Seasons In California

End of the plane ride....Mama losing it a little.

We had a wonderful visit back to Michigan with our two families, and were part of my youngest sister Song's wedding to Jack, the newest uncle in the tribe. Its a hard gig, suddenly finding yourself in ownership of "uncle-ing" my four wild boys and I have to say, Jack rises to the challenge. We have been quite lucky in both of the last two uncle acquisitions. My sisters know how to pick playful dudes with love of action figures, roughhousing and silly jokes...all the important things. Its an unspoken thing,  evaluating potential spouses of your siblings for the kind of uncles or aunts they will be to your kids. Never heard anybody talk about that before but it sure is important to me. You don't get to pick your own kids aunts and uncles and you sure don't get to select them when you are the kid but its  a pretty important role. I have looked up to my aunts and uncles a lot as I grew up and sometimes they have been sources of advice or assistance and more and more as I get older, they are part of my network of emotional warmth and love. There's no underrating the role that you can have in a child's life as a peripheral adult in their family who cares and is around and willing to "get" them. Determined to "aunt" more actively this year and make sure my nieces and nephews know that I care. 

The leaves on my crown here are from Michigan when we were there last week, the maples were just before peak, turning red and orange everywhere on the edges of the woods. We have many fewer maples by variety and by volume here in Northern California. I miss the trees I know well, mostly in the way one misses old friends, not because they are the only lovely trees on the planet but just because they are my "known" faces. I miss my childhood trees for familiarity and comfort, but I love all the trees I am getting to know out here. A eucalyptus or pepper tree are graceful beauties that I never knew before. I do have to share that for the amount of griping and disparaging I hear from locals about the "lack of seasons" in California (No autumn at all, so goes the rumor.) I thought the fall color was beautiful! We don't have the same ecosystem so there aren't big sweeps of maple forests which give the "hills are alive" kind of color that Michigan and Connecticut have in the fall. Most of our autumn color is out in the vineyards which all turn gold in the fall, or in the cities. There are beautiful street trees that are all turning color here, apparently unseen, because nobody points them out or talks about them much. I'm puzzled about why! The leaves on the sweet gum trees are just beginning to blush red around town now. They turn the most spectacular scarlet and so do the Japanese maples, the red maples, and the crepe myrtles. One of my favorites in fall is the ginkgo which will puts on one of the most uniform and brightly gold glow, pretty much every single leaf on the tree will turn a glowing yellow.    Here there are lots of new friends however, I love the sweet gum trees, the pepper trees, the crepe myrtles and so many more. The persimmons in our backyard will turn a dark lipsticky red too around Thanksgiving. Fall foliage is later here....coming more in November and even December than September and October and much slower and gradually. We get chilly mornings and evenings, albeit without frost and eventually after color is over the leaves will fall all over town too. We have a lot of persistant foliage too so its doesn't look as bare, but if you which streets to go down, the big leaf maple, sweet gum and sycamores leave big, unseen swathes of leaves for kicking through. Secret Autumn in Norcal.

 I harvested the first hydrangea heads to put up on the mantle today, a few of them had blown down in the first rains (the rainy season is here and starting to turn sunny days into a rarer sighting). I put a few on the front porch with our pumpkins and squashes too. Lovely to have my own decorations growing in the backyard. I have considered spray painting some gold just for subtle shimmer. Might be beautiful or might be tacky, hard to say.

The kale is still appreciating the recent trimming that I gave it and is putting out a new flush of delicious leaves. Strange to realize that there is no real point in putting it away in the freezer for winter as winter here means kale in the garden, fresh at hand. Still wrapping my mind around all that each season means. 

One of my next big projects will be making a NorCal Wheel of Seasons....with painted reminders of what things signify the changing seasons here, I'm so annoyed with everyone saying that there are none. All the world has seasons and change, we just don't all live in a Tasha Tudor book.....the world is more diverse and interesting than that. Who made New England seasons the heartbeat of what change in the natural world world means? It reminds me of the ridiculous obsession homeowners have with keeping up an green English lawn, even when it doesn't make any sense in their ecosystem. There is more than one way to enjoy a front yard or to mark the changing of the year. 

That's our cute little Orange Blossom Cottage, with the kitchen light glowing as the sun goes down. Hello to all of you, from Cali!

