun. Talk about a chain reaction set in motion. We sure didn’t want them hanging about or snatching one of the cats either. 

Bucky was a gentleman, he stood guard when she ate & chased off predators, but not us.

But this was also during the tail end of the drought, and the young deer was having trouble finding food, Bucky, who quickly figured out that I was a friend, not a foe who was feeding the doe, was reduced to eating lichen, toxic cotoneaster and ivy—which she couldn’t reach. She couldn’t even walk down to the creek, not with that blown hock, so I put out a bucket of water as well as assorted lettuce greens and grain. 

After all, generations of her deer people have drunk out of my old horse trough, and eaten my horses’ hay. These deer were born in the upper garden where Missy was currently sleeping, so it is as much their natal stomping grounds as it is mine. Besides, during the summer, I often sleep outside in the tent when I come visiting. So they know me. I am merely part of the garden furniture.

I am so not into feeding opportunistic wild animals, thus altering their behavior, but I don’t mind cohabiting with them. So this is a bit of a hybrid event, keeping her alive. Luckily, her fawns are afraid of us. May it continue to be so.

• The doe’s breakfast
• Morning aubade

I AM OF CALIFORNIA

I am of Ireland, the holy land of Ireland, 

the green land of myth and mystery. 

I have seen my grandfather bent over his books, 

as if they could restore the myriad atrocities 

dealt by the hands of the enemy. 

I did not know why he left his homeland 

to continue insurrection from this land of the free. 

So I sat on his lap and blew out wooden matches 

as he sucked on another stogie, 

that would eventually kill him 

as surely as those British bullets. 

Rubber ones hadn't yet been invented. 

That particular atrocity would come later.

I am of Ireland, that fabled land 

of verdant song & story. 

I watched my grandmother as she pinched pennies,

and hunkered down over potato beds in the garden,

raking & weeding, cajoling them into the stewpot 

where cabbage sang arias to bacon & ham hocks 

or tongue when we were lucky enough to get them. 

I never knew the poverty belt was cinched tight 

around our necks until I left home, 

the idea of perspective was always trapped 

in the green depths of the rearview mirror.

I am of California, the golden rolling hills 

where hawks argue over turf in a blue vaulted sky.

I need to quit using the word vaulted. 

It's just that the sky is a cathedral, 

a star of the sea shining in the distance 

where I was once baptized in pickled brine. 

But I gave it up, not for God, nor the vigilant nuns,

but when the women were ordered to give up 

their bodies, to spread their legs wide & cowp, 

then bend a supplicant's knee at the altar of prosperity. 

There was no melting pot, we were condemned 

by the fabric of our customs & names & religion.

The hidden wealth of the immigrant pushed aside 

made superfluous by insidious inquality 

of this WASPish nation wanting to break us all.

9/20/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

THE SONG OF BARBED WIRE

The song of barbed wire, strung taut on old posts, 

the way my grandfather labored on the steep hillside, 

the horizon distracting him as he wiped sweat from his brow.

Already the siren call of the deep valley below the mountain

will lead his children astray, the long arm of the known world 

promising so much and yet offering little in return.

A torrent of syllables and fragments slipping over rocks 

among the old bones, in the creekbed in deep summer. 

The body’s doubt, and the knowledge of regret holding us back. 

7/19/23

SHAME WORN HAND-ME-DOWNS

My aunt brought home a cardboard box of old clothes.

It was like Christmas in July. My heart foundered

on the festive picnic of a gingham dress 

with puffy sleeves and ruffles framing a scoop neck. 

It made me feel so grown-up as I whirled and twirled 

like a dust devil dancing up a storm in the driveway. 

I wore a funnel of pleasure floating off into the blue sky. 

I wore it to church. I wore it to school, it made me feel 

like a princess with its full skirts rustling in the breeze.

I vaguely knew the girl from catechism, she was older,

she didn’t go to our church or to our school. 

But it was a tight-knit farming community 

so I was careful not to wear it to the other church 

where her family were parishioners. I was in 5th grade,

it was a time of transitions. At our annual church bazaar, 

as my grandmother culled clothes on the rummage table,

there she was, whispering to the others, pointing a finger

at her old dress. She made me feel so ashamed 

for wearing hand-me-downs. Thing is, there was 

no shame attached to old clothes—until she outed me 

and I put that dress away, never to wear it again.

6/28/23 Write On! Prompt. Terri Glass

COYOTE COMMUTE

In the rearview mirror, I saw a scrawny coyote 

trot down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard,

midday, in the tiny hamlet of Forest Knolls, 

looking over his shoulder, watching for cars,

before turning up Tamal Road, 

headed for home as if he lived there.

