Life Being Life

I have to admit that my blogging has been low lately and I apologize to all of my faithful readers--I am teaching a class at the alma mater that I've never taught before, which is always a challenge. I've also, on the heels of my mother dying, lost a wonderful friend a week or so ago, a woman who had bravely fought lung cancer which had metastasized to her brain. So it’s been a sad time for me. I’ve been through the deaths of three major people in my life in the last six months and it is very hard to go through (and hasn’t done much for my creativity).

Still, I noticed a sweet surprise at work the other day—there’s a blossoming fruit tree right outside my office window, and there were a few fragile white blooms on it. It’s always hard to believe in the hope of warmer weather and sunny skies after such a hard winter. Winter’s not done with us here in Santa Cruz, either—yesterday, high winds blew down power lines on the upper road here and we were without electricity for hours.
The weather was cold and crisp, but I found myself taking out all my seed packets and looking at them, like a box of hoarded treasure—there are poppies, Lumina white pumpkins, giant and Thumbelina zinnias, Sunspot sunflowers, Moulin Rouge sunflowers (the packet promises “a rich velvety deep red” that will “steal the show in your gardens and bouquets,” “nest egg” gourds, which really look like Easter eggs, Heavenly Blue morning glories, cosmos, chocolate flower, Autumn Beauty sunflower, strawflower, Rosie O’Day and Oriental Nights sweet alyssum, Violet Queen cleome, Chater’s Double hollyhocks, butterfly flower, Virginian stock (an incredibly sweet-smelling flower), and bee balm. I got 90 percent of these seed packets from a woman who brings them to African dance class for free! Gardening has been perpetually important to my process as a writer.

And, as an update on Mr. Strega and me, we had a lovely Valentine’s day—he brought me pu-erh tea from Chaikhana in Santa Cruz (I’m kind of a connoisseur of tea these days, and pu-erh is one of my favorites), and I gave him a box of mini Reese’s Peanut Butter cups. It’s amazing we even had it in us to give each other our presents—we both have the world’s worst colds right now!

So, life is just being life these days. I found myself unable to work on my book after Mom died, but am picking this back up—I have literally about 20 pages to go, plus three or four recipes to compose.

So, that’s the update from the Ponderosa these days.