Andrea M. Jones's Blog, page 13

Reading Season

From fall into winter…

The pattern makes sense: that these winter months are a time of retreat, a withdrawal of sorts from the outdoor domain of wild that orients a significant part of my life. The weather is cold and even if it’s not—even if temperatures are freakishly warm, as they have been for most of February this year—the wintry factor of wind keeps me sequestered inside, more often than not.

That the body is confined certainly doesn’t mean the mind is. Winter is my season of exploration, of wide-ranging and wandering, of time spent at large in what I think of as the urban aspect of my life: the human realm, the social, cultural, technology-oriented domain of people, the things we make, and the things we think.

Books are a crossover of thinking and doing. I’ve been hinking about and reading them a lot lately, both because it’s that time of year and because literacy is a key theme in the new writing project I’ve been focused on since fall.

Writing seems like an archaic technology, and I suspect our ease with the technique of coding and decoding letter-forms inclines us to be dismissive of the written word these day. It’s so easy to exchange videos and pictures, images filled with color and movement and faces. Still, we rely on words, static and rendered mostly in black and white, to provide context and spirit, even if they’re formed up into the simple sentiments of “Hi” or “Wish you were here” or “I thought you’d like this.” Words hold their value as the currency of our much-vaunted connectivity these days, even if we’re seduced into twittering them down to the most character-limited formats we can get away up with.

My life up on this high windy ridge revolves around words—mostly cast in type but also written out the old-fashioned way, in ink on paper. Outside of my partnership with my husband, my paid work and most of my relationships proceed according to the rhythms of characters arranged in lines. I stay in touch with friends—the ones just down the road as well as the ones who live on other continents—via email. I spend my working hours indexing books that arrive on my computer as a stream of data. To say that I’m “researching” a new piece of writing is code for saying I’m reading books and articles. “Working” on an essay means I’m handling words, shuttling them back and forth from keyboard to page, drafting, reworking, looking up (as in flipping through the old-fashioned paper dictionary and thesaurus), wrestling, negotiating, scribbling out alternatives, checking them, trying again when they’re found wanting.

Maybe because writing is such an extended and sometimes tedious process for me, I prize reading: I appreciate spending time with the fruits of someone else’s labor. The marvel of it all is that I can be anchored in the wild place I want to be and still be exposed to the wider world, the urban universe of people and ideas. In theory, I’m far from the madding crowd, but from where I’m sitting it feels like I’m in the thick of it all.

A mix of titles recently finished and on the to-be-read list.

Since December, I’ve been beckoned to think about food and cooking and immunity in new ways. I’ve considered scientists’ thoughts on ignorance and just how wrong Descartes was with his perfunctory separation of mind from body. I’ve accompanied a writer exploring the intersection of biomedical research with one family and listened in on history as Ralph Waldo Emerson discusses writing and reading. Right now, I’m weighing the argument that introverts are at a disadvantage in American society. My brain, in short, has been a busy place lately, all thanks to a collection of 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks.

I spend most of my time on this blog celebrating the place where I live, but it’s worth a shout-out now and again to the influences that bring dimension to that point of view. Some of those perspectives arrive by way of digital video and audio radio signals, but the ones that make my heart glad and encourage me to see my surroundings more carefully are almost invariably the symbols that make up the English language. My favorites take the form of the long, slow, human conversation we call books.

A selected list of the winter’s reading, so far:

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Michael Moss

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, by Michael Pollan

The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, by Robert D. Richardson

On Immunity: An Inoculation, by Eula Biss

How the Body Knows its Mind, by Sian Beilock

Ignorance: How it Drives Science, by Stuart Firestein

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

Blank Slate

On a snowy day, the metaphorical alignment of undisturbed snow with the blank page is all but irresistible: that expanse of unmarred whiteness, awaiting signs of meaningful passage.

I don’t necessarily mean to compare writers to rodents, but it has lately come to my attention that signs resulting from the movements of mice in and through snow offers some potential as a visual guide to the writer’s experience with the blank page, a sort of metaphorical directory to a metaphor.

There is, first of all, the idealized vision I think most writers about their work, the aspirational dream of clean linear prose that leads the reader efficiently from one point to the next.

 

 

 

 

 

There are plenty of days, though, when the venture leads nowhere, whereupon the writer realizes it’s a bloody cold world out there and retreats to the nest for a snack and some YouTube videos showing cats getting their comeuppance.

