The Burrow

The moths cover the glass on our front door, attracted by the light in the foyer inside. The little yellow moths/butterflies travel in pairs.  I thought they were playing.  Scarlet opined that they were mating.  Whichever it is, they are rarely found alone. Monarchs are few and far between, but they are here.  Other, somewhat smaller and less colorful butterflies are also making an appearance.   The no-see-ums, tiny red crawling up your leg things, must have been flying this afternoon.  I found one half way up my leg. The tiny black pin head sized beasties were swarming around my sweaty head as I watered the trees this afternoon.  They drove me inside.  I'm not cooking on the bbq tonight unless the wind picks up and blows them away. There are butterflies drowned in our pool, floating amidst the leaves. There are 6" dragonflies but, surprisingly, no yellow jackets at all.  Every summer but this one we've had them as visitors when we swam....

(sorry about the earworm) I've been trying to deal with this corner of the back yard for 16 years.  Last week I bought the biggest Meyer Lemon tree in the nursery , having neither the patience nor the time left on the planet to nurture a 5 gallon starter to fill the space.  This is what they delivered today: . Once again , power tools were involved in the creation of the hole. The bottom of the box was shoveled off, then the dusty roots were brushed away. They muscled the box over to and into the hole. We (I advising, they doing the work) turned it so that the fullest part faced into the yard.   They filled the hole, established the irrigation, and used the extra soil to cover an exposed fiber optic cable on the outside of the pony wall.   I went out to water it a second time (apparently you cannot over-water a citrus tree) late this afternoon,  and this is how it looked.   As I said - lemon tre...

This card appeared as an attachment to an email from Old Friends (junior high and beyond).  He found it and she shared it.....  from 1964.....which feels like yesterday.   I remember what I wore - a navy A-line linen dress with a short white same fabric cape with blue piping and navy, fabric covered buttons.  I remember the size 4.5 AA shoes with the tiny heel that G'ma and I went into The City to buy.... because all the other Long Island girls apparently had larger feet than I did.  I remember doing The Twist.  I remember that I was the first girl he asked to dance. He took someone else to Prom.  He married someone else. We were all friends.  It seemed that everywhere you turned, someone was crushing on him, big time.  It's one of the cornerstones of my higher education in Oceanside.  I haven't had this much fun thinking about my youth in a long time. ***** I'm going through old photos, throwing out negatives and duplicates, sendin...

(Well, she's new to me, anyway)  Following along in my unplanned journey into Stories of Exile, I've found Ibi Zoboi.  She is a clear voice, a no bullshit, cut to the heart, I can't read another word but I cannot put this down kind of writer - and her voice is unlike any other I've read. She brought me to Haiti and Detroit and inside juvenile detention and I'm still wondering what happened to those I met along the way.  They were very real.   On the first page of  American Street , ICE separates a teenage Haitian girl - with American citizenship - from her mother - whose paperwork is not exactly in order - as they step off the airplane into New York, and, as Manman promises, la belle vie .  Fabiola's struggle to free her is just one of the threads Zoboi has running through her story.  There are three cousins and an aunt.  There are good boys and bad boys - because these are high school kids so of course there are both kinds of boys.... s...

The 20-something engineer/entrepreneur and new homeowner to his mother: I never knew how clean your house was until I had one of my own. ***** Have a lovely weekend, denizens.  

I don't know, Mama, I think it's clay. That was Little Cuter's thought on the traditional gift to celebrate 9 years of marital bliss.  TBG and I sent them clip on shoes for their Peleton .... last month.... when she showed us the hole she'd worn in her sneakers on the bike.... when TBG began his you need the proper equipment  rant....when I thought that cycling shoes were exactly what they needed for their anniversary. It's a good thing I thought of it then; the 22nd crept up on me without warning.   There's a new video gaming console and there's chocolate and there is lots and lots of love as the four of them party the night away.  Maybe not their usual celebration, but they looked pretty happy on FaceTime this afternoon. Nine years ago right now we were gathering for a sunset wedding.  The temperatures were cool enough, the breeze was warm enough, the fairy lights and the smiling faces were equally alight.  It was one of the best nights of my life. T...