I kept looking for Road Runner, 

knowing I was in the wrong cartoon.

6/16/23

Write invoice for a life past due

1. In the morning my voice feels like a lost horizon, a longshoreman headed for home at daybreak. The sun warming the edges of the ridges to the west. The stars weren’t quite ready to let go of all that indigo serenity. Perhaps the moon is setting, the lump in my throat reminds me to stay in the present tense, this day, this new beginning, is all that there is. Beginning now.

When I was a child, my voice was soft as warbling birds and singing was a second nature. My voice was a thin, reedy wind coming down from the ridgetops, its sighing having emanated deep in the pines. Those sighs followed me, my voice took on the stubbornness of stone, like the layers of ribbon chert laid down long ago beneath the seafloor. All the detritus of living transformed into metamorphic rock, into these mountains I call home.

My voice is closest to the earth, when I dream, because in dreams, my voice becomes the wings of small birds, escaping on the wind as I traverse the landscape of my psyche.

My mother, tired of hearing a child’s monotonous sing-song, told me to either sing or shut up. I love to sing, my voice was like the blackbirds in the cattails lining the pond. So I put it away in a box never letting it out of sight. But my voice wanted to scry on the updrafts and thermals, circling the valley of memory and the past.

Driving to work in floodwaters

Looking north on 101, at Petaluma Blvd. & Stony Point Rd. Used by psrmission, Scott Hess photo

How was your commute dear? Well, deep subject, I know. Laguna de Santa Rosa and Atascadero Creek were already flooded up to the berms of Occidental Rd. A few more feet and we’ll need amphibious cars. Lots of kayakers and Canada geese out cruising among the snowy regrets… 

Luckily Irwin and Llano crossroads were open—to a point. All the other smaller feeder roads are pretty much underwater. Todd Rd. was the only road—erm, make that a causeway—open, but just barely as you need to ford a lively stream by the slaughterhouse. Luckily I didn’t have to backtrack. I literally zigzagged my way across the llano, like a big game of water Tetris.

Best flooded road strategy is to ride the middle hump of the road, where you can see the dotted, or yellow line, which also requires playing chicken with oncoming cars. And when they pass you, it’s a ferme lá douche wall of water if your window was open like mine was.

Stony Point Road from Santa Rosa to Hwy 116 at Cotati was clear—but not the Rohnert Park Expressway. You’d need a snorkel. Maybe some fins too. 

But Stony Point Road south is an inland sea, a brothy mess well seasoned with eau de cow-cow. We were above waterline at the Redwood Penngrove exit, the offramp was innundated, but doable. However Petaluma Boulevard North was completely underwater. Lots of kleig lights. The cops were lined up, saying You shall not pass! One guy thought he’d try anyway. Didn’t get far.

Growing up in West County (both Marin and Sonoma), I have a large backroad database, which paid off during the wildfire evacuations. I wove in and out of flood zones via Highway 101, as I needed to get to Petaluma Hill Road, the fastest way to work. 

I slalomed my way back on the freeway again, running a newly obsolete red light, to navigate toward Washington Street. For the first time, I was grateful for all the massive retrofitting that Highway 101 underwent. Above the floodplain. The Petaluma River wasn’t too high, but wait for high tide, and Washington, and 116 would be real river roads.

Most of the small feeder roads are flooded in West Sonoma County and in West Marin too. Luckily, D Street-Red Hill Petaluma Hill Road was a breeze. Small landslides were rerouting water ditches. Why did the water cross the road? Because it was cross when the ditch ditched it.

At least the road south was clear, in a manner of speaking, but the potholes are so big, they’re stoned. Or the road is a vast jigsaw puzzle with several pieces missing. Especially in Hick’s Valley. Don’t hit those potholes, you’ll either bite your tongue off or get a whiplash.

But the Hick’s Valley chickens at Petaluma Hill Road looked like they were half-drunk, all piled up in a corner as if they were at a rave grunge concert. Not enough sense to come in out of the rain. 

There are three special renegade chickens that fly the coop (and the fence) every day. Every night they’re put back in the hen palace, a sort of Taj Mahal for chickens. Repeat this scenario the next day.

The escapee hens were happily commuting their sentence on the wrong side of the road. They like to hit up the tourists for free food. One of these days they’re liable to be flattened, or will have to answer the age-old question with their lives. Meanwhile the opportunistic vultures were lined up along the road waiting for the party to begin.

