Here are the turkey children with their blue-headed mothers. I hear one burbling, purring, behind me. Footsteps crackling, they’re treading through the dry periwinkle, where grasshoppers are spraying up criss-crossed like popping corn.
– And moving on all outlined in light. The mothers stop and stretch their necks to listen. Some have stopped to rest on the mound under the stone pine. One had jumped up onto a low branch of a cedar.
-
Phoning around about the pink hawk, nobody knows.
July 3
When I come out of any of my four doors there’s always a scuttle of some creature – always. When I come through the periwinkle down the path always something I can’t see rustling away under the bent stems.
Watching a glossy little brown head jerking in and out of a hole in the ground. Rummages in the dry leaves at the entrance, is nibbling at something. Out and back many times, starting and freezing, hasn’t yet come all the way forward. Seizes a bit of green and snatches it backward into the hole. What a nervous secretive little life. - Now I know what all those little holes are, it’s the first I’ve seen anything use them. - Now it’s gone, presumably down there eating what it seized.
July 4
It turns out wireless reaches to the chair. I’m under the oak listening to Near the cross on YouTube.
Thought of my dad living all his life in this kind of feeling. It was a sharp sudden ache. He was that ache in a way my mom isn’t though she was brought up in that music too.
*Fannie Crosby November 1850, sung by Sarah and Savannah Church January 2012.
July 8
The pullets are looking more like turkeys, longer paler jerkier necks. There are still the same number of them – the mothers have taken good care.
July 12
Barbara on the road as I’m driving by. She’s more guarded than she has been, stiff. Afterward I remember the last conversation I had with her. The news was on behind her when she phoned and she went to turn it off. She said “I don’t want to listen to him.” “Who?” “Obama. My friend and I say there should be a separate channel for him and Michelle.” “Why is that?” “So we never have to hear them.” I was calculating, will I? Said “I’m quite fond of him myself.” She said “Well that’s all right” with my mom’s sort of resentful dreariness.
July 13
Black Canyon Road two months later, very changed but still an hour of rapturous color. The road almost white and always turning. Banks and slopes grey, rust, taffy-colored, with gardens of cream-colored buckwheat flowers hung from dark granite or fox-red sand banks. The taffy color is parched mustard stalks or grass; the grey is some other dried thing that at a distance covers the slopes with mauve patches. Closer up, rosy long fronds of white sage seed heads, or the littler mauve flower stalks of dudleya. Everywhere spalted rock faces in endless variations of hue.
This afternoon there was a dark sky ahead to the north, with once a ray of sun on the white road where it came around a corner miles, miles, ahead. I was steering with my right arm, a lot of steering, window down, seatbelt undone, third gear, never faster than 15 mph, often no gas, just touches of the brakes, looking everywhere, perfectly absorbed.
At the top end there began to be a smell of wet hay or heated grain. I hadn’t seen it on the dirt road but on the asphalt it was obvious that it had rained. Puddles at the gate, and when I was coming up the lane enough of a pelt so I had to turn on the wipers. Loud run-off onto the patio rock. Came in and opened all the doors to the hay scent, which is reaching me on the couch as I’m drinking Louie’s organic Himalayan tea.
My Ramona excursion also brought home cherries, nectarines, strawberries, melon, raspberry kefir, feta, Irish white cheddar, avocadoes, radishes, small cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, green beans, fish, steak, cranberry essence, and a dark blue fitted sheet from the goodwill.
July 14
Wood louse, sow bug, Armadillidium vulgare the common pill bug “can invade homes en masse in search of moisture.” Crustaceans, detritivores feeding on dead plant matter. What are they doing on the living room rug? Toiling laboriously.
-
Thin and lame fox on the yard looking for mice probably.
-
Pleasure of householding. Washing the floor in the kitchen and mudroom, sweeping the doorway, putting away emptied plant pots. Laundry, towels and sheets. Smell of apricots simmering, beautiful red and yellow jars in the fridge.