When the big tree fell, we were more than sad.  Our house looked open and vulnerable, unprotected on one side, a gaping hole where once there had been lush greenery. We lived with it for a few months while I decided on a replacement. A Native tree was the obvious first filter.  A tree from the nursery  rather than a box store was the second decision.  Though the price differential was substantial, the quality and guarantee sealed the deal on where to shop.  The owner and her helper and I discussed varieties and availability and growth pattern and water needs.  I talked about my sweet acacia, the volunteer set among my rose bushes and therefore watered more frequently than any desert tree has a right to expect.  It's 25' tall and gorgeous.  We've got a 12 footer right here  was all I needed to hear. No, I didn't want to take it home (it's huge) myself.  Yes, I wanted them to deliver and plant it.   There's a stake along the main...

Friends of long standing?  Friends I've known forever?  Old Friends just feels right. Besides, we are old now. I met the Golden Gopher and his long, blond ponytail on my first day of social work school.  We were 5 people in blue jeans and flannel shirts, surrounded by Huckapoo shirts and slim skirts.   In the early 1970's, clothes were defining and we definitely stood out.  I searched for my people, and found them in the back row, smiling as I approached.  We've been friends ever since. Weddings and surgeries and moving and all of life's adventures have passed through, leaving their marks.  When he and Mrs. Gopher came for my birthday, just weeks after I was perforated, we spent the night laughing and crying and remembering and being grateful.  There are some people who are permanent fixtures - these are two of  them. They are the reason we're living in Tucson.  We live in Phoenix but we love Tucson they told us and here we are....

Confusing was the calmest adjective... or is it an adverb.... in the lead up to getting a supplemental COVID vaccine.  There was no guidance that was relevant fifteen minutes after it was issued. That's as much as I wrote before I fell asleep on the couch.  It was deep sleep, for a while, until I moved and my arm announced its presence with authority.   That was the beginning of my impetuous decision to get an additional dose of the Moderna vaccine.  A friend told me that Walgreens had lots of them, the online registration process was easy once I assembled my paperwork, and there was an appointment available at the pharmacy down the block in 15 minutes. An hour later I was jabbed and back on the couch.  I had to say that I was immunocompromised, but since my doctor told me to get the shot, and my immune system is old and therefore compromised, I only hesitated for a moment.  I don't like lying.  I don't like getting sick and dying even more. ...

Nicki Minaj has almost 23 million Twitter followers. She tweeted that her cousin's friend... or maybe her friend's cousin.... got the Covid vaccine and a swollen testicle - and the first gave rise to the second.  .  Despite all medical evidence to the contrary, Nicki Minaj tweeted the connection between manhood and the vaccine to 23 million followers, all over the globe.  This is not your aged aunt on her back porch sharing gossip with a neighbor.  23 million is a lot.   The media didn't help the situation by sharing the story - laughing at it but advancing it at the same time.  Then Joe Biden stepped in. He offered to educate her, to facilitate her meeting with scientists who would address her concerns, to get her questions answered, to do what he could to make her see the light. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to inhabit Joe Biden's skin these days.  Have at it  was the most recent gentle explosion from within.  I'm having f...

We really like Nicolle Wallace.  We like her voice, we like her mind, we like her mom-itude and her admission of responsibility and doing penance for Sarah Palin.  She kept us company all thru Pandemica 1.0, giving us something to do while we waited for our daily mid-afternoon call with the grandkids at their dinnertime.   After a few months, we began to notice her clothes - specifically, the orange and brown blouse which complements her hair and her cheekbones.   Then we began to fixate on her hair.  Working from home hair, going into the studio hair, having a long day hair, just curled hair - we were all over it.  We weren't judging, we were noticing.  Some we liked more than others, but underneath it all was her refreshingly candid commentary and her insistence on making her point, so her outside was less important than her inside. All of that is to say that we are not entirely weird when we spend much longer than you'd think we would anal...