Alternate route via Hick’s Valley Road has fewer potholes. Watusi cattle with their massive horns, on the ridge of Wilson Hill Road were like prehistoric silhouettes holding up the skyline. What epoch was I in, anyway? Chileno Valley Road is in good shape. But it had flooded near Helen Putnam Park. Spring Hill Road and Pepper Road were dry as was Meacham Road, but there are a few low spots that too will flood.

From the top of Wilson Hill you can see the old Laguna de San Antonio is back—stretching from the Laguna School to the far end of the valley. Yeah, about the name: don’t call it Lake Laguna, that’s an embarrassing Anglo cartographer’s error. See my segue below.

Nicasio reservoir is so full, it looks like it’s going to pop. Nicasio school was closed—no power. My last bottleneck hurdle, Nicasio Valley Road, under the redwoods, was open, TG. Otherwise I was fresh out of alternate routes. Some acacia branches are leaning on power lines across from 2100 Stuart Ranch at the old McBride place where the old fire truck lives.  

Made it to Forest Knolls in record slo-mo time, the potholes out there are the size of hot tubs. All the roads are flocked with tree limbs and pine/cypress/fir carpets. Power was out everywhere, I did what I could at work—at leas the stove worked. Chainsaws, and gas generators were sonorously whining their little hearts out everywhere. It was as if the little valley was collectively snoring or purring in unison. Like a big cat.

MEASURING TIME

During the dark of the year, 

my grandmother said, open the door. 

Let the spirits in. Or was it out? 

As we burnt sage, and she tended the hearth,

I never could remember the sequence.

I was young, an imperfect student. 

But I learned to walk barefoot in the dust 

to let the soothing songs of the earth in. 

And that certain rocks had a powerful thirst 

that needed libation and coinage. 

We measured the arc of time 

by clocking sunrise through the seasons 

by the sentinel pines on the ridge. 

In summer, the sun hovered over the big rock, 

as if to land, then pushed south along the ridge. 

It’s all grown in now. We can’t see the markers. 

The world has become so far removed from the old ways. 

So, in my 7th decade, I tempered the passage of time, 

by witnessing the pulse of the seasons in the tent, 

so I could hear her again as she tended the garden.

1/4/23 Write On! Susie Terence

NB So, the tent is gone as of last night’s storm. I had no idea I was writing an elegy for the tent. It was hit with up to 80 mph winds. It lifted up off the ground like a mad UFO and hovered for a while before it crashed into the upper garden fence.

The doe’s breakfast

One of our young deer, Bucky’s sister, is badly injured. At first I thought perhaps she’d gotten tangled up in a barbed wire fence, as we’ve been working on the fence line. Or maybe she had been attacked by a mountain lion or a coyote—we chased off one opportunistic coyote yearling who came snuffling down the trail from the tank after her. There is transfer blood on the doe’s good hind leg, and she can’t put any weight on her right hind leg. The wound almost looks like her leg is broken, her hock is badly swollen. Because she can’t put weight on her hindquarters, she also can’t feed herself by rearing up on her hind legs for the meager winter fare of low hanging leaves of the fruit trees in the garden. We watch her limp across the field, debating what to do, no longer knowing anyone with a gun to put her out of her misery. We debated whether to call Fish and Game, or the Humane Society, a certain death sentence, but we aren’t willing to watch her die of sepsis, or let nature, long in tooth and claw, take its course. I come from that old rural school where you do not let injured animals suffer. You see, when I was young, I wanted to be a vet. I learned rudimentary feline and equine triage from Point Reyes’ Doc. Daniels, DMV. We wondered how the deer got injured. Then we realized the model was at hand, as a handyman jackknifed his truck up our narrow road as if he were a contender for the Indie 500. Perhaps he, a neighbor, or a visiting friend, hit that poor deer and then kept on going, never stopping to report the hit. Criminal, to leave her to suffer like that. We keep an eye on her, noting her minute progress each day, as she limps down to the creek for her daily drink. There is still not very much for the deer to eat after the prolonged drought cycle. And it is still too soon for nourishing winter grasses. They have taken to nibbling the jackets off the buckeyes and eating ivy leaves, both of which are toxic. So they can only eat a small amount without damage to their livers. I suspect she has already eaten her quota. Today is a black frost day. The pipes were almost frozen solid, I had trouble gathering enough water for morning tea. The frost has been thick every morning, leaving the tent painted in a mirage of crystals. I have been feeding the doe for days since it seems she may survive this trauma after all. Her hock is surely blown, but I think it is not broken. I know they can survive these onslaughts. (Another gimpy doe, hit by a tourist in Nicasio a few years ago, lives out a full life by my cousin’s old water tower. Each year she presents him with spotted twins.) At dawn I prepare a breakfast of Bob’s Red Mill organic oats garnished with yellow apple leaves, red plum leaves, rose petals and leaves, which at first, she viewed with suspicion, and then she discovered they were actually quite good. She still eyes the pumpkin with horror (Bucky and gang won’t touch them, so much for all those Facebook memes) but I have noticed that she has eaten some of the strands and the seeds. Progress. Sometimes I talk to her and she cocks her ears toward me as she listens to my murmuring. Sometimes Bucky stands on the other side of the garden fence keeping vigil as she eats her breakfast. This is our morning ritual.

