The city is strange and gorgeous at the dark end of the year. Summer lingers into September, and then on October first, as if someone had flipped a switch, it’s suddenly and irrevocably fall. You crave soup and pie. By November you are riding your bike to yoga in a dry sunlit cold that makes your bones ache.
Last week Lenny and I had a private lesson with the boss trainer to work on our canter depart. I’ve been riding for forty years but this program demands absolute correctness, and it’s fiendishly difficult. To canter, you sort of pick the entire horse up with your thighs and put him back down on his outside hind leg. Oh, and you sit perfectly still while you are doing it. Sound impossible? It is.
And then Lenny and I came around a corner and I saw where our canter depart should be, and I showed Lenny, and he stepped into it, soft and round and through. For a blinding instant I felt superpowered. We have yet to reproduce our feat.
On the drive home the marine layer rolled in with the early sunset. 280 was a freeway through giant trees – not mere redwoods, but dense black trees so huge they blotted out half the sky. 21st century cars zooming through a primeval forest, the landscape of the reptile brain.
Riding – not even bothering to compete, just riding for its own sake – is the most ephemeral of arts, there and gone almost before you can acknowledge its presence. Like the city circling the sun as the planet spins on its axis, that scrubbed-clean sky, those ghosts of monstrous dawn sequoias; I write them down because memory is the only trace they leave. As John Darnielle sings, “All of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” To live is to bear witness.
We’ve been going to Benjamin Dean lectures on and off since the kids were tiny. It’s pretty cool that our youngest, nigh-adult child now enjoys coming with us. Last month we looked at the Galilean moons, including Ganymede with its own magnetosphere and our beloved Europa. This month Stanford professor Susan Clark walked us through the magnetic fields in the interstellar medium (ISM), the dust and gas between the stars.
She was charmingly annoyed about this name. “I’m pretty sure oceanographers don’t study ‘the stuff between the whales.’ I don’t think atmospheric scientists study ‘the stuff between the birds.'” To be fair, she acknowledged, the parts of ISM that are dust show up as black blobs in visible light, like Barnard 68. But if your eyes could see into the infrared spectrum, you would see the stars beyond.
One cool thing about the dust is that its particles are amorphous; another cool thing is that they spin. As they spin, they align with magnetic fields. Because they’re aligned, they polarize the light from the stars behind them, and the heat radiation they emit. So that by examining the polarization of that distant light and heat – by seeing with different eyes – amazing observatories like Planck and Arecibo and SOFIA can map the magnetic fields between the stars. (That main image got projected onto the dome of the Morrison Planetarium. It was astounding. Collective intake of breath.)
Of course the Planck and SOFIA missions have ended, and Arecibo suffered catastrophic mechanical failure. “Everything I love…” said Professor Clark sorrowfully. All eyes turn to the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Space Telescope. There is so much more to learn! Very good science lectures are like being at a party listening to someone absolutely fascinating hold forth on their field of special interest; they’re like touching grass, except the grass is interstellar space. They’re delightful.
Everything went impossibly right. We spent months trying and failing to sort big kid’s passport and didn’t have it in hand until the very hour of our original flight, which we had to rebook at vast expense. Despite this I managed to overlap with dear friends in Paris and spend our first afternoon together at a cafe in the square. There was a fricken accordion player, it was ridiculous.
The fast trains to Narbonne were sold out so we rented a car in Paris instead, picked a village halfway there at random and ended up having one of the best meals of the trip in an absolutely gorgeous covered market in Souillac. We revisited the lovely abbeys at Fontfroide and Lagrasse and finally made it to Niaux Cave, which instantly joined Newgrange as one of my favorite places in the entire world.
Back in Paris we got Bastille Day free entry to the Louvre and I went to a concert in Sainte-Chapelle – Vivaldi and Pachelbel. Shivers up my spine. Then Jeremy and I rented bikes and accidentally crashed the victory rides around Paris with Team Rynkeby. Everything planned half-assedly and coming together at the last minute into delight. Amazing grace.
Even though this may sometimes seem quite hard to do, training yourself to enjoy only looking at things, instead of buying them, is very nice and also a good practice.
Posted in happiness, mindfulness|Comments Off on the gentle art of swedish death cleaning, by margareta magnussen
From Barcelona through Chris’s community in Vidalia and over the Pyrenees to Villerouge-la-Cremade, and back again. Cathar castles and Montserrat and the Med.