July 16
Singing at the computer – Mozart – thinking of my mom at the sink or the stove with her back to the room singing as she worked. Cotton housedress, apron, sturdy bare calves.
I feel a pressure in the center of my chest when I think of that house with my parents young. Why is it. The naturalness of surrounded belonging. There were things to fear and be dissatisfied about but the framework itself hadn’t yet been disturbed. The house and yard and surrounding land and the family were all one thing, which I was. Within that one thing I didn’t know I was I had struggles and pleasures I thought of as myself. The early journal isn’t worth much because it identifies itself only with those struggles and pleasures and ignores the whole.
July 20
Rabbits are eating straw, desperate enough now to chew spiked succulents.
The toyon has been blooming beautifully white.
July 21
The sun is starting to appear on the front edge of the window bookcase.
July 22
I’ve been working these days, all day. It gets very hot in the afternoon. I’m at the desk in loose cotton singlet and loose cotton pyjama pants, keep glasses of water in the fridge so the whole glass will be cold. Don’t want to eat very much. Have the whole door open to the day.
What it was like before, when I couldn’t work: intention just faded away at the thought. What it’s like now: intention doesn’t come into it, I just do it.
-
A folded little brown bat on the ceiling – figure out how to make it easier for it to find the open door – it misses on half a dozen passes – try turning off the radio – stand at the window end of the room waving a broom – beautiful swoop into the open black.
July 26
When I was twelve what it was like beginning to be noticed by men my father’s age – riding in the grain truck with my dad, some man at a weigh station on the road to Dawson Creek, who kidded me, or him, about wanting to keep me, which was the standard line. I had sparkle. I’m writing this down because I’m missing that power of sparkle, I’m looking at the backs of my hands and they aren’t bright anymore, are starting to have the under-surface bruised look of old women.
Did a Santa Ana wake me, blowing this morning from the east.
June 17
Two o’clock, 90 degrees, the hottest it’s been. Sunday afternoon. The fridge shudders off. Bit of a breeze hissing through the hard oak leaves, comes in with a scent of pine.
Airplane’s singing growl. A moth like a floating leaf crosses bright in front of the shadow side of the pine.
Three turkeys resting in the second oak’s shade at nine in the morning as I’m listening to Genaux singing Handel.
June 20
This afternoon the cattle are bawling continuously down beyond the hill, did Norman ship calves?
June 24
There’s a wind today, southeast, strong enough to keep off the flies. Sunday afternoon, sun very nearly overhead, so the oak’s shadow is thrown straight down. Warm scented air a soft buffet on the face’s skin. Grasshoppers flowing like blown leaves off the stone pine’s edge. Motorcycles growling down on Mesa Grande. Smell of strawberries on my fingers – warm strawberries, that long-ago smell. Isn’t it the best possible air, warm lit upland air – clair et beau said Luke, who found the poem in the old Vancouver library and wrote it in his journal.
The long breath of the three pines in the corner where the hawk settled on a middle branch just now. There goes his shadow on the grass.
The pines diffuse medicine into warm air.
Oak trunks bright even under the canopy because the ground is.
Wind in the oak canopy scrapes dryly, in the stone pine is a dark soft roar.
Tiny ticks of grasshoppers landing.
The air is extraordinarily spiced, different than yesterday.
White four-day moon whose bow points almost straight up.
June 26
What was that conference of birds, a dozen raptors circling over Angel Mountain, different kinds. One must’ve been a bald eagle, white head and tail. One was pale pink, was that a ferruginous hawk? Turkey vultures. I saw them from the driveway as I was going to back up toward Angelo’s to get a couple of flat rocks for my steps.
Kettling.
June 27
From the chair at nine in the morning, the view has a ripe look, a blue plum bloom on the hills.
Susan – what about her – brilliant bad Susan. Take up your bed and follow me. She said, and I didn’t trust her. For good reasons I didn’t trust her, and yet what she turned on was the right thing. The point is to live where I was reminded to live by her. Thou’rt neither, neither thy capacity.