Morning aubade (photos)

The coyotes are howling at both ends of the valley—in broad daylight. Harvest moon has come and gone. Earlier it was a family of small owlets who still can’t properly hoot. Soon, Bucky and his old father with the hoarfrost dipped nose, will daintily dink their way down from the hill to get their morning drink from the creek. They have no fear, now that hunting season is over. Last night was supposed to be first frost, but again, the grass has no dew on it, so we can’t see the lacework of the orb spiders laying out their crocheted webs on the dry grass. Even the dew is forsaking us.

I love lying in my flannel sleeping bag listening to the morning chorus of birds. Mostly ravens patrolling the valley muttering grock-grock, and the small screech owls in the trees are having trouble getting the correct sequence of their hoot on, so I can’t tell what species they are, not great horned owls, nor burrowing owls. One-note towhees and chupping robins add to the morning’s cacophony. The robins and warblers are getting hammered on the clusters of madrone berries. Soon the quail will add their smik-smik sounds in the underbrush. The bluejay adds his metallic squitch-squitch scissor sharpening sounds to the score. 

The redtail hawks no longer circle this valley, nor call it home, but an opportunistic red-shouldered hawk moved in and has raised a family, she is constantly squawking like a fishwife, at war with the ravens and crows who are now barking like dogs. No love lost between them. I prefer the redtails with their lonely tcheer sound. My totem animal. I heard one redtail passing overhead, why do they no longer stay here? 

Who said nature was peaceful? It’s one massive turf war out there raging tooth and claw. A hummingbird lectures a poison oak bush with its mip-clicks. The gray squirrels are busy scolding each other in the bay trees down by the creek. I love waking up in the tent, knowing I don’t have much longer where I can sleep outside like this. Poignant reminder of passing time. Yesterday, I had to secure the tent, really a rickety summer gazebo, from the fierce winds bellowing in from the east. It rocked like a taut jib sail, the tie down ropes singing like harp strings. 

Yesterday I finished stacking the rest of the cordwood for winter. Like a draft horse I pulled 20 small wagonloads of wood up the hill. Mostly dense cypress and fruitwood. Day three of my second COVID booster, I’m puffing, but I feel surprisingly good. First sun illumines the buckeyes, small golden orbs. The deer are hungry, eating the jackets off the toxic buckeye. 

So much love and hard labor is required to clear out my grandmother’s old garden orchard after a half-century of neglect. Last week we took 16 loads of debris down to the road to the county chipper, we are fire hardening the land. We will haul 20 more loads down to the road, and repeat again the following week. Two little old ladies with broad backs and battery-operated chainsaws who refuse to succumb to the vagaries of age. My hips hurt from hauling wood, but this winter, my cousins will stay warm. 

The tongue of low lying morning fog is infrequent these days and because of it, the trees—especially the redwoods and firs—are aging out, dying from pine beetle infestation and a profound lack of water. A tinderbox of a pocket canyon waiting for the hunger of a match. The last time this valley burned was in 1942. The first thing that drew me to poetry was the the wind in the fir trees sounding like ocean waves. And the bluejays making similes. I didn’t realized how much I missed keeping rhythm with the seasons, especially the long dance of the fall. Saying goodbye to my childhood. Maybe for the last time.

During the summer of fire

During the summer of fire I slept beneath the madrone at my grandmother’s house, herself long gone, but the evening breeze carried the sorrow of smoke, and the sky was bathed an amber light. The moon, a raging red eye seeking water. The coyotes didn’t know whether to howl or to bark. And the young horned owls, still working on their slow solos, had trouble counting the notes. The stars, a distant memory. Their light occluded by the veil of smoke, the death knell of dying trees.

Endless summer

End of the school year. We were all sitting in the garage clubhouse on Railroad Avenue in Woodacre.  Someone was rolling doobies, an album cover served as a desk. Jimmy Bowman lit one up, inhaled deeply, errant seeds popping like firecrackers. He passed it around, and I remember looking at my friends, as if I was in suspended animation, present, but not fully present. You know that moment when you step outsite of your dailiness and take a fresh look. And everything looks strange and new at the same time. 