 

 

 

 

More standard, perhaps, is a series of forward plunges to test possibilities that just don’t work out, whereupon the author retreats to the coffee shop to discuss “craft” with colleagues who find themselves similarly blocked.

 

 

Sometimes all you can do is noodle an idea around, and even if you end up pretty much back where you started, you feel like you’re getting closer to finding, if nothing else, the shape of a thing.

 

 

 

There are days when grubbing around with the first draft reveals several possible trajectories.

 

 

 

 

And every now and again, the meandering shuffle of that exploratory draft takes the scribe to to a place where the direction of the piece is revealed and the work skips unfailingly along.

 

 

 

 

 

Occasionally, writers get bored or distracted and change course to work on something else.

 

 

 

 

And then are the days when it doesn’t matter what you do, nothing seems to work.

Walkout Workout

Sure, you can raise your heart rate and a nice sweat on the elliptical machine in the basement. You’ll stare at the wall, though, and play mind games to keep yourself from watching digits on the timer count too slowly downward. Save that for the days when the wind sucks the air from your lungs and freeze-dries tender flesh. No, if the weather’s fair, make tracks down the road. It’s 2.2 miles roundtrip to the cul-de-sac and back. If there’s a skiff of snow on the road, you’ll see who else has been out and about, and they most likely won’t be the human neighbors.

Let’s go: out of the house, past the barn, and between the gates, where a raven lifting off the top rail sometimes sets off a gentle metallic rattle. Wave at the horses out in the pasture as you cross the flat and, if it isn’t deep winter, watch for bluebirds hovering over the grass. This is your warm-up, where kinks from the office chair will get shaken out of your thighs.

At the T-junction, turn right. Borrow from the slight downward incline to send each footstep reaching long. No need to fear traffic, especially in winter when the second-home owners have all retreated to warmer climes; if you do encounter a vehicle, the shock of its appearance will send your pulse surging, and that’s what you’re after anyway. The road is graded smooth: you don’t have to watch where you’re putting your feet, which is what makes this different from a hike. If you do look down, though, on an autumn day you might see marks scuffled in the dust from two bucks shoving one another. In early winter, you may find yourself stepping through a churned path of dirty snow where a herd of elk flowed across the road, forgoing the engineered lane for an ancient migratory route. Heading down the hill, you have an uninterrupted view across the platter of Beckham Basin to the grassy buttes beyond, where those elk were headed.

The road hugs the ridge as it drops a few hundred vertical feet, mostly over three gradually pitched grades you’ll hardly notice until you’re on the way back up. As it descends out of the sunny grasslands of the ridge’s top, the road cuts a swath into dark timber. Watch for turkey tracks in the mud in spring, neat chains of chevron imprints left by birds that prefer hiking to flying.

If you put a little snap in your pace, you’ll be huffing when you reach the cul-de-sac and execute your about-face. The evergreen shade here is cool and quiet, unless the Clark’s nutcrackers and Steller’s jays are gossiping. On one still day you heard the tootling calls of Sandhill cranes flying north while you were down here; you had to stop to scan the sky for a skein of birds you never saw.

When the road begins its first uphill slant, your calves go to work; the incline is subtle, but it’s long. This is a good place to listen for the chirping bustle of chickadees and nuthatches among the evergreen boughs. The pitch levels off for a bit, but the respite ends where you found the mystery gilia a few years ago: one solitary plant clinging to the cut-bank, festooned with tubular flowers. They were pure white, ghost blossoms of a wildflower familiar to you since childhood, but only, until then, in its vibrant scarlet form.

The second uphill section is a little steeper, but it’s short, and you’ll get another breather where the road throws a bend into the notch of a small drainage. There’s no permanent stream, but runoff and snowmelt water a remnant aspen grove being overtaken by the successional generation of evergreens. Fresh snow here is promptly and prolifically stamped with a tangle of shadowy impressions: rabbit, mouse, coyote, fox, and deer prints, with your less dainty contribution cutting through.