I never paid attention to this event before.    But I go nowhere and see no one and now any splash of color (that's not sports) catches my eye.  Especially when my first view is of Amanda Gorman Us Weekly There were a lot of crystals.  There were lots of nearly naked women and if there were any nearly naked men I couldn't find a picture to share.  I'm not sure how this is okay. I know nothing about the event itself.  I have no interest in knowing any more.  It's enough that I spent some delightful minutes watching videos of people I didn't know smiling/grimacing/turning this way and that on the red carpet.  I browsed  Vogue's coverage  for a while, realizing that I knew very few of the celebrities.... and that I didn't care. It was pretty and superficial and I didn't care about that, either.  I was amused in a novel fashion for a while and that, in Pandemica 2.0, is, apparently, enough. (Have I mentioned that being a considerate mem...

We've always thought about life in stages - infancy, childhood, adulthood, old age.   We met on the cusp of Adulthood, in the old age of Childhood, and passed into the infancy of Adulthood together.  We moved through adulthood's middle two stages without major traumas (ok, maybe except for getting shot) to ourselves or those we love.  We were remarkably healthy and active and involved. Lately, it's become obvious that we've moved into the infancy of Old Age.   Everything hurts. This morning our hands hurt...... all four of them. A dull ache, no desire to clench a fist or touch fingers to thumb - is this some rare contagious syndrome?  We lay in bed, our hands in front of our faces, turning them palm to back and around again, marveling at the addition of another body part to our list of aches and pains. I'm not talking about my hip and its assorted sensations.  They are in a separate class.  It's my eyes, which get really tired as the night go...

Pandemica - I can't travel, I can't hug my friends, I can't eat. What?  I feel you furrowing your brows.  The connection is not obvious, but it's there. Taos Bubbe and I had plans to eat pizza and salad at Sauce ..... until she arrived early and discovered that they had no outdoor seating.  Luckily, the plaza also houses a  Prep and Pastry , which had several umbrella shaded tables just waiting for us....... after a 15 minute wait while they dithered about, neither clearing the dirty plates nor wiping the table nor seating us. We were shaded.  There was no breeze. It was over 100 degrees. And there were flies. Lots of little annoying beasties, landing on my bare shoulders and bare legs and hovering over and occasionally alighting on my avocado toast.   Taos Bubbe was hot.  I was dripping sweat.  I had absolutely no appetite; there was enough on my plate that the server offered me a to-go box. We met up a few days later at the Sauce near me....

Scarlet's never had her own garden before; she's alert to every nibble and discoloration in her small but passionately tended space.  She has a gardener she trusts, but he has his own ideas about what to cut and how to cut it.  She uses me as a sounding board - am I right to insist on this? Late Summer in the desert has brought the moths.  More moths than anyone ever remembers seeing.  Not butterflies, with colorful wings and delicate markings.  These are swarms of brown winged insects, clustering around your face and arms, swirling about in my courtyard as I type to you.  Twenty or thirty of them are touring my front yard right now, some dipping down to investigate 2 feet off the ground, others circling the rosemary, looking for I don't know what. There are some tiny yellow ones who have paired up this morning, dancing between the crepe myrtle bush and the river rocks.  Google tells me that moths are drab colored  and encourages me to look at the...

and our birthday and anniversary twin....  died too soon. He was a big guy, in all ways.  Large in stature.  The world's biggest smile.  A hug that deserves a special spot in the Hugging Hall of Fame. Non-judgmental but snarky, always ready with a bon mot or a snarky quip or a really bad joke, he was a fixture at soccer games and basketball games and school plays.  There are fathers who love their daughters, and there are fathers who coach basketball for their daughters, but they all take second place to Mr. A, whose world revolved around the two women in his life. They were the tightest three-some in Tiburon. To say that he was a proud grandfather would be understating the case.  That tiny baby in his grandpa's big arms, smiled upon with all the love in the world, I'm so glad they were in each other's lives..... even for just a moment. I cannot get my head around the fact that he is no longer on this earth.   Rest in peace, Mr. A. Your memory is ...

