Blog-azic

Dinner Friday night. Going to the coast feels transformative. In the first place, I watch the landscape transform. Mixed hardwoods give way to dominant pine and low scrubby oak. Clay yields to sand. Urbane wealth fades away and you're left with rural mystery. “What do these people do,” Susan asked watching the cinder block houses with rusty metal roofs fly by somewhere between Wallace and Maple Hill. We drove deep into the backwood sand flats, flying around a twisted rural highway. There's also something that changes in me as I relax my go-go-go (not go-go) personality. So, I drove soaking in the the beautiful symmetry between spring and fall. The trees are red and orange in both seasons, though spring is more subdued, a bit hazy. Jessimine was in bloom, gold and green, growing up and over the cedar and pine at forest edges. Susan pulled out a small Casio keyboard and gave me a private chamber recital: Circle of Life, Kumbayah, Down in the Valley, etc., etc., just the cl...

When the rain comes, water pools on the yard and sits for days and seeps into the clay. Heavy, hammer-handed, wet slop; thunder, rumbling, unyielding clay. From indignant and rock hard to asphyxiating and slick with nothing between but dread at my next battle with it. But, then again, I am committed to it, bound to it somehow, and determined to tame it. Such was the scene Friday in front of my house, at a low spot where the rain collects. I had my head down in an iris patch, digging in soppy clay, remarking at the purple iridescence of the flowers and the yellow sparkle of pine pollen, like light from the stars against a summer dusk that I saw once long ago in Athens, laying on my back at the Ridges, alone, waiting for darkness to fall complete so I might walk the forest at night and confront - what else - fear! A grape scent wafted up, brought me back to the present, and I saw Susan smiling, watching me from the porch. “We’ve been invited to dinner,” said she. “Get out of those ove...