Unknown Duration
The headline in the Independent warned that the 101 would be closed for an “unknown duration” as flash floods threatened parts of Santa Barbara County. Rain has been drumming on the walkways here and seeping into the thick green soggy grass, and even through a blur of cloud, I can see the white of a vibrant waterfall in the mountains. All plans are on hold, and I want to lay low and stay cozy, but I’m also sick and angry about what we’re hearing in the news. (Please, let us stay fiercely determined in our resistance.)
Sometimes letters from friends are what keep me going, and I received a beautiful message from my dear friend Jeanne, a magnificent role model always. Jeanne and I used to walk the canyon together during the years when we were next door neighbors at the Ranch, sharing a journey that binds us always. As her first definitive action for 2026, she was planting two apple trees, old kinds that you can’t get anymore, “like us.”
“Next to chickens,’ she writes, “trees stand as hope in my heart.”
She planned to rip out excess vines and weeds by the roots, just as we will rip the losers out of office this year.
In a new world I do not recognize, that runs on bitcoins and fraud, masked men with armor, and crimes against humanity, I will be that old lady with a bag of seeds, dropping them into the Earth to make a future I DO recognize.
Thank you, Jeanne. I—and many others—will be with you. (I will never understand or forgive the complicity that has given such vast power to a lunatic criminal and his cohorts.)
Still inspired by my friend’s message the next day, I stepped out into the mist and rain and walked into town. (Yes, I can do that now.) The hills were greenly gleaming, and I happened to be listening to Barricades of Heaven, one of my favorite Jackson Browne songs—“all the world was shining from those hills”—and remembering what it felt like to be young, when “straight into the night our hearts were flung”.
I am carrying my own redemption, old and grateful as I am.
A week after my brother’s brief visit, the house still seems newly emptied of him, and a muffled kind of missing that I’d gotten used to over the years has been revived and exacerbated. What was simply the ordinary state of things is now another incompleteness. I guess it’s just my fate to be far away from many of the people I love most. But as Oralee once told me, near the end of her life and feeling quite alone: “Just be happy they are alive and well, somewhere in the world.” Wise words, among the many gifts she left to me via old-fashioned handwritten letters.
The rain came down hard as I walked. I climbed up the stairs to the local Thai restaurant, bought myself a container of soup, and carried it across the street to the grounds of the Mission. I sat on a bench next to a statue of a gentle, teacherly Jesus, sipping the hot soup in the rain.
It cleared a bit and misted, and the air was a veil of diamonds, and I was remembering my mother, who died on this day exactly eleven years earlier. In particular, I recalled her remarkable receptiveness to wonder. Even in the bleakest of times, she had a touching capacity for delight, enjoying an ice cream cone while I drove her around the neighborhood, pointing out a cat curled up in the sunlight on someone’s front steps, a shiny car in candy-apple red, a plump white cloud in the sky. She was like a tour guide to the tiny joys I might have overlooked. Suddenly I missed my mother terribly, but at the same time, I deeply felt her presence.
And later came the rainbows, a radiant array of rainbows.