Rising Above, Y'all

Sometimes there are days when its all about kicking your own inner pain and vulnerability to the curb and refusing (even when you don't know if you can) to live in an identity of defensiveness, all strapped into a permanent victim name tag. Sometimes other people don't get you. Sometimes people hurt your feelings and leave you soaking in lonely. Sometimes you make what you think is an obvious plea for connection and understanding and you are rebuffed and told to grow up. But I don't wanna live there. I get that it hurts, even feels justified and its not about lying to myself. Its about the honesty that if I sense defensiveness in myself, then clearly I feel I have something to hide.

I am super over soaking in my bitter angst when I feel wounded. Its the most challenging mental and emotional muscle work I have ever encountered (short of the entire experience of being married and being a parent) but its the right, strong and healthy thing. Its the vibrant thing too, the compassionate thing, the warm thing, the thing that lets you lie down and sleep at night.

I'm trying to learn how to do this and its such a new technique that I have very, very few credits to my name yet. But today....today was one of them. Yes, I cried some hot tears, I ate some pastries I regret in bitter emo style, I angry texted, I snapped at my kids.

But, I also:

    ....got good advice, cleaned off a shelf in a cluttered closet, ate a fresh orange, took pictures of beautiful things, thought through ways I'd been clumsy in the conflict, I talked it out, I solved my own problems, I told myself that I mattered, I listened to spiritual comfort, I sat in the sunshine, I smiled and I drank more hot tea. 

And by the end of the day, I had clawed my way back up.

Its so hard but I'm really frickin' proud. Every little bit a tiny victory.

Make New Friends but Keep the Old

Sometimes a little insanity is in order. This weekend we made a manic, somewhat last minute, ridiculous visit back to my alma mater. We didn't have any extra vacation days so we did the 14 hr drive in just a weekend which was really a lot of driving but was also really (sometimes life is incomprehensible!) exactly what needed to happen. The theatre club that my close chums and I helped found was celebrating 10 years and that was enough excuse for me to step up and insist on going.

I have recently decided to make a pretty directly clear life choice about friendship and important events. Somehow I became the girl who is too far away and too busy to come to anything her old friends are doing together and I hate it. I am determined to stay connected to old chums, attend those key events (weddings, baptisms, dedications, reunions, anniversaries...etc.) and whenever I am in town, I'm going to make lunch dates.

My beloved college theatre director and instructor.

When I moved away from my home state I was elated about the idea of a clean slate. I love the idea of creating yourself and the yawning possibility that exists in new friendships. And who doesn't like the hope of undoing old reputations and forging a newer, brighter image? While all of that is delicious and inspiring and wonderful, I accidentally lost touch with lots of old friends, missed a lot of wonderful opportunities and didn't have the nerve to try to meld the old me with the new one. I'm over it.

Not that I am saying I'm fearless, I'm just saying that I have come to understand that old friends and new friends both matter for different reasons, that old me and new me are still both me and both important, that relationships and connections are the feeders and safety net for essential, healthy human life and that I want my life to be one wild, spinning, knotted, weave with threads of all colors and strengths....and that meant that I needed to go to Michigan, come hell or high water.

I came home surer than ever that I'd done the right thing. There were screeching greetings with old friends, hilarious recollections, abundant warm words, more hugs than I can count, lots of long-waited-for introductions (hello husbands!), dress-up fun with my sister Foxy, sweet niece and nephew portraits, verbose and longed-for conversation (hello immensely long drive!) and a lot of coffee... It was one of the rightest things I've done in a while and so inspiring that I can hardly wait for the next chance!

My sister is a wizard with eye make-up. Isn't that beautiful?

Why People Matter.

Had a good friend from my elementary years (believe it or not!) stop by to visit for just a little the other day. Am so honored that she thought of me when making her way out here...and that she persisted even when I was hard to communicate with and then of course that it all worked out and we saw each other. I am so pleased to have people in my life who feel like old friends matter and are of value. I can't really find the right words here to say what I mean so I'll share this poem by Brian Jones instead because he says it so much better than I can.

So, here's to you Angela! Thanks for stopping! You made me feel really....yeah.

About Friends

The good thing about friends
is not having to finish sentences.

I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once
on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud
and watching the small chunks slide into the water
and listening to them - plop plop plop.
He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...
like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...'
We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed
and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon.

I first thought there was a sad thing about friends
when we met twenty years later.
We both talked hundreds of sentences,
taking care to finish all we said,
and explain it all very carefully,
as if we'd been discovered in places
we should not be, and were somehow ashamed.

I understood then what the river meant by flowing.