What needs to be finished. The death I’ve been wanting is that death.
In the meantime this glistening small hayfield running with birds, this jiggling canopy, this air.
-
Jesus / keep me near the cross
There my glory / ever
Free to all / a healing stream
Flows from Calvary’s / fountain
That came into my head – what Christians used to know about intensity, what we sang.
There a little yellow-legged grasshopper lit on the page. Its small grip on my fingertips, the strong kick as it leapt away.
Cattle crying in the hollow.
July 1st
I won’t always be here in this air, with a pink hawk circling somewhere above, in an unimaginedly right chair under a blue oak above golden slopes. There won’t always be this long branch reaching forward over my head lit from below by stubble all alive with dry-grass-colored grasshoppers.
July 2
From here, this chair, to there, the mountain’s apex.
from here to there and in a complete cube
Dotted lines.
How bodies use language in space.
How world shows its sides to the sun.
July 9
Hello Monday. Sweet clear Monday 7:30. Woke in daylight hearing turkeys chuckling and purring under the window.
July 10
Drove from Julian and stopped to open the gate in 100 degrees. Came up the lane waving my whole arm out the window reveling in the hot bath of air.
July 11
A squirrel on his back legs on the gatepost rock staring toward the north end of the cedar windbreak chipping earnestly for ten minutes. I see its small mouth opening and closing as regularly as if it were a little automaton. A single note very high and loud, like a bird's whistle.
Try sitting outside after the sun’s gone west behind a white screen. There’s no breeze. Mosquitoes, biting ants, flies. I’ll have to go in.
July 12
Another kind of day, high grey and variable wind. Early on there was one strong blast, and since then I hear it rise a bit, skitter of leaves at the screen door, cool air across my feet. There’s been so much light and heat that it’s a rest.
July 15
Warm south wind and race cars roaring, whole fleets of them at the foot of the hill.
I’ve been happy in the house, for instance loving the air at the open front door and the clean mat at the kitchen door.
At the same time have had fantasies that if a mountain lion attacked me I would let it have me. – Had one just now, in the midst of this beautiful day, this air and light I love.
I don’t think I’ve had this steady underlying wish for death before. It’s not the suicide voice of acute pain, it’s just quietly there.
A hawk’s shadow runs quietly over the grass.
Am I letting my early self down, should I be fighting more, for the sake of her story. Something like that is what I feel about what I’ve said above.
July 16
Certain animals … see perfume and electricity.
Any radiation is bounced off, around and variously within all the matter of the world, altering its character and effect as it does.
This resonance and echoing is taking place with all substances at all times.
An electrical storm may make rocks buzz.
Wherever there is a fragrance there is likely to be a subvisible radiance charging the light with its underglow.
All is penetrated and immersed in the wave-complex of visible and invisible light. What we see is determined as much by the invisible as the visible, for the quality of the visible light cannot be separated from … invisible radiation, or the look of the place from its sound, or the smell of it from the look.
Peter Redgrove in The black goddess and the unseen real
July 18
At my age, the more alive you are, the more you’re aware of death. Says Samuel Menashe.
July 27
Clichés rolling out of the invisible back room today, what is it – keep having to erase.
Windows open, a loud single cricket sounding to me like a dotted line.
August 15
Bit after 7, first morning back. Sun over the broken oak, a lot of smoke and it’s thickening. Four lightening fires, the largest south of the road I take to Borrego Springs.
August 16
Thick blue-ish smoke quite aromatic because it’s sage, pine and chaparral. It’s filtering and tinting the light. The sun is lower, reaches almost across the bookshelf now, pink pale ivory.
August 18
I bought a bed, iron bedstead someone dug up behind a cabin at the Eagle Peak Mine. Heavy to drag out of the back of the jeep and awkward to assemble by myself. I have set it under the driveway oak and was lying on it in the dark looking at single stars that were like the single notes of Ann Southam’s Simple lines of enquiry I could hear through the screen door. Love the sensation of lying there in the open, in the dark. Bats blur past. The crickets grind away at layered distances.