This last uphill stretch is no steeper than the one before, but it’s longer. You’ll be inclined to stop and take in the view, but this is a workout, not a nature walk. Keep your chin up: let the span of sky above the shoulder of the ridge be your visual lure until Cap Rock Ridge heaves into view. As you top the hill and make the turn onto the plane of your home-address road, you start your cool-down. Everything here is as familiar as a front yard, albeit an expansive one: grass rippling through the pasture, the distant crenelation of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, lightning-scarred trees. But don’t let your attention be snatched by the idea of a snack or the work waiting on your desk on this literal home stretch, where the house beckons from its fringe of ponderosa pine. That last power pole before the pasture gates is where the woodland raptor was perched last summer—whether a Cooper’s or a sharp-shinned hawk you couldn’t tell. You heard the dainty sneeze, though, before the lean bird shook its head, tilted forward with outstretched wings and, veering, vanished from sight.

Wear and Tear

For the past couple of years, I’ve pulled my barn coat off the hanger for the first time each fall and thought, I gotta get a new coat.

But then I’d think, Nah…it’ll go one more year.

The holes in the front pockets came first. I thought almost daily about patching them, but put such idle thoughts aside when an easy fix presented itself in the form of a little cloth bag of holiday goodies. Treats consumed, I repurposed the bag as a liner for the more-used right-hand pocket. Some of the flowery yellow fabric oozed out the ever-growing hole now and again, but the bag accomplished the goal of item containment.

The bigger issue was the worn fabric at the seams along the sleeves and at the waist. The frayed canvas, coupled with the fact that the coat’s lining had compressed and thinned over the years, meant my heavy winter coat had become more of a jacket. A well-ventilated jacket.

I bought this coat when we moved to central Colorado in 2001, so it wasn’t unreasonable to seek a replacement. Trouble is, I hate to shop.

I also have a minor compulsion about getting as much wear as possible out of clothes. When my elbows start jutting out of a winter nightgown, I cut off the sleeves and voilà: summer nightgown. Dress clothes are busted down in rank to work clothes as they fray and fade. I still have the down vest my parents gave me for Christmas back in 1975 or 1976. My mother, ever practical, bought it big enough for me to grow into, which I did. I then outgrew it, too, but only by a little bit. The snug fit makes the vest perfect for layering, and a jacket or coat over the top makes the applique accents Mom sewed on all those years ago—a mushroom and ladybug at the lapel, a patchwork kitty-cat on the back—my private little joke.

Despite a profound distaste for shopping and my proclivity for hanging onto things, by this fall it was pretty clear that I needed to find a new coat.

I was not optimistic about the task, so imagine my surprise when I found the perfect coat at the second ranch supply store I stopped in. It was exactly what I was looking for: long enough to cover my butt; practical dark color; pockets with flaps to keep hay out; tough canvas exterior with a fluffy, soft, and warm fleece lining. The only catch—and there had to be one, right?—was that the coat was a men’s size medium: too big. No worries, I thought, making note of the manufacturer; I’ll order a small online or through my local store.

Only they don’t make a size small.

I will spare you, gentle reader, the rant that transpired when I found this out, except to note that it involved conspiracy theories about clothing makers having it in for guys of slight build and women seeking practical work clothes.

This experience did not palliate my dislike of shopping. Neither did being forced into the women’s department, where I discovered I do not have a sense of humor when it comes to outerwear intended for work. Candy-hued mauve and turquoise are bad enough, but pink camo?? I found the colors ghastly, but conspiracy theories crept back to mind when I felt the flimsy fabrics and airy linings. Evidently I’m supposed to be a slave to fashion even while trying to stay warm feeding horses or shoveling snow or putting tire chains on the truck.

I did eventually find a women’s work coat. It’s brown. It’s the length I was looking for. It has pockets with flaps, and the canvas exterior will resist barbed wire to a certain extent. The lining is pink plaid, which makes me cringe a little, but the flannel is soft, which I like. The coat is comfortable, and fits me better than my old one did.

The catch—and there had to be at least one, right?—is that although I bought the heftiest one I could find, this coat is not as rugged as the ones they make for men. Worse, it’s not particularly warm. Our winter winds, which are still tuning up for their headline performances in January and February, filter through the canvas and cute pink plaid flannel. The coat feels even more well-ventilated than my holey old one did.

Lucky me, though: I have a down vest to use as a liner. When the wind is screaming over the ridge later this winter, my arms will freeze, but my core will be toasty warm. Underneath my porous outer layer, my kitty-cat will have my back.

Thanks, Mom, again. And always.

