February Week 2: Blue Dicks & Osoberry

February 14, 2010 at 10:49 pm (Family, Flowerblogging, Poem)

This week is a time of frustration and excitement for flowerbloggers, in equal part. The weather is opening up; it’s clearly no longer January . . . and the world seems suspended, swollen and aching to bloom. In town, the plums are throwing snowy mantles around their shoulders, the first enormous magnolia blossoms are breaking open, but narcissus are already admitting that the season is passing.

Here’s a poem by AE Housman, from A Shropshire Lad, that becomes more precious to me year by year:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs is little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

2-11-10 Osoberry on a cutbank along Olema Road in Fairfax. Every year it's a hold-your-breath delight to find that this uncommon native has survived right on the edge of a well-traveled street.

2-11-10 The first Blue Dicks of the year, early on the slopes of Baywood Canyon. Native Americans harvested the bulb of this familiar beauty in a way that consciously increased its abundance year by year.

2-13-10 The solitary jelly-red female flowers of Hazelnut side by side with pendant male catkins on Pam's Blue Ridge

2-12-10 A Tree Poppy bloom sheltering itself from rain on the Southern Marin Line Road

2-13-10 Not a flower, but a deer-coppiced Bay Laurel on Pam's Blue Ridge, looking like a Druid momument

2-12-10 Silkytassel on Knob Hill above Kentfield

2-12-10 A surprise! The first very early Huckleberries have burst into bloom along the Hoo-Koo-E-Koo Trail, bush after bush of them

2-11-10 California Saxifrage beside the Narrow Gauge Trail above Fairfax

2-12-10 A second look at a Slinky Pod blossom and its leopard-spotted leaf on the Hoo-Koo-E-Koo

2-12-10 Rain-jeweled Tree Lupine, Hoo-Koo-E-Koo Trail

2-11-10 Every spring we bring a Buckeye branch indoors to unfurl in the middle of our kitchen table

2-11-10 Our oldest daughter Sarah Orantes with Tina and a grandmotherly live oak on the Narrow Gauge Trail

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Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2010 at 2:41 am (Family, Poem)

Owl Love

.            for Desiree, who I know was listening

Walking along willows so thick and deep
that the winter creek could scarcely say its name,
willows so bright in twig with spring’s promise –
red and yellow, green and gold—that the lingering sun
bathing the high fall of hills was scarcely needed,

long before the hour when owls should fly, or sing,
or cease to hide from lesser birds, two February owls,
though they had spent their blinking day apart,
one on a twiggy nest, one in a broom of branches,
began to boom their joy in being mated.

I was miles from you, miles and hours and more,
and scarcely in a hurry to leave a world readying itself
for bloom. But still, beloved, am I wrong to guess
you glanced, once, or more than once, from your window?
Wrong to guess you listened for my hollow song?

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For Tina

February 6, 2010 at 12:54 am (Family)

Weeping cherry on Meadow Way in San Geronimo Valley

Odds are, if you’re reading this, you already know that my wife of nearly four decades, Cristina Kessler Noble, has been struggling with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. It began to take its toll in Tina’s late forties. It’s now in its mid-stages, and has left her profoundly disabled. Her awareness, her steady sunniness, and her fierce determination to stay engaged with life humble all of us every day.  Last year, Tina seized on wabi-sabi, the delicate Japanese aesthetic of impermanence, as a way of coming to terms with what is happening to her. This poem is my attempt at expressing our ongoing sense of loss.

Wabi-Sabi

Let us honor the rust streak,
this windy snow of petals,
today’s umber sky of clouds.

Lilt some half-voiced song
of the imperceptibly thinning
radiance in my wife’s eyes,

of this pen, raised and then
put down. Of a frog, leaping.
Of the enduring empty after.

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