As I Sat Out One Morning...

Flowers and peaches and time to see them...

photographs or word pictures? Both seem to help embrace the quiet times.

One August in early morning I sat and wrote:

I'm sitting in an old arm chair that has broad flat arms where I can prop my notebook. Currently this chair resides outside the cottage door on a stone patio under an eave. If I look straight ahead the stones patio disappears one step at a time into the forest of redwoods, cypress and pine. Just a slight turn of the head and the blue horizon greets me. The very top of the round green house roof and the tips of wild California lilacs, a lone lanky Monterey pine, more limb than needle, all interpose themselves before the blue. And in the waters, the rocks rise up, give me perspective on the tides. The sky is mottled lights, ethers lit with soft hues of morning pink and purple grays. The air is soft and breeze sweet with warmth of yesterday's inland heat.

Behind me, behind the cottage, behind the stone walls and another ring of trees, cars wind north and south on the road. Where do we all go? What do people do all day? 1

This chair in which I sit has had many incarnations. For many years it sat on our covered porch in Sebastopol and was home to Katrina the cat. Prior to its release to outdoors, it lived for a time in my office where I sat and listened to the dynamic lives of my clients. Before that the the old chair had been matched up with its couch and inside the house high on the hill above Blank Road, in a cavernous room with a window that looked down across a field past towering trees to Mount St. Helena where my children were young and happy.

Suddenly the wind has shifted and the garden has filled with smoke. Mark's phone rings and rouses him from slumber. It's a robot call checking on the quality of yesterday's car service. Up now, he goes out to to the drive to retrieve the newspaper. The front page says there is fire east of us, Pinnacle's National Monument near Soledad is threatened and that power is cut for 100's of homes and people are evacuated. The firefighters are already stretched from a fire further south. The cause of the fire is thought to be agricultural fireworks, modern scare crows.

The quiet early morning air of light and fragrance is past. The winds have shifted, smoke has arrived and now encompasses us.

~~~~~

1. What Do People do all Day? ( Richard Scarey children's book.) and for my title, a curtsy to Bob Dylan for his similar song lyric...As I went out one morning...