Shifting Gears

I like being a denizen of the temperate zones. I appreciate that the seasons here, dictated by my position on the globe, are so distinct. Watching the gradual cycling of weather, light, foliage, and animal activity has helped train me in the habit of attentiveness. Yes, I’ll think, there go the oak trees, turning to rust; or That damp dirt sure smells like spring.

In addition to teaching me where I might direct my gaze for a fresh detail that wasn’t there yesterday or last week, this seasonality shapes the year with a physical rhythm. When the days are long and the weather is fine, the landscape beckons my mind outward with scent and color and activity. And since most of my warm-season gotta-do chores and fun diversions—gardening, hiking, playing with the horses—are of the hands-on variety, I get my workouts outside, too.

As Thanksgiving approaches, the landscape has settled into relative dormancy. A stroll down the road or a glance out the window reveals a familiar two-tone patchwork of tawny grasslands and dark evergreens, largely unchanged over the last six weeks. I’m done weeding for the year. The garden has been picked over, dug up, and pulled. Hay and firewood have been stacked in their respective sheds. Snow from our first and so-far-only storm melted weeks ago. With nothing to shovel and nothing to plow, the slow fade of fall into winter is marked primarily by an internal shift, an inclination to ponder rather than do. I feel my perspective curling inward.

The daily rituals of building the fire and closing the window blinds against the dark beyond the chilly glass reinforce this inward-drawing impulse. These are protective gestures, the defensive nesting behaviors of an animal who lives in a place where the winters can be hard.

This pulling in isn’t an impulse to shut out the world. On the contrary, I’ve been feeling a peculiar restlessness lately. This yearning is part of my annual pattern, too, even though I’m often slow to remember that this particular craving means my brain is hungry, not for sensation, but for ideas. Instead of fixing on my physical reality, my neurons are inclined to interact in a more deliberate and moderated way, through the written world.

It’s reading season. It’s the writing time of year.

There will be challenges and distractions, as always. There will be errands to run, horses to feed, meals to cook. The indexing projects that make up my working life will continue to arrive on schedules not of my choosing, with occasional periods like the past month, when multiple projects arrived one atop the other to commandeer my waking hours. Now, though, with external deadlines largely satisfied, I’m settling in to spend time with myself.

I am not always the best company. In this transition period, especially, I am out of practice and frequently out of sorts. I’m highly distractible, and although I’ve been looking forward to this time, I’m prone to fits of petulance. The work doesn’t make demands on my biceps and hamstrings, but that doesn’t mean it’s effortless. My expectations right now outstrip my capacity for diligence and focus. Composing anything longer than 900 words seems difficult beyond reason. Knowing that research is a valid part of the process, I offer my brain a book from a long-neglected stack. It soon wanders off, accustomed to the quick resolution of short articles in magazines or online.

My brain, while ready to work in theory, needs time and conditioning. My home place is wondrous and beautiful, but the irony is that an abundance of sensory riches can induce mental flabbiness. I don’t have to work very hard to find something to marvel over—all I have to do is look outside. What’s called for now, though, is patient thought and long-form attentiveness. I don’t have the luxury of simply noticing and describing, I need to tease out connections and test arguments. I need to write, and rewrite, and edit. And then do so again…and again…and again.

It’s slow going. I groan when I arrive at my desk in the morning to find the same unresolved pages I started with yesterday. It’s early, though. Winter hasn’t taken hold, not really. The season for hunkering down in the interior landscape is just getting underway. I stretch, brew some tea, sit down again. The fire is lit. The wood is stacked and waiting.

On the Theme of Running Late

For once, it wasn’t me.

The party running late, this time, was autumn.

Oh sure, the light changed, spearing over the land at that long low angle that first alerts me summer is waning. And, yes, leaves of sticky geranium and Rocky Mountain penstemon flared scarlet here and there against a backdrop of grass cured to wheaten monochrome. On several early October afternoons, I heard the peculiar belling, fluting, honking calls of Sandhill cranes drifting down from on high, as small flocks of the big birds threaded south toward their wintering grounds in New Mexico. The horses shed short gleaming hairs and began to put on their puffy winter coats. Changing aspen leaves emitted slow-motion flashes of bright yellow from dark evergreen stands, and the oak brush flared, more slowly, in tones russet and rust. The lusty whistling of bull elk rang through the crisp air for weeks.