August 19
Woodpeckers playing in the clear sky above the road, four of them, no maybe five, or six, swooping up, diving, fluttering, urking. The white patches on their wings look transparent against the sky. They’re excited. They seem to rise to some point and then pivot and fall.
There had seemed to be no mourning doves here and I missed them, but since June I’ll sometimes see a group of them fly up when I drive past certain flat silver plants that grow along the roadsides and nowhere else. Dove weed. It's a plant that is unpleasant to touch, but a fine perfume rises when it's crushed by a tire.
Croton setigerus, or Eremocarpus setigerus, of the Euphorbiaceae, the spurge family.
Turkey mullein is a very low-growing plant that is commonly found in summer through fall on the sides of fire roads and other such places that are open to full sun. Its gray-green, roundish, thick leaves are 1/2 to 2 inches long, spade-shaped with 3 veins visible and covered in bristly hairs. The pale yellowish flowers largely blend in with the foliage and are in bloom from May to November.
Its dark, round seeds attract doves, quail and other birds.
Crushed plants were used by the natives to stupefy fish.
Thomas Belzer Roadside plants of Southern California
Dorothy Richardson, born in 1873, published the first volume of Pilgrimage when she was 42 and went on writing it for the rest of her long life; the last of its 13 volumes didn’t appear until after her death in 1957. The series describes Richardson’s own life as an independent woman in turn-of-the-century London, from the time she leaves home at 17 until she sits down to write what will become Pilgrimage itself, the years 1891 to 1915.
June 2nd 2012
Miriam Henderson in July of 1903 walking home at midnight from a meeting. I’m reading her this time seeing how young she is.
June 21
At the player’s cue, the fabric of the game-world suddenly warped and shifted so that the landmass seemed to be refabricating itself from the inside out. “That’s the fourth dimension,” ten Bosch said.
Sometimes very briefly imagining the world as locked and moving patterns of invisible non-substance – how that would look, a visualization.
June 22
I like the moments before the sun is over the horizon, when the hills glow evenly bright.
It’s 5:30, that early light beyond the window’s wide frame.
When I was climbing over the sill yesterday and earlier when I was trying to jump onto the counter a sensation of quiet surprise that my arms don’t pull me up the way they did and that I’m so awkward getting down again. What I mean is there’s a childish silence in it, it’s dimly conscious. Is it because it has happened before?
Something like it when I’m writing. When I read over an email I've written I’ll notice I’ve left out a word or miswritten one. Writing here I erase more and ponder more, there isn’t elastic drive.
June 30
So far today – cooling at nearly five – a lot of Deadlock. Thoughts I can have about it while I’m being her. Thoughts she can have about her work in the form and time of me.
What I notice more than I did forty years ago is the shapedness of her books and the ways she’s remembering young uncertainty and provinciality. When I read it first I was sunk into the pleasure of intelligence described from inside, so many thoughts voiced I’d had silent. Something I’m more conscious of now - that comes from her method? - is that it’s meta-conscious and so situates itself behind the language self to include nonlanguage, what I’d now want to call the whole body. Meta-consciousness is an idealist stance it seems, like LSD: she describes changes in light and space that are actually changes in herself, so that the room she’s in expands and contracts, dims, brightens, wavers.
July 1st
In Deadlock she 25 and Shatov is 22. Her friendship with Shatov is a marvelous story, conversations told in detail, Shatov so really discovered. The way he plays straight man to her ignorant excesses but then also leads her along, she marveling at being led. Their young open-heartedness with each other. The way she is embarrassed to be seen with him but constantly finding him beautiful.
She's funny, the interior way she shows Miriam getting tipsy on her first glass of beer.
She passed, talking emphatically, out into the wide dimly-lit sky-filled East End street, and walked, unconscious of fatigue, carrying Mr Shatov along at his swiftest plunge, mile after mile, in a straight line westward along the opening avenue of her new permanent freedom from occasions.
