Living on Air

Growing up my mom's diet consisted of meditation and grapefruit; I am accustomed to poverty. There is a grapefruit tree in Healdsburg, on the corner of Johnson, just north of the library. I go to the library on wednesdays as they are open until 20:00. I love libraries, all of them, especially the ones with books and periodicals. I saw the grapefruit tree much earlier in the season, september or october, and mistook it for an apple or pear. Upon closer inspection I find the yellow orbs of a citrus and that the tree us not pomaceous. Ignored, the tree and the fruit continued to hang and ripen, the branches grow heavy under their burden and hang close to the ground. Ten days ago at the grapefruit tree: It stands proud with dark glossy leaves in an empty lot. Liberating pounds of fruit into my grocery sack, I freed the tree of the burden of production without appreciation. There is an abundance of food here, growing and hanging and waiting to be eaten by strangers because most people are too nervous to eat the food that grows in their yard and would rather eat food that comes from a truck. I eat what I find and supplement my diet with the fresh eggs my neighbor gives me for keeping an eye on her goats. Though comfortable with basic survival, I wonder if it will always be this way. I remember back to my father and his liberty to do as he pleased, there is liberty in poverty, time becomes more important, the reality that time is all we really have. Time and love and the abstract idea that there is nothing outside of love and time.

Long Winding Roads are Scenic and Worth the Effort

Here it is Sunday morning, the week before Christmas. For those of you who know me and are a relation, jam is in the mail. For those of you who would like a jar of preserves, send me your current address and I will put a package in the post for you. If I am feeling particularly generous I may include a spoon so that you can stand in the sun, somewhere far away from here, with a mason jar in your left hand, a stainless steel spoon in the right, eating the fruits of this season thinking of me. These days I circle in closer to myself; I feel the touch of the starlings wings in my ear as their murmurations escalate into pulsing sculptures of light and silence, the air is redistributed and catches me up into the wind before settling me softly back below the oak that has lost most of its leaves, the one by the gully that needs to have the girder removed, you've seen it, you know. I move towards myself. Close to the surface, tears in moments taken alone course down my cheeks, cut through the dirt, oil, manure. Laughter fills my heart as I remember the touch of starlight on my soul.

Why people set their alarms and don't get up

Why do I wake up a little bit grumpy and rough around the edges on a perfect cold morning? I have everything I need (to survive) and thanks to the California food stamp assistance program, more than enough to eat. Food tastes funny on ebt; the cardboard coffee from Trader Joe's I was drinking for months was something I had learned to tolerate. I had stopped dreaming of french press stumptown or cellar door coffee roasted the day before, too dark to see through, rich with oil, hot but never boiled. All of that slipped into the past as I became increasingly inventive with my morning routine. I would have continued this from now until some other day, unseen looming on the horizon of my future had someone not told me that my coffee tasted like dirty socks. I was a tiny bit offended as I had even purchased 1/2 & 1/2 (a luxury of fat and flavor) to add to the brew. Attempting to create a drinkable cup of Trader Joe's coffee, I first tried a single cup pour over. Admittedly that was a grayish mix of hot water, milk, and with the subtle flavor of paper from the cone. Improving on that wasn't difficult. I began filling a mason jar with hot water and grounds and letting it sit for five minutes before sending it through the cone and filter. To me, this method was a huge improvement in the color, if not flavor of my mornings. The flaw was in the fact that one of my roommates decided that my two mason jars (one for brewing, one for containing) made great ToGo containers and started to take them to the barn everyday, at which point one broke, and since I am to old to keep doing other people's dishes, I had to find yet a better method. I moved to the soak simmer, which I believe is also called cowboy coffee, but since I am a civilized dressage trainer cowboy coffee sticks in the back of my throat and rubs the bottoms of my feet. This has become my preferred method. Put grounds in water, heat slowly to just below a boil, reduce heat, let stand and cool for a few minutes, filter through a fine sieve, add milk, day starts. Simple. There was the dalliance with an attempt at brewing a toddy like concoction. Soaking the grounds in cold water over night before heating them in the morning. I found this to be an extra step with no perceptible benefit. Yet, my morning still tasted like old socks and it was suggested that the weakness was neither in my preparation nor in my creativity, but was inherent in the dusty old beans. This is where ebt swoops in disguised as flavor-man wearing a mask and cape and offering me freshly roasted beans all for the price of pride and the color of my day will improve if I can just accept that I am poorer than dirt and let that be okay. I can let that be okay. My mornings, no longer stale, are filled with rich solitude and the sky before dawn.

Comfort the Fallen

I got the deep itch of doom last night, the sense that I am far (miles, more than five hundred) from family. It made me toss and turn, the thought of the world ending and me walking north towards an unknown border with few supplies and no knowledge of how to set a bone or suture a wound. The world can press down on my being; I must be lonely for rational life.