Through it all, though, no frost—at least not a heavy killing one. As I dug potatoes and shifted the horses to the cold-weather routine of evening feedings at the barn, I was still picking cold-tender vegetables in the garden. In the waning days of October, we have enjoyed fresh-picked cucumbers and yellow squash and salsa made from homegrown, vine-ripened tomatoes and tomatillos. The last of the Speckled Trout’s Back lettuce, having bolted and grown tough and bitter, was felled by my tugging, not by icy air on a cold night.

Living in a harsh environment, I’m sensitive to the weather, but I had not realized quite how thoroughly I align autumn with the onset of freezing temperatures. In these times of shifting climate, unusual episodes like this fall’s warm spell take on heightened significance. I worry about what’s coming. I fret over what might be lost, including the opportunity for collective humility, given that we humans have now demonstrated a capacity to alter global forces once thought beyond our control.

Although Big Thoughts like these have churned through my head lately, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t preoccupied with smaller things. Like those tomatoes.

I was pretty pleased with myself last spring, when I managed to nurture them from seed to seedling to transplant. They grew modestly in the cold and rainy weather of early summer, but bloomed dutifully and by August were putting on little green marbles. Our first frost usually arrives around Labor Day, though, so August is late summer up here. The early cold snap bypassed us this year, and I managed to pick a (small) handful of tomatoes before we left on vacation in mid-September. I told the neighbors who were watching our place to enjoy whatever survived. I was thrilled to pick some more ripe tomatoes when we got home.

The first week of October, when we usually get the frosts that missed us in September, passed without a freeze. I kept picking, a few tomatoes at a time, as they ripened on the vine. Come late October, I rescued the “last” of the green tomatoes in anticipation of a hard frost—three different times.

One phase of the October harvest (the wine corks on the windowsill are not homegrown).

The end result has been an unequivocal bumper crop. Now, “bumper crop” is not something I ever anticipated being able to say with regard to tomatoes grown in my garden. I’m just not a bumper-crop gardener, to start with—the garden is small; I am not particularly attentive; and although I experiment all the time, I don’t necessarily keep track of what works and what doesn’t. I haven’t mastered sheltering plants with seasonal covers that would extend our short growing season.

So, even though I can take credit for getting the tomatoes started and keeping them alive over the summer, I owe the successful harvest to an aberrant fall. I still don’t know how the short-season tomato varieties I tried this year will fare up here, because we didn’t have a short season. I’m not ungrateful for the mild autumn, but the tomatoes feel, just a little, undeserved. Two extra months of growing time is a weather mega-millions jackpot—and I didn’t know I’d bought a ticket.

The long shafts of morning light are, finally, angling onto frost-silvered grass. The first snowstorm of the year arrived last week, soaking earth that dried out in August and was further parched by the unseasonable warmth of September and early October. The Sangre de Cristo mountains and Pikes Peak are dusted white. Now that the marigolds—and tomato plants—have finally frozen, I’ll finish fall cleanup in the garden and put it to bed for the winter. Now that we’ve polished off that last batch of homegrown salsa, all seems right with the world.

A Rainbow in the West

Early morning rainbow in the west, October.

When a delicate early-morning rainbow appeared late last week, I hustled to find the camera and take a picture. “We almost never see rainbows in the morning,” I was thinking to myself.

And it’s true. Most of the time, rainbows here are captured in the beams of late-day sun, riding the tails of afternoon thundershowers. The combination of time of day and weather conditions means that a  rainbow’s prismatic arch usually appears in our eastern viewshed, often straddling Pikes Peak.

The landscape in the other direction, which was underneath last week’s morning rainbow, is lovely, albeit not as striking as the mountain view. I probably look out our west-facing windows more often than any other during the course of the average day. The pasture lies that way, and I frequently check to see if the horses are in sight and if so what they’re doing. The road leading to our place threads in from the west, and I’m nosy enough to peer out and see if I know who’s driving by if I hear a vehicle. I also watch for my husband driving in, when he’s due to be coming home from work.

The photo I took of the recent rainbow was nice enough, but the context of the image lay beyond the camera’s frame. I wanted a picture more as a way of recording the unusual position and timing than of capturing the bow itself. I couldn’t get the entire rainbow in the camera’s frame, anyway; it was huge, writ large by a sun still low in the sky, just beginning its day in our part of the world.

