We have the contractors back in to rip out the Mamie Eisenhower pink bathroom (I know, what barbarians, but it was leaking) and replace it with Fireclay tile and a shower under the skylight. Opening the walls revealed, as expected, eldritch horrors, most notably that the upper staircase was supported by an angled 2×6 resting on its narrowest edge.

I’m no expert but that ain’t right. While the house undergoes what’s essentially a heart transplant, the main level is a carnival maze of plastic walls with zippered doors. We’re still working from home, camping in the kitchen, on the deck and in the garden.

Luckily it’s spring and the garden is a little ridiculous, unphotographable. The box elders and grapevine are back with a vengeance, velvet green leaves casting dappled shade. The sticky monkey flower, purple and hummingbird sages are in full bloom and the meadow is a riot of poppy, tidy tips, Chinese houses, flax, globe gilia, bird’s eye gilia, the last of the five spot and baby blue eyes, Douglas iris and mountain garland. Fluffy black bees as big as your thumb buzz from poppy to poppy with panniers full of emergency-orange pollen. It’s gaudy, excessive.

Because we’re further up the hill than the Mission, closer to the edge of the fog-tide, it’s often windy back here, and I’m aware of the atmosphere as a restless, oceanic thing, always in motion. The bathroom will be tiled in celadon and silver-blue, with a terracotta sink. Earth, meadow and air. Opening the walls of my own heart reveals, as expected, eldritch horrors, but what a privilege it is to rebuild this lovely old home, make it sound and safe for the next fifty years.

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.

We knew coming in here that the tall green stand of top-heavy, shallow-rooted blackwood acacia trees would have to come down, and that we would be lucky if they didn’t come down on the house. We lost them to this winter’s unending chain of atmospheric rivers. Even expected, their loss is incalculable. They were invasive, but the hummingbirds and woodpeckers and grey squirrels loved them, and so did I.

Without their shade and shelter, my little garden feels much more exposed. The patterns of daily sunlight have changed and the fog wind whips across the deck. I got two lovely Japanese maples from Flowercraft and put one on the deck and one in the shady alley above the stairs. I worried for the one in the shade, but the deck tree blew over half a dozen times and is dry and shocky. I have put it with its friend in what is now the maple courtyard, the shaded tree still green and thriving.

After considering buckeye – toxic to cats – and bay laurel – a carrier of sudden oak death – I noticed a tree at the barn, on the bank of the creek, with maple leaves and a weeping habit. Box elder. Paul at Bay Natives had two of them in fifteen gallon pots, over six feet tall. He’s had them for years and was delighted they finally found a home. They barely fit in the Prius, which is still full of their leaves. Aisea planted them yesterday and this morning I drank my bowl of latte in their dappled shade. No single thing abides, but all things flow.

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.

Happiness is not a solvable equation.

The club leader says “she is just a little bit ugly, which makes her cute.” Which is… not inaccurate.

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.

I have been blogging for twenty years. How about that.

“Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child’s is the kingdom.” As Heraclitus wrote twenty-five hundred years ago. In many ways this is a terrible thought. The most terrible of all. A child playing a game . . . with all life, everywhere.

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.

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.

If I spent years clawing toward sunlight from the bottom of a dry well, that summer I looked over the edge for the first time and saw my sister.

It was Dad’s birthday on Saturday so I drove over to see him and Mum.

There is beauty even in lost things. Lucky for me!

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.

Last Thursday, Jeremy asked what it would take for us to decide to cancel or postpone our planned trip to Australia. On Monday, we rescheduled our flights. Yesterday, the public schools and our kids’ school all closed. In grocery stores, people are calm and brave, Londoners during the blitz. Online, we take turns being scared and comforting one another.

I’m sitting on my back deck drinking coffee with Jeremy. The gardens are full of birdsong. Hummingbirds are having fierce air battles over the shrubbery. And now I know why the pair of crows I’ve been trying to befriend have been so preoccupied. They’re building a nest.

A lazy morning in bed with cups of tea and books and Alice cat, followed by Rebels Within and lattes at Craftsman & Wolves. (Two dogs came in: “Wolves! Truth in advertising.”)

To the house, where Jeremy expressed glee over the extremely solarpunk radiant floor and hot water heating system, while I sat on the stairs daydreaming, only for our starchitect Bonnie to show up unexpectedly for a look around. We all agreed that it is turning out to be a very cute house indeed.

To the barn, for a lazy amble on Bentley. Freya my war mare has a new family, and family photos were being taken in the golden hour. Freya, fat and happy, was striking warlike poses. “This is my person. This is my dog.” God bless the war mares and starchitects and wolves and craftsmen and rebels, every one.

We spent the weekend in Point Reyes, which is so beautiful it almost defies photography. The California Field Atlas describes it as an authentic Pleistocene-era prairie by the sea. Philip K. Dick was also moved by:

this wild moor-like plateau that dropped off at the ocean’s edge, one of the most desolate parts of the United States, with weather unlike that of any other part of California.

The giant camels and mastodon that roamed here in the Ice Age are gone, but if you look closely, there’s a herd of not-quite-extinct tule elk grazing out on this headland.

Jeremy was enchanted by the Marconi RCA wireless station, the first and last of its kind. Now that we are home, he’s in his office playing with software-defined radios and emitting atmospheric bursts and Morse code. For my part, I loved the dairy ranches, and imagined myself quitting tech to become a simple farmer, a man of the people, at one with the land.

Of course I am not the first to indulge this fantasy. It forms the substance of Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist, Daniel Gumbiner’s The Boatbuilder, and even Summer Brennan’s The Oyster War. All three are at pains to point out that no matter how lovely the place is, it can’t help you escape who you are.

West Marin has dangled before the white mind like a lure for almost five hundred years. In 1579, the pirate Francis Drake in his galleon full of stolen Spanish treasure christened it Nova Albion and claimed it for Queen Elizabeth I. The visitor center on Drakes Beach notes that people in South America used his name to frighten their children, so that’s nice.

The Coast Miwok survive and now form part of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. Still, anthropologist Betty Goerke calculates that between genocide, epidemic, and aggressive zoning laws designed to maintain high property values, there are fewer people living in Point Reyes today than there were in Drake’s time. It’s a pretend wilderness, like Yosemite and Kur-ring-gai. I’m indebted to its original custodians for how it heals my sore heart.

When I was pregnant I craved bitter greens, and this craving has never entirely left me. Last night I ate, with great focus, a plate of shaved brussels sprouts. Last week I told a colleague the story of how I broke my leg. I left part of it out; nevertheless, he said: “You sound bitter.” I am.

The evangelical church in which I spent my teens is highly critical of bitterness. So is society at large. I’m beginning to understand the ways in which this serves political ends. Bitterness is the perception of injustice. God knows we are treated unfairly, but God forbid we should be angry about it.

Burnout is cumulative, like concussion. After I was fired, I never wanted to work in the tech industry again. Now that I have returned (as if there were any other industry; as if academia, journalism, publishing, teaching weren’t equally soul-destructive) I can feel the limits of my capacity to endure, just as I feel the limited range of motion in my ankle. There are leaps of faith I could make in the past I won’t be able to make again, and not only because I am ageing. I have lost the faith that made such leaps possible.

In its place I have my bitterness: the astringency of medicinal herbs, that can heal, or poison. Knowledge that exists beyond the imagination of the church and society at large. Witchcraft.

Can a place be too pretty?

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