It’s a story in which she discovers she’s a writer.
The early sentences were forgotten and unfamiliar. Re-read now, they surprised her. How had she thought of them? She had not thought of them. She had been closely following something and they had come […]. They were alive, gravely, after the manner of her graver self. It was a curious marvel, a revelation irrevocably put down … reflecting a certain sort of character … more oneself than anything that could be done socially […] and not oneself at all, but something mysterious, drawn uncalculatingly from some fund of common consent, part of a separate impersonal life she had now unconsciously confessed herself as sharing. […] this something would continue, it was herself, independently. It was as if there were someone with her in the room, peopling her solitude and bringing close to her all her past solitudes […]. Never again, so long as she could sit at work and lose herself to wake with the season forgotten and all the circumstances of her life coming back, as if narrated from the fascinating life of someone else, would they puzzle or reproach her. […] Those strange unconsciously noticed things, living on in one, coming together at the right moment, part of a reality.
It starts as she’s running upstairs after her first meeting with Shatov. She comes into her room, looks at the sky, and then grasps how the meeting has been. “Philosophy had come, the strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels.”
In my immersed reading I’ve never thought of her narrative designs. I haven’t thought of the books or sections as such.
- In there a grasshopper lights on my forefinger: its perfectly marked little back seems a gentleman’s tweed in the context.
I’m reading what she wrote in London in 1920 nearly a hundred years later in a place where there are open miles instead of thoughts. Breeze from the southeast swaying the canopy. Chair facing blue Cuyamaca Mountain with its much-dotted foothills. Fields now the color of wheat.
She’s interested in mistakes. Miriam gets something wrong, as when she’s playing the piano and assumes Shatov has come into the room and proceeds as if he’s there but it’s someone else – that sort of moment recognizable and never mentioned by anyone before. No it’s not mistakes she’s interested in, it’s those sorts of unspokenness.
In under a spotlight now. The sun directly overhead, even a bit north of directly overhead, shining white on the page through a hole in the canopy.
Woodpeckers when they fly draw a white band around themselves.
He said there are different kinds of white sage growing at different altitudes.
When I asked if he lives downtown he told me the long circuit he walks. I'm supposing he's dirty because he sleeps out.
The way he carries himself is remarkable to see on 5th Avenue among the Californians. I first saw him at least a year ago, walking uphill with that long light traveling stride. Wouldn't have thought he was Indian. German, maybe. He has a beautiful nose, a strong-boned face, looked a prince in disguise as a pauper. But not when he opens his mouth. He talked on and on.
August 9
He's a naturalist. His heart leapt toward the cassia because in it there were cloudless sulphurs, uncommon in the county. Gulf fritillaries, which are really heliconiniiae, a cicada nymph with wing buds. When he was little he would go into the brush with his reptile books. He raises butterflies, birds, snakes. He's anxious to go into the mountains, so anxious he has offered to be my faithful Indian guide and bodyguard. I will certainly go camping with him but I will be wanting to arrange showers and a laundry so I don't have that garbage smell, which it is, in the car.
Since my fit about his not listening he is alright in conversation though not investigative.
One of his ears is scalloped as if an earring had been violently ripped through the lobe.
August 10
He held a June beetle, which is a scarab, and showed me the livid green carapace dark red below. How to hold it at the shoulders feeling the sharp insistent strength of its forelegs. He considers creatures sacred. He knows quite a lot about plants but is interested in them mostly in relation to animals. He's surprisingly straight. I mean his carriage is. At lunch I saw him with his long fingernails holding his cigarette and bringing it to his mouth like a lady. He has no interest in me, though he praises my having made a garden attractive to so many kinds of butterflies. We are starting to make plans to go camping next week.
August 16
It's grey 6:30 Monday morning. Later I'm meeting Michael and we'll leave town in time to set up camp before dark.
I want to say about Michael that what has been annoying me is his childishness. The way he doesn't wash or look after his teeth, the way he lights a cigarette when it's time to start working, the way he babbles on heedlessly. His posture with me is as if he thinks of me as a parent. He'd ask permission for this and that: Is it okay if I have a smoke? He was expecting me to want to cook.
