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It is after 8:00. My dogs and I just returned from a drive to one of my favorite places in the county. I know this place in the valley of the hills where the raking light of early evening turns a bend in the river iridescent blue. Tonight the breeze was both warm and strong. The kind of breeze that can blow away thoughts as easily as turning a leaf inside out.
Environmental education was a powerful theme in my childhood and present especially when picking blackberries with my grandmother. Geography, ecology, history, ethnobotany all in one lesson! My grandmother had one special hat that she wore only at berry picking time. It was a wide, broad straw hat with an ivory ribbon that she tied in a limp bow under her chin. Even though it was July, her ensemble included a long-sleeve flannel shirt and long pants which she tucked into her socks. The first time we went picking together I wore cut-offs and a tank top which she suggested I change into a get-up more like hers. I admired my grandmother very much and have always been proud to share the same middle name as her--but it was hot and flannel and long pants seemed burdensome in the summer of girlhood. Needless to say, I was covered the next day with a managiere of chigger bites on my person that would rival the tropics. The environmental education then came to include entomology! I thought of this memory today when I had the most scrumptious blackberry cobbler and paused to remember how lucky I am to have had a family that believed that the out of doors was a precious, valuable, and vital classroom.
This is one of my favorite poems. It feels like a mission statement to me...what I think of what it means to be famous, really.
http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/poem.html?id=177521
My thoughts are turning to a friend today in Haifa. The images on the news of rockets bombarding Haifa contrasts with my own visual of her lovely neighborhood. I keep thinking about the sourdough bread starter sitting on her marble kitchen counter --evidence of the daily custom of life so interupted. My friend is a bread maker like me and we share the discovery that we thought we kneaded the bread for the carbohydrates but what we really needed was the ceremony of baking bread. Oceans apart we scoop flour that slopes like the hills we see out our windows. For me, an elegant swag of green that follws the river like a garland. While for her, she rests her eyes against hills, dotted and redrawn with houses over millennia, that "whisper" she says.
Began my morning on a high hill, breathing crisp air, with fog lying in the valleys so that the hilltops rose from it disconnected like gentle blue islands scattered across a pale sea. I sat among the grasses, gently upon the ground, as though the earth were a thing requiring great tenderness. Then, walked roadless through the woods.
“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the mountain heights where joys can hear the sound of wings.”
I thought about the release "from the little things...."
I went with a friend today to visit the formal rose gardens in Richmond. I had been chomping at the bit to go and hoped to discover a new yellow rose variety that might be hospitable to my area. I found a lovely yellow rose named "Julia Child" --clear and brilliant yellow petals, which will find its way into planting into my rose graden without a doubt.
http://www.weeksroses.com/JuliaChild.php