Surprise Guests

Two yellow flowers

on a new tomato plant

bloom against cold glass. 

We didn't expect that one of our indoor tomatoes -- left for dead when winter blasted into the Valley -- would give birth to a new plant, much less that two fragile blossoms would develop on its branches. Who am I to say whether it's too early for fresh tomatoes? Stranger things have happened in our sunroom garden, like green-and-orange bell pepper mutations and red Roma tomatoes dangling from the vines long after summer. This plant is an offshoot of one of our orange tomatoes. These plants produce bright fruit in Day-glo colors, sweet as candy. 

Winter Voices

Sounds engulf the house:

wind, coyotes, and ghost voices

broadcasting warnings. 

New Year with Ghosts

Each post emerges

like a separate gray soul

on the snowy road. 

On the last day of 2012, I went for a long run. A light snow fell. Milky banks of fog shifted across the landscape. Along the sides of the rutted roads, old fenceposts and signposts materialized one by one, like memories stepping forward from my subconscious. Beyond the border of the road, the horizon was a cloudy sea, marked by underwater dunes and mesas. In the distance, the Dome reminded me of the volcanic rock that rises out of Morro Bay in Northern California, where I spent so much of my life. 

I often miss the Pacific Ocean. But has it ever left me? Have any of the faces, seas or skylines I knew in the past really left me? I thought once again of how this ancient lakebed acts like a canvas for the imagination, how its shapes and sounds evoke remembered beauty or pain at every shift of the seasons, at every turn of the light. 

According to a Chinese superstition, ghosts of the past shouldn't be mentioned on New Year's Day. We should look forward to the future, focusing our thoughts on the coming months. But I don't fear these ghosts, or regret them anymore. I live with them comfortably now -- much more comfortably than I did when I was younger. I greet them like old companions on the road, like the old wooden corral posts that I've come to know so well. 

Snow Brooms

Like brooms against snow

shadows of the rabbitbrush

sweep a restless mind. 

Snow fell again on Saturday night. Its planes and hollows are laced with tracks -- birds, coyotes, rabbits, dogs, humans -- like frenetic thoughts crisscrossing the mind. The rabbitbrush blossoms turn dark bronze in the winter, their fine branches spreading like broom straws agains the snow. The sagebrush have turned powdery silver against white. 

Yesterday morning I was lighting the propane stove, when I remembered that we've always had the tank refilled in December. I checked the tank level, and it's down to zero. Why can't I remember this? Meanwhile, we have just ordered a truckload of aspen logs to heat the house for the rest of the winter. We use propane for the stove and for the hot water heater, but those two appliances are responsible for hot showers and coffee -- two of my only remaining addictions. Filling the tank and loading up on firewood can get expensive, but it's still cheaper than heating Eric's turn-of-the-century house in Denver. 

My thoughts are as scattered as the snowtracks. I come home late from the nursing home, and my brain is still numb from the alarms and call lights. I fall into bed and dream of charting I forgot to do. In the morning I have to ask Eric to repeat things that he told me the night before. I worry about forgetting something important. I worry that I've inadvertently harmed someone.

The blue snow shadows calm my mind a little. 

Winter Maze

Walking in a maze

of prickly pear at sunset,

I lose the dirt road. 

Hard Frost

After a hard frost

the last of the tomato vines

freeze into brown bones. 

The frost and snow were late this year. We didn't have our first snow until Sunday; for the first time this season, Blanca is truly white. Our tomato plants have withered to skeletons in the greenhouse. The plants in our sunroom are still eking out a few orange tomatoes, their sweetness concentrated by the cold. We eat the small, candy-like segments on our salads. Their flavor is a ghost of summer.  

This is the time of year when everything shrinks into itself, hardening against the cold. The dirt roads have turned into rutted ribbons. The rabbitbrush and tumbleweeds are stiff hands, raised plaintively against the North wind. 

Shadows Roll In

Up the green foothills

the South wind pushes the clouds

in a shadow tide. 

On a windy autumn afternoon, masses of clouds roll across the Valley, darkening the plains and flooding the roads with shadows. The shadow wave moves over the Blanca Massif; the clouds will hover over the peaks all night and leave a dusting of snow by morning. 

I watch the wave of darkness roll towards me as I jog down the road. I wait for the moment when the wave will overtake me the way I used to wait for the waves of the Pacific to fill my mouth and nostrils with salt and the taste of seaweed when I was a little girl. 

The months go by quickly. It's already November. The little pile of firewood that was left from last winter is already dwindling; we've started lighting up the wood stove at night. The clouds roll fast. The shadows come in. I walk and jog and stretch to keep my body as straight and supple as I can, but at times I already feel the pull of the earth below my feet.