Not long after I snapped that picture, I realized I’d actually seen rainbows organized in my western view more than once lately. It hadn’t occurred to me that they were in the west, glowing during morning hours, because I wasn’t at home. Everything about the landscape I was in at the time was novel. My focus was on being with people and enjoying a new place, not thinking about context or significance.

Our vacation in late September took us to Ireland, where we spent a week on the Dingle Peninsula, a rocky finger of land pointing into the north Atlantic. We’d rented a comfy house with captivating views of the coast, and invited my Mom and some friends from England to visit and share it. More than once during our stay, I glanced out the big front windows to see a rainbow over the waves, lit by sunshine shot between low and fast-moving clouds.

In my admittedly limited experience in Ireland, rainbows are common but fleeting. Rain and drizzle coursing swiftly over the emerald landscape make them likely any time of the day. They’re often partial, bent snippets of color caught in, as one local weather forecaster put it, “moments of clarity.”

Looking west from Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, near Clogher Head.

When we left home in mid-September, I was ready for a break.  I happily left everything behind for a while—the weeding and the chores and the work projects, together with the lingering late-season wildflowers and the horses and the rugged contours of this place I love. Rockiness and wind aside, a salt-misted sea level locale is about as different from our arid mountain environment as it’s possible to get.

Back home, everything looks washed clean and fresh, as if some of that Irish rain rinsed the land and sky. That’s not what happened, of course—it was my eyes and my brain that got refreshed by the change of pace and changes of scene.

The charm and pleasure of travel is experiencing places that are out of our ordinary. Seeing and writing usually run in tandem for me, but I was on vacation from the writing mindset during that time in Ireland. I looked and watched and saw, but mostly took a break from reflective impulses. I followed the wandering course of conversations with old friends. I pondered what to drink with my Irish stew or fish and chips. I weighed in on where to take our daily walk. I enjoyed unfamiliar beauties. I let my attention skip across the surface of things.

The more common angle for our Colorado rainbows, with Pikes Peak on the northeastern horizon.

It felt hedonistic to simply let sights and sounds and scents and flavors and textures flow in, without analyzing them or setting them to words. Once I got home, I was a bit regretful that I hadn’t picked up a pen and made notes. Lucky for me, my brain was evidently working discretely in the background. Last week’s rainbow offered evidence that some portion of my mind had been noting subtleties while my conscious brain went on vacation, and I’m relieved that the task of documentation wasn’t left solely to my camera’s memory card.

The Hazy Days of Summer

The crisp weather I associate with fall arrived early this year. The grasses and wildflowers and weeds that had shot up in June matured, set seed, and began to spin the landscape into gold by mid-August. If clouds bothered to assemble at all, they lost interest in organizing themselves into thunderheads. The cloudless sunrises typical of a Colorado summer were matched, increasingly, by cloudless sunsets.

Sunrise, August 24, 2015.

As August ebbed, the twilight bookending the days started going Technicolor, with vibrant and wide-flung displays of magenta and fiery orange. Then the coloring agent for our showy sunrises and sunsets began to make itself evident during the day: a haze of smoke from distant fires in the Pacific Northwest and northern California.

Pikes Peak faded to a murky cutout on the horizon, and disappeared altogether some days. The hills and buttes looked grayish rather than tawny. Our views lost their clean edges and the blue faded out of the sky.

A hazy northern view.

After a wet spring and early summer, the haze was a pointed reminder that wildfire is and always will be part of the reality of this place. My joy in the botanical wonders that filled our summer was spiked, in part, by giddiness inspired by a respite from being incessantly fire-aware. As rains from thunderstorms in early July soaked into the ground, I imagined the trees around us drawing in water from soil that had been drought-parched for so long. Several Ponderosa pines near the house we’d considered cutting down because they seemed to be dying rebounded. For the first time since it was put up more than ten years ago, the roadside sign on the way to town that displays fire danger was reeled down, albeit briefly, to “Low.”

I knew this luxuriousness would, like the wildflowers, be fleeting. This is a semi-arid climate: dry is the default setting. This year’s early precipitation—a snowy February, record-setting May rains, ample monsoon thunderstorms in June and July—was an anomaly. The rain total for August was one of the lowest in a decade. The tall vegetation tanned, then dried, then toasted, and now shatters when you walk through it. September is always a dry month for us, but so far this one is looking like it will end up being downright parched.

