sketchblog

It rained last night, throughout the night and into the morning, until the sun poked through the snivelling stratus and proclaimed that it was no longer a time of grieving. So the rain packed up and moved eastward, I’m told. And in its wake, the starlings came back out of hiding among the ivy boughs, and the quail promenaded atop the dewy lawn, properly.

For the past three weeks we have had occasional rains, and each time the pitter pattering begins above our heads on this old roof, we tell ourselves, “This is the last rain of the season.” That was the last rain of the season.

Speaking of proper, this is a blog where I am obliged to to log a chronicle of events, and I missed the holy weekend of Easter. I’ve been called on this, so let me indulge you people on what you missed, heretofore two weeks.

Alis threw Seth an Easter rager. Thirty-odd toddlers turned every stone and log looking for eggs and chocolate on the Whitman commons that straddle Skyline ridge. She spent the week beforehand sewing fleece easter bunnies and dying eggs in pots of boiled beets and onionskins and cabbageleaves. On other nights, she wrapped heirloom seeds in tulle and tied them to colorful tongue depressors, and when she was busy wrapping little pots of violas and wheatgrass with tissue paper and hand-painted yarn, she enlisted friends to string wooden beaded bracelets into the wee hours or, as in my case, stand in her kitchen, slackjawed and dumbfounded, to gawk at all the hard work she really put into this fete while she dyed yet more gorgeous eggs.

Which is all to say that my boys cared neither here nor there about any of this, on that particular day, the day of the hunt, as they poked and prodded through the Lamb’s Ears and Lilies until they found all forms of chocolate, but that we girls, and by that I mean me( because I was trying not to notice my younger competition) secretly dashed through the garden like a pixie, collecting shiny glass beads and seed packets, purple-and-orange violas and wheatgrass pots, slipping them inconspicuously into Chas’ easter basket while he gorged on his gold, his precious chocolate. Occasionally I’d urge him to pick up a seed packet that I’d found, and he’d probe the entire area first for chocolate, certain that I had scouted for nothing other, and finally reach for the only thing hidden in the foliage, which was indeed the seed packet and which he indeed picked up. For me!

And so, with seeds to plant, I’m faced by the bare patches of three quarterempty flowerbeds, spared just for such purpose, and the blank face of a front and back yard, freshly plowed by a thirty year-old and rusting tractor with a likewise rusted and ringing plow, just days ago before the rain fell. I see mounds upon which to plant two to three ppumpkins seeds apiece. Give or take a melon.

I have tenacious, hard callouses on my hands from three weekends ago, when we spent the rest of Easter weekend in Pebble Beach, playing drunk barefoot tennis doubles into the black of night. I’m not sure how I didn’t bleed through my feet by bedfall, on those heavy, luxurious sheets; on the contrary, my feet tingled as if they’d been freshly shorn of three old inches of thick hide. Perhaps they were?. Indeed, the rest of me felt that idyllic; it’s fun having rich friends with third homes nestled in the surreal beauty of California’s monterrey bay peninsula. We drove home along the coastal highway bisecting the prim acres of golfing lawn and the rugged, emerald blue jumble of ocean and guano-stained rock and the white froth of my amazement. Acres upon acres of blooming artichoke and fruiting strawberries, laborers scattered along the endless rows that stretched inland, hunched over the produce like props. Surreal produce signs with enormous specimens that seemed to shine from the light of the sun itself, which glared down sternly upon us as we shook off the two day hangover that only an irresponsible weekend in someone else’s mansion in someone else’s neighborhood could bring.