The holiday season just ending presented a curious feel to it this time around. There were Christmas lights draped on a large balcony in the building behind ours, while below them stood glowing orange globes on a sturdy little tree — fruit, actually. Oranges, uh huh.
A friend sent a gift of many delicious lemons from one of her trees last week.
Although lots of trees have dropped their leaves and it is pretty cool day and night hummingbirds have been buzzing around our balcony feeder non stop since summer. The species present are mainly Anna’s right now, though the odd Blackchin can’t be ruled out. There’s been a night or two just below freezing, when the tiny birds showed up extra early, sticking around longer than normal. Little energy wasted on chasing one another.
The oleander trees have flower buds, while a tall sycamore flaunts dark yellow feathery flowers three stories above us.
Meanwhile, across the region marches a series of storms, drenching the northern part of the state, piling snow many, many feet high in the Sierra Nevadas to the east. Yosemite is being buried as I write. While I’m used to the West and the effects mountains have on weather I have to admit that the variety of Northern California climates occasionally makes my head spin.
Here we are bundling up as for New Mexico winter to take the dogs for a midday walk, during which we spot …. hummingbirds! …. dashing from one oleander to another. Since there are no actively flowering bushes in our surroundings at present it is good to know that the small creatures also eat tiny bugs, which I hope crawl out from beneath bark in the sunshine. Condo neighbors seem to have mostly removed hummer feeders for the winter.
The most up-close-and-personal change has to do with the transformation of our pleasant condo into a wedding warehouse and assembly line. With Jericha and Paco’s marriage a week away we have 75 pounds of table linens stacked in boxes. That is seventy five pounds of table stuff!! Would the Waldorf Astoria need that much for three hours one day?
There are sheer curtains which my daughter and a small army of friends have transformed with crepe paper strips (on the back side) to offer gentle colors when hanging in the many large windows (with indifferent views) at the wedding venue. More sheer curtains have had LED light strings attached, to hang behind the raised stage at the head of the room, glowing during the ceremony. We have been gluing lovely quotations, printed on vellum, inside three of the six sides of small jars she found to serve as wedding favors. Into the jars go small strings of LEDs, with switches craftily held above view in pretty netting just under the lids, tied tight outside with ribbons.
Earlier today Jericha baked an experimental batch of the cupcakes she wants to have stacked up into a wedding cake shape. We’ve happily been fattening ourselves on the things — which, full of butter and honey, along with fine cornmeal and almond flour — are making their way towards “you can’t have just one” fare.
This evening the kitchen workshop is open for creating huge paper flowers out of gigantic coffee filters.
Also this evening we are having rain. So good for this region with a six-year drought, so slowing for getting one’s wedding errands done.
Besides living in my daughter’s dreams of a beautiful wedding in which she imagines and then creates most of the decorations with help from a special wedding planner friend, and many good hands, I’ve continued to get grounded with my new state, and enjoyed reconnecting with several good friends I hadn’t seen or spoken with in a long while.
Amidst this cheerful disarray came along my birthday on the 6th. Not seventy yet, but working on it… That idea brings to my grasshopper mind yet another view of the ways in which my life has changed since last June. Jericha and Shirley, our roommate in the condo, took me for a birthday lunch at a Himalayan restaurant next to the preschool where they both work.
It was Friday, a day when great numbers of tech industry employees love to grab a longish lunch. We had a bit of a wait to get in… In line with Asian men of different ages. After we finally took our places at a small table there was time to look around. Cheerful paper lanterns hung from ceiling beams, bearing the message of a Happy New Year.
While munching my way through excellent Indian food that calm feeling came over me that can settle when I’m in a new, good mind space. Looking around I realized that there were over a hundred people sitting at long tables, mostly in large groups. That we three women were a) one of perhaps five women in the entire restaurant, and b) besides one distant man we three were the only pale faces that I could see. To which it isn’t too much speculation to say that we were also in a wee minority of diners not employed by Google.
These things made me smile, all the more when, as we were leaving, Shirley wished me a happy birthday and right afterwards a friendly hand touched my shoulder, a young man leaned towards me and murmured, “Happy Bird-day!”
That one little gesture lighted me up in the midst of what was already a specially good day.
This was all the more relished since the many changes in life of late may bring happiness to the heart one day, yet sadness will invade the next. Sadness for what (and who) is now gone forever. Making this an appropriate moment, perhaps, to suggest that we not hesitate to offer a smile, a small compliment or bit of help to some complete stranger, randomly. It makes a difference, it really does.
Rising Over the Smoke 