Last week, I mowed the thick but brittle grass around the house, refreshing the moat of defensible space around our home. Cutting down the native grasses is always a bittersweet task. The mature grasses have a beauty I did not know of before living here. I love their colors, and their diversity. I love watching their threads and plumes and sprays nodding in the breeze on the hillside outside the kitchen window.

Defensible space, freshly mowed.

Once the job is done, the mowed area looks tidy. It will be the first area to show green next spring, and the wildflowers there will pop with less grassy competition. The more immediate benefit is the ease the short-cropped vegetation gifts to my mind. Trimming the grasses and shrubs will help lay a fire down to a lower intensity, should one approach the house.

Maintaining defensible space is one of the obligations that comes with living at the wildland-urban interface, but cutting the grass—along with thinning trees and trimming brush—also carries an aspect of ritual. These activities are a bow to the fact that wildfire is one of the sculptors of the landscape I cherish. Acknowledging its power and adapting, as best I can, to its rightful role here is part of what makes living on this high ridge different from living in an apartment in Brooklyn or on cul-de-sac at Denver’s fringe.

Cultivating such equanimity was much, much easier when we were surrounded by verdure in June. A philosophical attitude toward fire gets harder as red flag warnings enter the forecast and the leaves on the young aspen trees I planted last fall crinkle, the groundwater level settling beyond the reach of their their roots.

Native grasses, standing tall.

Making peace with the concept of wildfire is not the same thing as coping with the threat, or with the aftermath. The complexities at the interface where human habitat meets fire-prone landscapes proliferate the more we learn—about forests, about fire, about our land use patterns, about the unintended consequences of our actions. My thoughts are with all the Westerners contending with fires burning in landscapes they love, now and in the years to come.

Strawberry Season

Strawberries in abundance. They’re not always so visible.

It’s been a good summer for strawberries in the garden. Actually, it’s almost always a good summer for the strawberries, but this has been one of those years when we’ve not only had a steady stream of fresh berries for eating with cereal or yogurt, but enough to give away, cook with, and stash by the quart in the freezer.

That alpine strawberries grow happily here, at almost 9000 feet in elevation, shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, but I remain somewhat in awe of their consistent runaway success. My other gardening endeavors tend to be much more hit-and-miss, with crops I usually do pretty well with—snow peas, kale, potatoes, beets—faltering or outright failing periodically.

The strawberries, though, have been doing their thing ever since I transplanted a single plant from our old house outside of Boulder back around 2002 (if memory serves, I got that plant from Shepherd Garden Seeds, a precursor company to Renee’s Garden). I don’t know the name of the variety of white alpine strawberry I have, but I do know that it sends out runners as well as reproducing easily from seed. My solitary strawberry plant soon had company, and then the company had company. It wasn’t long before strawberries overflowed the planting bed I’d allotted them and colonized the northwest corner of the walled garden, where they’ve been engaged in a turf war with creeping thyme for almost a decade.

Volunteer strawberry patch in the garden’s corner, with runners infiltrating the planting bed at bottom right.

To keep them from taking over the entire garden, I now heartlessly pluck out seedlings and rip runners up by the handful, lest they strangle the chives or take over the walking paths. I tolerate the strawberries’ aggressiveness within the confines of the garden because I’m a sucker for the easy success. About all I do to nurture them is rake the beds hard in the spring to thin the plants and sprinkle on some compost now and again.

In return, the strawberries fruit reliably and dodge the attention of birds with their unusual color. They’re also delectable. When I offer one to someone for the first time, their eyes move back and forth between my face and the pale little orb a few times, as they try to figure out if they’re about to be the victim of a weird prank. The fruit is dinky. It looks unripe. Then they catch a whiff: unmistakably the aroma of ripe strawberry, but with a punch of floweriness. Won over, they pop it in their mouth and discover that the fruit is soft yet concentrated. It’s a strawberry, to be sure, but with an edge of tartness and a whisper of tropical fruit. Familiar, and yet unexpected. A good thing in a small package.

If you’re wondering why such charming fruit isn’t more commercially available, I offer a few reasons. One is that the berries are so delicate that they make raspberries seem like road warriors. Once picked, they degrade to mush in a day or two, and if piled too deep in a container they soon begin to dissolve into a puree.

