No clouds, 70 degrees by nine o’clock. phainopipola with her one note call in the rosemary bush on the deck out front. Humming birds and finches buzzing and trilling within the manzanita tree, morning doves cooing out of sight. I sit in the patterned shade most mornings and simply listen, I don’t read or even think of anything other than the sounds coming to my ears. Not dozing just letting them echo into my brain, perfectly happy, and warm. There are no other sounds… occasionally a car on the highway in the distance. Occasionally a coyote yipping once and then joined by another.

We are in the Anza Borrego Valley in California. I have been coming here since I was six years old. Jan and I lived here for the winter in 1977-78. I was a horse shoer and Jan worked on an ornamental tree farm that had a health care plan, including dental! My parents lived here then and in the late afternoons we often swam in their pool to beat the afternoon heat. That spring Jan and I made the agreement that we would go back to Sitka, Alaska and I would actually look for a job, even though there were not any horses on Baranoff Island. I promised her I would not sulk about going back to wet southeastern Alaska and I would throw myself into the job hunt, but if I didn’t find a job I liked we wouldn’t stay. I found a job as a work leader with the YCC along side Steve Reifenstuhl, Mark Gorman and Ralph Surrette and we had a life changing good time, working on trails, sowing grass seed and picking up garbage at White Sulfur Hot Springs, Yakutat, South Baranof and Kruzoff Island, and that was all she wrote. Jan and I became Alaskans.

But Borrego Springs, California and the high desert remained a part of our life.

All the beauty here is not grand nor obvious. So much is tiny and just underfoot.

The town is small, I have no idea what the actual year round population is. Even now in the winter standing on the hill above the churches looking down on the valley there are so few lights on in the houses as the sun sets it’s hard to imagine a gathering large enough to fill a high school gymnasium. On weekends there are many cars driving through, motorcycles and RV’s pulling tear drop trailers, and dune buggies around Christmas Circle which is the large round about in the center of the town. It is a lovely park covered in green grass and shade trees. There is a public market there on weekends selling fruit and vegetables and the usual crafts made by the nomadic people of all ages: people with dark brown skin selling everything from tie-dye to crystals to pottery and fresh tamales. In the winter the medium ages skews towards the elderly but in the summer it’s harder to tell because most of the people remain nocturnal sleeping in their one cooled room in most of the day and easing out at night for socializing. I have only been here in the summer a few times and I found it brutal, but exotic.

Jan loves it here. The warmth and the silence make her happy. Though she can’t hike the way she used to we have a four wheel drive and we can get into the back country of the desert where we “amble” now slowly moving around looking at the small flowers and watching/ listening for birds. We don’t carry big cameras, just our iphones, which are great for flowers but terrible for birds. We are both working while down here, Jan has phone meetings almost every day. I work on my writing. I read and research my next Cold Storage Book, and am at the card game stage, writing down the plot points and mixing them up and laying them out. The next Cecil book is resting happily at SOHO press where my editor has promised to get back to me soon. So I am in that sweet spot in a writer’s life where I’m out from under a deadline and the ball in the editor’s court.

Jan is doing all right but her mobility is worsening and of course I worry even when I know my worrying doesn’t help. We just try to be happy every day and when we fall we pick ourselves up. Suzie is doing the hard work of taking care of young Dot, who I also worry about, though I should really worry about Suzie for it sounds like Dot is a terrible rascal eating all manner of non-edible things including a fourteen penny NAIL, and a lid for a bucket as well as Suzie’s shoes. Young Dot is becoming both huge and more and more strong willed and I am getting geared up for going home to train her into submission. Yes….I know. Good luck with that. But no matter, I miss Dot terribly.

I will be reading from my newest book on March 4, at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, of Seattle, Seven o’clock, then at Powell’s in Cedar Hills, on the sixth in Portland, also at seven. I hope to see all my friends in those cities.

Here is a new desert poem:

DESERT CAREGIVER

Could I be devoted enough

to become a cloud

held gently in the bowl

of mountains above your head?

Could I love you enough

to become rain

and fall once again

onto the tender skin beneath

your eyes, so as to mimic tears

which have not fallen yet

then rise with the sun again

along with the small finches, working north

across the desert, forcing their songs

to become the only prayers breaking,

the deepest silence the earth

can conjure, could I love you that much?

When all I know for certain is that you don’t

want to share your suffering with anyone

and that there is not water enough here,

to bubble out of the ground,

nor a prayer powerful enough

to draw forth a river.

So we may both die thirsty,

as so many others who have come before,

while the small birds

flicker over this dry country

migrating north

to cooler, wetter climates.

Take care good friends. I hope I may see some of you in Seattle and Portland. I will have more news soon about readings coming up in Juneau, and in Sitka.

Phainopipola

with her one note song, calls me

from the mistletoe.

jhs