Even more beautiful: from San Francisco to Redding and up and over the Cascade Range and along the Rogue River Valley to Reed College in Portland. The State of Jefferson, the high desert where my wild horse Lenny was born.
Riding our bikes to the beach or GG Park used to be An Event, and now it’s just what we do on a sunny Saturday when we have no other plans. All the colorful houses looked brilliant and happy. We stopped at wushu to catch up with Philip and wholeheartedly recommend “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” The dunes were reclaiming Great Highway, and there was a huge party along car-free JFK, a place so joyful that it can make a middle-aged murderbot question her misanthropy.
The Presidio has a new park, Battery Bluffs. We found and explored it, then turned towards home via Crissy Field and Marina Green. There was a Ukraine protest at the Ferry Building, and games at both the ballpark and the stadium. At Crane Cove we lay on the grass by the water, my with my head on Jeremy’s lap. I read a fantastic fic about the gay pirates, got a little sunburned. This city, you guys, my God, it’s so fucking good.
The rains started again in earnest yesterday. We had some good rain in November and my garden is brilliant with sprouts, both the sown and desired native wildflowers and my doughty adversaries, Bermuda buttercups, catchgrass bedstraw, white-ramping fumitory and pellitory-of-the-wall. A second soaking will set us up for a beautiful, if weedy, meadow in the spring.
After living for almost twenty years in uninsulated San Francisco Victorians, it feels like a miracle to sit in our warm house watching the raindrops run down the windows. The cats complain about missing their supervised outdoor time but I am curled up with my laptop under a wool blanket my kid crocheted, next to our fragrant Douglas fir Christmas tree. It’s a good week at work, two programs happily completed, a new one in its most exciting nascent phase, my team fresh off meeting in person, energized and seamless.
(As I was thinking about this post and its title, I pulled up Bosch’s altarpiece of the same name and looked at it on my large high res monitor. Did you know that it is a motherfucking masterpiece? I shared this insight with my pocket coven, most of whom, unsurprisingly, were already fans.)
Between coaching sessions with engineers, I sneak outside to pull white-ramping fumitory and Bermuda buttercups out of my garden. It’s the same meditative headspace as doing a jigsaw puzzle, with added sunshine and birdsong. I actually like and respect the buttercups and especially the fumitory, with its feathery leaves and pink-tipped white flowers. But I like the hummingbirds and native bees and the sprouting meadow wildflowers that support them even more.
The first time I remember wanting a garden was reading Kate Llewellyn’s The Waterlily, years ago. While “some outdoor space” was high on our list in hunting for this house, a large, level, undeveloped yard seemed so unlikely it didn’t even occur to me to want it. (Large by SF standards: 25 by 45 feet. A fortieth of an acre.)
The me who didn’t garden seems a stranger to me now.
I’m out here every chance I get. My fingernails are black with loam and clay. I meant to restore a postage stamp sized patch of Ramaytush land. Who’d have thought that the land meant to restore me.
My garden has been a gift all quarantine. My whole life I’ve hardly enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed Bic, Emma and Precious, the City Grazing goats who took down the worst of the weeds. After Marco and his team pulled out the raised beds I didn’t want and built a retaining wall and stairs, I started planting, and I haven’t stopped. There’s still one big raised bed at the back for a kitchen garden. So far I have nasturtiums, white sage, rosemary and wood strawberries, plus a young Eureka lemon to complement the neighbor’s Meyer lemon that leans over our fence. The rosemary, lemon and a potted jasmine are the only non-natives I bought.
Everything else is hyperlocal, from Bay Natives, Mission Blue or Yerba Buena nurseries, Annie’s Annuals or Larner Seeds. Ceanothus, ribes, coffeeberry, coast live oak – the keystone species. Bay laurel – much more delicious than dried bay leaves, we put it in all our soups and stews. An arroyo willow. Native grapes, Dutchman’s pipevine for the swallowtails, silver lupine for the Mission Blue butterflies, narrow-leaved milkweed for the monarchs. Hummingbird sage, blue eyed grass, variegated yarrow, coast buckwheat. A bog with sword fern and chain fern and douglas iris. A pond with seep monkeyflower and rushes, which is doing extremely well and which I hope will attract frogs. Yerba buena trailing down the retaining wall. Two elegant Dr Hurd manzanitas that, goddess willing, will grow into sinuous, sculptural rainbow beauties.
