October Reflections
October 2021 began in a blaze of autumn leaves transitioning from green to pear yellows, shades of pumpkins, and Indian plum reds. Then Indian summer temperatures pivoted on a dime. Local squirrels sensing the sudden change began gathering acorns, digging holes with both paws, and covering up their nutty treasure. Do they keep a mental map of where their winter provender is buried, I wonder?
This month of transition, Kit has been busy preparing for my birthday when I reached three quarters of a century plus one. I wanted no gifts. Only an evening here by the fire, shared with a small circle of family and neighbors. I baked a carrot-walnut cake from a Riggs family recipe now so faded I can hardly read it. No need. It lives in my head. Three cups of shredded carrots, eggs, oil, flour, baking soda, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and cream cheese frosting. Served with a splash of wine for toasting.
At the birthday celebration, the harvest table centerpiece was a gorgeous autumn bouquet from my San Diego niece Aliya, created by Izzy Belle at Grass Valley Florist & Cruz Thru Coffee. The crowning jewel of the bodacious creation is a peacock feather, featured on the shop’s business card. The mind races back to my final year teaching in Thailand over half a century ago when my Peace Corps pal Jim Lehman arrived at the little Bangkok bungalow that I shared with my student Chomsri and presented me with a full train of peacock tail feathers.
Years later, a lone peacock arrived one day at Breakfast Creek, our first home in MO, and spent a night in one of our black walnut trees. Maxine Martell, an artist friend visiting from Whidby Island, WA was so entranced by the mysterious visitor that she painted a collage immortalizing the peacock’s walkabout. And just this week, a Yuba News alert reported “two peacocks in the roadway on Penn Valley Drive near Indian Springs Road, not quite a muster but maybe a pride, or an ostentation. These Pavo cristatus are known to be quite loud and they’re omnivores, so let Animal Control deal with them.” Which leads me to wonder if Izzy Belle the florist is missing a pair of peacocks.
For the past month, Kit has been experiencing a sleep-awake-sleep pattern called “dorvay.” Not by choice, but because he’s wrestled with shoulder-pain issues for the past month. While reading Colson Whitehead’s novel Harlem Shuffle, the protagonist learns that the term refers to a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night. Charles Dickens used this awake time between sleeps to walk the streets of London and gather ideas for characters in his novels. Kit used his dorvay hours to write a five-act, one-page play about our relationship that he read aloud the evening of my birthday gathering. What a gift!
The following night, wrapped in an elegant Tiffany-inspired wool shawl that Kit had ordered from a catalog from The Met, we shared a birthday date at the National Exchange Hotel’s Lola dining room/bar—Walnut Paté with sourdough toasts and endive leaves; Red Kuri Squash with fried Oyster mushrooms, almond ricotta, red onion, and watercress; and a New York Steak with Celeriac, tarragon gremolata, and brown butter solids. Heaven!
These late October days, daughter Heidi and I are now decked out in matching plaid fleece jackets that she gave me for my birthday. Just in time for a Pacific storm of historic torrential proportions that brought rain, flooding, downed trees, and potential power outages last Sunday that lasted through the following day. After almost no rain since we arrived last April, Northern California experienced half an inch an hour in some areas from the Bay area to the Sierra Foothills. To prepare, we gathered up and covered porch furniture, rolled in the awning, and added gas to the generator…just in case. And, before Kit’s second MRI, we stopped at B&C Hardware to buy extra flashlights and a couple of sturdy snow shovels and SaveMart for extra milk, canned tomatoes, and assorted Progresso soups.
Saturday night, a final gift arrived just as the predicted rains began. Kit had secretly ordered three dozen homemade scones from our friend Sharmini Rogers in Columbia MO. For years she made light, crisp, irresistible scones that she sold at monthly Saturday Morning Book talks Kit organized for local writers, readers, poets, publishers, and book lovers. The scones were scheduled to arrive October 18, three days before my birthday. Due to an unexplained geographic detour by FedEx, they ended up in AZ and did not finally arrive until a week later—just as rain began to pour and the L.A. Dodgers lost Game 6 in the playoff series with the Atlanta Braves.
On the rainy Sunday when rain had much of Northern California hunkering down for the day, I perused a stack of lovely birthday books from Pat and Sheila, dear friends from our L.A. days. The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing; Yasmin Khan’s Ripe Figs: Recipes and Stories from Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus; and Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats…and Rufus. And from Anne and Brady Deaton, Julia Child: People Who Love to Eat Are Always the Best People. Tomorrow as the rains die down, I will pen notes of thanks to my sisters Kim and Kelly, Chomsri and other family and friends for their thoughtful gifts, cards and birthday wishes. Finally, in this severe weather-induced period of hibernation, I’ve found just the right moment to open Anthony Doerr’s newest novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land and lose myself in his tale of a book and characters across time and into the distant future connected to its story.
“Longer linger” Nebraska poet and U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser writes of his favorite month, then shares across the miles this rainy Sunday as I’m sitting by the fire, gathering October reflections of my own.