Bare Roots
Yesterday we planted four bare-root roses. I admit that Monte did most of the hard labor of clearing out the bed and digging the holes, but I was instrumental in choosing which roses we planted, reading instructions out loud, bringing tools and water, and helping to pile and pack mounds of warm earth around the roots of the strange and skeletal plants, which I can only hope will yield flowers as pretty and fragrant as their pictures promise.
The weather has been so sunny and startlingly beautiful that I fear some future punishment, especially while hearing about the wintry conditions folks are enduring in other parts of the country. (I remember living like that, and it will never cease to amaze me that I no longer do. But we’ll have our turn. Fires, flood, earthquake, drought…)
In the meantime, it’s a bit of paradise. The Channel Islands are etched as clearly as I have ever seen them, and at one point we could see all the way to Point Magu, where Monte recognized the distinctive shape of Old Boney, and beyond that, the faint outline of the Palos Verde Peninsula.
I went for a walk with my friend Kelley and we saw a snowy egret lighting on the water, and black cows with their new calves grazing, a single calf among them inexplicably beige, almost ivory.
Later I encountered a neighbor on the road who had been to a certain secret place beneath the oaks where chanterelles grow, but there were none. “Have you been there already and taken them all?” he asked, in a manner more joking than accusatory, but designed to make sure we’d feel guilty if we had.
We hadn’t. Honest.
“Maybe it’s just too soon,” I said.
No problem, really — we'll go again another time. It's hard to sustain disappointment on a day like this.
On Monday my daughter went to Africa. I’d like to think that in some funny, indirect way it means that I have also, but no, I’m pretty much right here.
On the other hand, a friend of mine wrote to tell me that I made an appearance in one of her dreams, which felt like quite an honor.
Everything was turning, she said, and she was afraid, but the dream version of me told her that it would be okay, that all she had to do was stay connected to her heart.
That’s exactly what the real me would have said.