You are your best audience  he said to me, with a big smile. I should hope so  came out of my mouth before my brain engaged. We kept swimming, and I kept thinking.  By the end of the next lap, I was ready. If I didn't find myself amusing, if I didn't like what I thought, how awful would that  be? And we stopped for a while and thought of the people who were always so negative, who never had positive energy, let alone positive thoughts to share. I'm really glad that I like what I say, and how I say it. FlapJilly spends time alone, with makeup and fancy clothes and jewelry and hair accessories.  By the time she comes down to share the beauty, she's already had her own personal, private adventure. She's her own best audience, too. Talking to Little Cuter while the kids ate dinner tonight, Giblet was laughing and wiggling and having a grand old time.  No one was paying much attention.  He was happy as a clam. Talk about being your own best audience.

But aren't they all?   I had this thought while swimming laps this afternoon.  Communal societies, like that depicted in The Island of the Sea Women by Linda See, share and share alike..... until someone breaks a norm and then all hell breaks loose.   Suddenly there are factions. I'm thinking about the Tudors, a dynasty built on bastards and blood, in which the peasantry was called upon to do the dirty work. Did a cobbler in Cornwall really care who sat on the throne?  Does a woman in a remote Afghan province care which repressive autocrat  holds the Presidency?   I don't think so. People, real people like you and me, want the government to stay out of our way and to keep us safe.  Beyond that, things get a little messy - how far out of my way and how safe and who (like, if a fetus is a person at 6 weeks is that when child support begins?).  The intricacies get in the way, more often than not, and it would be nice to think that the ...

  Here's my Labor Day post, recycled and improved every year since 2012. ***** My  Zaydeh  was a paperhanger. So was his son, my uncle. They belonged to the Paperhanger's Union. When he retired, my Zaydeh got a lapel pin and a photograph of himself and the also-retiring Union Rep. The Union Rep got a pension and health insurance. No one knows if he got a copy of the photograph, too. It was that kind of complicated relationship to Labor, with a capital L, that dominated my growing up years. Daddooooo's father owned a business. G'ma's father was a worker. In the same way that her parents' accented speech and his parents' religious devotion were there, so was management/labor, bruising the edges of their relationship. On the one hand, I sat on my Zaydeh's shoulders as he bounced me around the living room, singing  Zum Gali Gali , a Zionist/Socialist work song.  When I needed a biography for a book report in second grade, his daughter, my mother, suggested E...

TBG and I are vaccinated.  Our doctors tell us to get the booster when Moderna is approved, to wear masks, and avoid eating inside. JannyLou and Fast Eddie are in the same situation.  We live next door to one another.  We haven't seen them in more than a month.   JannyLou and I went out to lunch - so long ago I can't remember where.  There was much catching up.  There was no hugging.  Today, when she called to apologize for being AWOL, I laughed and told her she was taking the words out of my mouth.   There's nothing to talk about, once we caught up with the kids' lives.  We aren't doing anything worth talking about. My weekly private sessions with the Pilates Diva are the only things on my calendar.  The only person who's been in our house lately was the window washer, and we stayed as far from one another (masked, of course) as we could. There's not the same sense of panic as there was when we were doing this a year ago....

Driving north after an away lacrosse game, my Audi full of high school seniors, Big Cuter and I were having one of our serious discussions.   I don't remember the topic, but I do remember his conclusion: My generation has never experienced an American loss.  You had assassinations and Vietnam.  We see only wins. Six months later, a freshman at Georgetown, he watched the smoke rise from the Pentagon on September 11.  The losses would start to pile up.  His life now had a before and after .  He was 18. The war in Afghanistan has persisted throughout his entire adulthood.  There was no draft.  Some in their generation raced to the battle - Pat Tillman wasn't drafted - but most just shared the generalized angst of a war being fought on our own shores. That faded soon enough. The war, as Wolf Blitzer mentioned today, was rarely the first or second story on the evening news.  It was hardly ever a  headline. His friend served in Iraq; we t...

Without outrage, politics is less interesting.   Without sunshine, I can only post photos of rain (and I did that yesterday). Without access to the Prince Scholars (who are now masked, but still unvaccinated) I have no stories or pictures to share. I've been reading authors I know and their stories are comfortably the same (and I have shared them already). Honestly, denizens, I'm out of ideas.   I'll try to do better tomorrow.