Judy Soga was mad for Jimmy and he was aloof which only spurred her on. We were a ragged tangle of odds and ends. Though I was a grade older, we were all roughly the same age as I began school early. There wasn’t anyone in the group I was romantically interested in except for maybe John but he was a summer blow-in, not a permanent resident. Besides, he was from LA which was hard to take. But he was my first kiss. I remember I didn’t like it. 

I wasn’t ready to grow up but I wanted to just get on with it. Rites of passags. Everyone else was paired up—even the twins, Jack and John McBride. John was seeing Janet who look like Yoko Ono. They crashed in Bill‘s white van on Dead Man’s curve. 

Bill, the drummer for the Sons of Champlin was our main man. We bought dope in little baggies laden with seeds for $15 a pop, pooling our resources. I contributed spare change when I could, but I wasn’t really into the dope scene. Seeds rolled off of the album onto the carpet as we rolled another one. Teach your children well was blaring on the dinky stereo, if you could call it that. 

There was something endless about that summer. The sheer depth of those blue skies and golden hills. The shadow green of oaks. We were all on the cusp of something—we knew not what, but something was stirring, and soon our tightknit group would disperse with the winds in the fall. We were growing up, and growing away from each other. I didn’t know to savor any of this. 

I was sitting at the piano bench with Jack showing me a chord progression. And in that moment, I realized that this happenstance friendship of proximity was every bit as valuable as the throes of first love. I thought of The Turtles singing, Happy together, and that was the last summer we were all truely happy together, before the winds came.

6/9 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

RIP Naomi Judd

Note bene: I never know where my next writing idea will come from, where it will go, or what spawns an idea, usually it’s because of a Facebook post that serves as a trigger, I write a comment which leads to another comment, and so on. I never expected to be floored by the death of Naomi Judd, someone I didn’t even know. But there you have it. It seems Facebook style Wakes are becoming a thing. This is a developing piece based on a lot of hear-say (stet) as I only knew her on on the periphery. Call it 1° of separation if you must. So bear with me as I uncover a West Marin story.

A new Facebook friend, activist Sandra Birnhak, who grew up with Diane/Naomi in Kentucky, said she went by the name Naomi back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, so maybe she changed her name back to her given name, Diane when she was in LA, with her then husband, Michael Ciminella, before moving to Lagunitas. She was only 17 or 18  when she had her first daughter, Christine, in 1964. 

Sounds like Hollywood wasn’t kind to her—in her autobiography, River of Time, she mentions about being molested by an uncle, she abandoned by her husband, then, at 22, she was raped by an ex-con heroin addict. I don’t know how she wound up in the San Geronimo Valley, but it was a haven of single mothers. Since I only knew of her peripherally, I’m still piecing together the stories… 

Backstory: The Judds once lived in Speck McAuliff’s apartments above the post office in Lagunitas (where I once lived as a young child before my parents split up). Then they moved up the road to north a cottage on Tamal Road next to the House of Richard (a hippie store), and they also lived on Resaca Avenue as well.  

CLEAR CUT

When I was a child, our neighbor, 

Lucien Vincilione—his name, a clue—

in an attempt to establish a preordained
sense of order in a fecund wilderness,
vigorously cleared manzanita and coyotebush,
to let the land breathe. He sawed and whacked
and sprayed the brambles with a vengeance,
leveling with impunity the berries and wild roses,
eradicating the snowberry and the pipevine—
what we called the greeny Dutchman’s pipe,
never learning the names of those wild plants
that survived for eons in that unkept garden.
Still not content, he torched the honeybee nest
in the bay tree down by the creek, he
felled the venerable crabapple in the gulley
all for the idea of order, and a good riddance,
he said, having abolished the slovenly wilderness
for a sterile landscape of non-native grasses.
First to go were the shooting stars, then the creamcups,

then the larkspur, and the tiny wild strawberries,

the death-knell of the blue-eyed-grass and hounds-tongue 

and the dainty iris. Only the death camas survived.

Of course we were unaware of the role of symbiosis,
an interdependent dance of host plant and insect.
And for all his efforts, for decades there was no longer 

a verdant wildflower carpet to greet us,

nor a crown of black pipevine swallowtails
with luminous indigo and russet eye patches
swooping around our heads in spring.
No accounting for taste, my grandmother said.
Not even the small birds could survive 

that onslaught of progress.

4/10 PAD