Nice-sized berries plumped by monsoon rains; many are much smaller.

Another reason alpine strawberries aren’t more common is that they’re so danged small. By volume, both beds on a given day at the peak of the season might yield four or five cups. By number, though, we’re talking hundreds of berries. In a compulsive fit last week, I did a rough count of how many strawberries made up the one-cup measure I was getting ready to stir into a batch of muffins: about one hundred.

The berries’ small size makes picking an outsized chore. Sure, gleaning a handful for cereal can be a breeze: skim the beds to pluck the berries hovering in plain sight above the leaves. The gentlest of tugs identifies the ripe ones; if the fruit parts from the hull, it’s ready to eat. If not, move on to the next morsel.

A thorough job of picking, however, demands effort. To find the most succulent of the diminutive pearls, the ones that have plumped enough to bow the stems down below the canopy of leaves, requires that I riffle of the dense foliage with both hands, looking for pale fruits and feeling under leaves for the delicate rounds. Since there’s no room to kneel, my hands execute their gentle repetitive motions parallel to a full-body workout of stooping, hunkering, leaning, bending, squatting, and hunching.

An hour’s work.

Hand-combing both strawberry beds takes about an hour. Add another fifteen minutes to begin to straighten my kinked body. Multiply that by two or three times a week at the peak of the season. Consider that this variety in this place starts fruiting in June and peters out in late August, and the result is a sizable chunk of my summer gardening time.

So, yes, the alpine strawberries are easy to grow. Harvesting them, though, is not for the faint of heart—or weak of thigh.

Coming Around to Orange

I’m always reluctant to name a favorite this thing or that thing when someone asks. I suppose I could dodge the line of questioning altogether if I’d just respond that “variety” is my favorite thing, but that might send the conversation off on an even more complicated journey. And as much as I’d like to think of myself as the sort of person who favors diversity, I might just be a contrarian. Besides, the evidence suggests that I do play favorites, as I discussed last summer in reference to my color preference.

I’m less evasive when it comes to things I don’t like, and if purple is indeed the color I most prefer, orange is my least favorite.

Orange is the aggressive attention-snatching hue of warning signs. On traffic cones, roadwork signs, reflective tape, and barricades, orange is the color of imposed vigilance, screaming Watch out! Stay back!! Orange is unfriendly to poets (at least those of the rhyming ilk). I’ve long cultivated the opinion that orange is beneath my regard because it reeks of artificiality. It’s suggestive of lurid Day-Glo and fluorescent pigments. Orange calls to mind flapping flagging tape announcing that another piece of land has been deemed suitable for some version of the human imprint. Orange is bossy, a control freak of a color. It’s unnatural…leaving aside, of course, the fruit of the same name.

But I’m coming around to orange. It has lately come to my attention that orangeness isn’t inevitably geared toward caution signs or flyers shouting at me to buy something. You, gentle reader, are probably already aware of this, but oranges aren’t the only orange thing the natural world has to offer. Sunsets and sunrises offer plenty to admire, and they’re frequently tinted in wavelengths that read to the human eye as orange. Carrots are orange, as are the luscious Rocky Ford cantaloupes that are in season right now. The sandstone canyons of the Colorado Plateau are lovely and admirable, in part, because of their studious rejection of green and bounteous display of all that is ruddy, umber, and orange. Flowers, of the garden as well as the wild variety, come in shades of orange, as do pumpkins, ladybugs, autumn leaves, and the flesh of the Hubbard squash I like to stow in the freezer for making quick breads and muffins.

Like many of the internal shifts that can be counted as improvements in my character, this change of heart owes much to my surroundings. This high ridge in south-central Colorado rewards attentiveness, whether it’s with large-scale displays splashed across the sky or fine details suspended in the space between blades of grass. My brain is regularly stopped in its tracks, forced to pause and proceed with new input.

As it happens, this year’s wildflower display has demonstrated that orange and purple can be striking companions.  And while there’s still plenty of purple to be seen in the flowerpots around the house and I’m trying to grow a variety of purple carrot in the garden this year, there are also marigolds and California poppies. As orange increasingly joins purple—and the blue of flax and the yellow of sunflowers and the marvelous greens of our many grasses—in the hierarchy of my color preference, I have to wonder whether I do simply favor variety, after all.