I do want to learn about the backcountry, though. What does it add up to. Refuse to be parental and don't take anything personally.
August 17
Michael wasn't at Starbucks yet. There I sat looking at maps for an hour, expecting to see him arriving with dirty bundles from his mysterious roost somewhere to the north. When I've waited for an hour I'll leave, I said, and did.
Anyway, up Black Canyon road slowly as the day heated. I was growling at Tom. Why isn't he with me. I'm growling at Michael too. He thought I would drive him around all day yesterday doing his errands. He was affronted when I stopped him after an hour and a half of monologue. He was startled when I said we should each buy our own food.
In his last monologue I did like the way when he told a story involving a pigeon, a juvenile ferruginous hawk, a prairie falcon and a golden eagle, he acted out the parts of all the birds.
- Oh I forgot to say he also insisted I should bring along my pillowcases because that's the best thing for transporting snakes if you find some. I said no.
I am sorry though to be having this eventless dull kind of camping rather than learning about rocks and animals and plants and more places.
So here I am at Indian Flats campground. He'd said joyfully that it's the hottest time of the year. He wanted a pry bar to be able to open up cracks in the rock and see what's in them. Lizards. A mine back up in the hills.
I'm under oaks waiting out the heat, another couple of hours maybe. There are sudden winds. The air flowing into the shade from the sun is freighted with heat and scent. I've had to put my socks back on because wasps are interested in whatever is between my toes. High desert.
Is it maybe 8:30. There's my jeep looking nice under the oak tree. Good breakfast cooking although she said - the warden - don't even use the Coleman.
Manzanita, coast live oak, sagebrush, white sage, California scrub ash, redshanks, St Catherine's buckwheat.
How was the night. Cold enough to need the sleeping bag, the orange blanket, and the quilt. I woke often. Located the Milky Way, looked uncomprehending at the stars, and went back to sleep. Peepers or whatever they are shrieked at a constant level all night. Not long after dark some large animal screamed from the pile of rock that's east of here. There were shots like an automatic pumping.
I've been lonesome and grouchy and then something will catch my eye. At that moment a fine tuft of grass springing light green from the base and beige-dry at its tips. It's very full and fine-textured, upright and fountaining, catching a lot of light and jittering its ends.
The oaks are full of buzz and give out occasionally a single dry skitter when they let go an old leaf.
Yum garlic sausage stew.
That pile of rock is made of this same rapidly decomposing granite. It's pink by some thin flush of lichen I think, and has stronger grey and black markings where there's water seep. Thick chaparral between the boulders.
What is the smell when I crush an ant - almost a plastic smell.
I'm wondering what it would be worth to me to have a guide, here, someone who could tell what that screaming was last night, what kind of butterfly that was, what that nice trout-banded lizard was. Transport him, feed him, listen, endure smell, spend day doing errands, supply pillowcases and small containers. The exchange wasn't clear, was being negotiated unclearly. I'm so nervous about being asked to serve that I may have refused an opening into all sorts of arcana. He did keep promising marvels. Tourmaline. Secret site, Indian songs, reptiles in the headlights, butterfly migrations, summer storms, the Baja, Dr Banta's ranch. It wasn't clear who was buyer and who seller. We both assumed the other was buying.
Meantime here I am with the advantages and disadvantages of just me. It's getting hot. Shall I stay here another night. Why not.
The redshanks are messy things. They don't have the compact shapely glamour of manzanita (which has berries now, dark red, and so is even more beautiful), and at first I thought they spoiled the landscape with their red-brown dead stuff held aloft among the plumes of yellowish-green new growth, the whole thing looking too chartreuse for this oak-grove and that grey-green scrub. But yesterday I sat looking into a stand of redshanks with the binocs, and what I saw was its interior light. If I look into the plant's space I see quite a golden somewhere. Yesterday when it had cooled and I was on a sand ridge looking down a bank I opened my eye onto a blue glitter of the greasewood below. It had the bitty reflectivity of the decomposed granite itself. I thought that was the light particular to greasewood.