It doesn’t look like much yet. I am in constant battle with the Bermuda oxalis, wild radish and those bastard arum lilies. Everything else is barely knee high. But every chance I get I loll out here in a comfy blue lounge chair, listening to contentious crow parliaments in the neighbor’s lillipilli, watching hummingbird aerobatics, loving the sweet descending melody of gold-crowned sparrows. There are fat red-tailed hawks who coast from the hill to the canyon, often with an escort of angry crows. I leave almond offerings on the deck railings for the members of this murder, whom I dearly love. I planted a bog. I am a real bog witch now.
I’ve been riding at the new barn for a year and change now. It’s a serious barn, although not serious about showing in the jumpers (like Glenoaks and McIntosh) or in the Welsh breed shows (like Heather Hill). Not even super serious about dressage shows, although it does that. Serious about correctness, starting with correct position and then continuing through tempo and line to rhythm and bend. An intense, meditative practice, conducted in partnership with large livestock animals.
Russell, who is Heather Hill Rhodri, drew me to this barn in the first place, being literally the dream horse I described to my former trainer Laura: “Rhun, but younger.” Rhun is Laura’s horse, and Russell is his nephew. Laura bred them both.
Russell is exactly what I was looking for. I call him Black Beauty. He has a small, refined head with a big unmistakable fan-shaped star. He likes you to rub his velvet nose and cheek-ridges and fuzzy ears. It’s as tender as petting a purring cat. He’s gentle and obliging and talented and experienced, and he has taught me a lot about how it’s supposed to feel, what it’s like when you get it right, how you know.
Lenny is the horse I didn’t know I was looking for. He is a mouthy, bratty sorrel mustang with a tentacle-shaped white snip licking up the end of his Roman nose. He looks like a little Belgian draft horse, like Ice Age megafauna painted in ochre on the wall of a neolithic cave. I call him, and this is even more embarrassing than Black Beauty if you can believe it, I call him Bright Angel because the expression on his face when he sees me and knows I have sugar in my pockets is like a messenger of God’s grace. I have often been infatuated with ponies but Lenny represents a severe and ongoing case.
I rode Lenny for months when most other people weren’t very interested in him, but as he got stronger and rounder he has started to be a sought-after ride. Of course now other people can ride him better than I do, and we had a few weeks where I was frustrated about this and we lost our groove. But yesterday I somehow got over myself and found my balance again. Maybe it was watching the Spanish Riding School show and remembering to sit like a pair of wings folded into his back.
Whatever it was, he found the round soft trot of his that’s like a Zen monk deep in prayer, and I’m still thinking about it a day later. Holding the reins like I am holding hands with a little kid, dancing like we’re Nureyev. People call it round or collected or on the bit but the best word for how it feels is contact, like a burst of radio waves from a beautiful, friendly alien. The wow signal.
In February I moved to a new barn; in March we moved house and I started a new job. Also in March, of course, the shelter-in-place order came down, and we have been isolating ever since.
All at once, the house was a space station. I don protective gear for away missions, and decontaminate in a scalding shower when I get home. Everyone else stays home and communicates only over network links.
Don’t know when we’ll hug our friends again. Don’t know when we’ll see the rest of our family. But the house is glad to have us here, and I am glad we have each other.
…is how long we lived in the apartment on Eugenia Avenue. On Monday we moved again, into a house half a mile up the road. The neighborhood is called College Hill. No one has ever heard of it. I say it’s still part of Bernal Heights, but the kids insist it’s Glen Park.
It’s two years since we bought this place. It was a very sweet Queen Anne with just a little deferred maintenance (termites, wood-boring beetles, asbestos, a mummified cat in the walls), waiting for a naive tech couple to come along and pour their life savings into it. There are a lotta construction photos, if that’s your jam. Our architect and general contractor are both local, women-owned businesses, and they did such a good job, I can’t even tell you, you would fall off your horse. My Fireclay tiles, let me show you them.
Tonight’s our second night here. I’m hoping to make friends with the crows, but they were distracted today with yelling at a redtail hawk. There’s a toyon full of hummingbirds. Our neighbor Lucinda brought around a basket of Meyer lemons from her tree with a note that said: “Welcome home.”