I'm not sure I'm not making this up, but it makes sense that the surface forms and textures of any plant will set up specific intensities of light. Maybe in a redshank canopy the stems are reflecting wavelengths those needle-like leaves (ie absorbent all the way around) will want to take in. Say they are internally reflecting a lot of that yellowy-green. The whole canopy is singing at that pitch. So is the messy dry stuff in the redshanks there because it's feeding the plant light? Anyway redshanks is a particular kind of temperament, helter-skelter but luminous. A lot of grass in its litter-skirt.
I like the pale coral color of the buckwheat flowers with the silvers of the larger buckwheat and white sage. They seem often to grow together.
There are crows. I saw a scrub jay catch a bug on the wing. A black bird with white patches on wings and tail that flaps a lot. Largish bird that came off the mountain at nightfall closing its wings and shooting down. Large-headed small brown birds in the oak.
It's quieter by day than by night.
Beavertail spines are good toothpicks.
What is it about oaks. They are dark and dense. The way those leaves are convex - is that it? - convex and small, thick, dark, stiff and where left alone reaching to the ground - gives the tree - that one, in front of me - an impenetrable density. An establishment tree, buzzing with manufactury. It's pulling in rather than giving off. But it does speak, in its dry light rattle, to every shift of air.
The air has a thick quality.
A lizard, very striped, with a long grey tail. The binocs let me see how well he was hidden, brown and grey, in the oak leaf litter, his long grey tail like any of the fallen twigs. He freezes and flows alternately.
At the peak of that mountain-pile are a few pines with their roots among the boulders.
I was looking across the thick scrub in this bowl thinking the landscape of people has that mixture of kinds and accidentalness of individual structure, some shrubs half dead, some trees with limbs torn off by a flash flood. I am not able easily to tolerate the complexity.
Clouds form toward the southeast where there may be hotter land. Yesterday afternoon an immense blazing pillar with solid round protuberances like the boulder pile beside it. Today's clouds are milder so far, not those tight formations of huge energy. No - I see one of those forming due south, over Borrego.
It's growing fast but it doesn't seem to travel. The softer cloud over the mountain-pile is spreading in place.
Now - not much later - it has simply relaxed itself. It was a tight erection and now it's just a loose pile, though it does have a tighter front edge.
There are strong abrupt gusts that clean the oak by sweeping it.
That little bird just swooped down and took my manzanita berry! (Off the table.)
Yes it's hot. I'm hiding out under my home oak with my head on a pillow up against the jeep wheel.
August 18
Last night I also 'saw' a native man walking toward the oak flats holding a little boy's hand.
August 20
What did that excursion amount to. Some of the digital photos are nice. Buckwheat and the distant hills above Warner's Valley. The jeep under a coast live oak. I saw August. Got road grit for my succulents. Worked out more about how to pack the car.
It took 24 hours and two cups of tea to be able to start seeing anything.
Dead mouse smell strong in the kitchen, getting stronger especially by the long cupboard. It’s not in the wall, because the wall is solid plank. Can’t see how it could be inside the cupboard, don’t see any way for a mouse to get in. But this morning when I open a drawer to look for a stamp the smell is so thick that I look again. There are some coiled hard drive cables in a small plastic bag, and inside the coils a wad of what looks like slipper fleece. I pick up the plastic bag and hurry it outside and dump it. Out tumble three dead baby mice jumping with maggots.
She had found such a sweet ideal nesting place, contained and private. Had her babies and then one day didn’t come home probably because she was the one whacked in the trap next to the sink.
- There was the lovely way she or some other mouse would slip through the small hole carved into the corner of the sunroom door. It never seemed big enough but she would flatten somehow bonelessly and slip through. Always a tiny moment of preparing herself, and then the flattening motion with back feet spread, and then zip. O little mouse.
