Cool Blue

29 Dec 2010, Boise

An inch of snow before dawn. The yards and rooftops and forks of trees piled white as clouds, and through them from the cabin window of my study I can see a robin's egg blue sky stretching out over the ruddy bare trees to the white hills across the plain. A frigid pale blue sky scrolled with thin clouds that look like they've just breezed off the sea. That springtime urge to travel, to move out into the land, to gain a ridge or walk a hillside in the sun, comes in winter too. Days like this ignite a spring inside you, especially after so many hibernating weeks of snow and sleet and cold. If I didn't have to work I'd haul the family up to Bogus and ski the trails up there. But work I must, and sharpen my daydreaming mind to the task ahead.

The novel has been finished for days now and I feel both liberated and desultory. The weight on my shoulders is also an engine of purpose at my back driving me forward, the engine and the rudder with my hand at the wheel as I scan ahead over the lake and study the ridges against the sky. I find myself seeking another project, when I know now is the perfect, rather the natural, time to take it easy, to sleep in and play with Ada and to go off to work after breakfast has been had (instead of sitting down for another session of writing). But it isn't easy. I wonder if until I get this novel published and get some kind of break if I'll ever rest over the matter. I recall what Steinbeck wrote to a friend about how it never got easier — he was on his fourth or fifth novel and by then he'd figured it should've been easier but it wasn't. Each book is it's own new and different ball game.

4 Jan 2011

Well, Obama came out of the scrum smelling like a rose. Just when it looked like he was in real trouble after the mid-term “shellacking”, he changed costume and stepped onto a new stage of politics: that of the centrist. Stage left you have the folks like me, progressive and pissed and feeling abandoned by our great white-black hope. Stage right are the Tea-party-ers, snorting and dagger wielding, ready to tear the theatre down to its Constitutional foundation once they assume power in the House. They now have the “hope” the left once had, and they'll soon have our disillusionment too. For center stage is where the action is. There, doing an even better impersonation of Clinton then Clinton ever did, is Obama, dancing to a two-base hit of Start Treaty ratification and the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell. The opening number which started the dance – and the ill tempers on the left – was the full extension of Bush's tax cuts, particularly those to the super rich. Nobody but the wealthiest in the country – and the poor saps who believe in the wealth-myth, and Obama's strategists – thought the tax deal was a good idea. For the rest of us it's an infuriating social injustice, especially in tough times like these for schools and families and social services. A typical tax refund for the upper bracket is more than an average American family earns in a year. Must capitalism be as corrupt as the Soviets portrayed it be?

But I'm getting off target. Nobody wants to see that sideshow, the desperate ventriloquism act so far to stage left we're bumping up against the curtains. What Americans want to believe is the same old show right down the middle, the one we know so well: The Play of the American Dream, in which everything turns out all right in the end if we just work together and don't rock the boat, don't over-regulate or over-tax the system that pours billions of dollars upwards into the hands of the few and the wise, the investors and the inventors of this great economic vessel, who, in due time, always right the ship and distribute it's surplus bounty fairly and evenly over the sea of bent backs below. There at center stage is the massive gleaming paper mache craft, Obama and Bernanke at the helm. Somewhere at the back of the cockpit Clinton is orating directions and Bush Jr. is strutting around in his aviator suit. Murdock has written the script and is working the lights. Stay true to the course, steady down the middle of a wake already carved for us. And merely because we can't see the mast-tops of the last boat to go before us shouldn't arouse doubt or suspicion that that long parade has dropped over the lip of a cascade we can't see. No, we're to keep our eyes on stage, on the dream and on the actors playing it out. And when finally we step outside the theatre into the streets of our lives we'll have the warm afterglow of their performance to sustain us. And should those memories tatter there'll always be another “reality” show on Fox to keep us believing, enamored of the myth instead of angered by its makers.

Winter Notes - Towards Solstice

13 November 2010, Boise

Bicycling to work into the foothills, climbing into the sun layer pouring across the ridges, the amber light in the yellow and ruddy and still-green treetops of the North End; various flocks of birds streaming like confetti over the valley across the pale turquoise sky. This new job couldn't have come at a better time for us. It involves renovating a house in the hills not far from our place. What was once quite a modern Eighties home is now in need of contemporary upscaling: new kitchen layout, new energy efficient windows, all the heavy oak trim and baseboard pulled for clear flat stock moulding. It's a fun project and the owner has a great eye for design. In fact he built the place in the Eighties and still has piles of period Architectural Digests to prove it. Now those mags are replaced with Dwell and Wallpaper, and perhaps in another twenty years the whole cycle will start over again. But like I said, it's a fun process.

Last week Republicans stormed back into congressional power, taking around 60 seats in the House on their way to controlling it (and halting just a seat short of commanding the Senate). Perhaps Obama did exchange hope for pragmatism, but how practical is missing your opportunity for real change by playing moderate, thereby losing your progressive base, and then getting reamed anyway by the far right for being a 'radical'? He should have played Bush-Cheney hardball from the start, rammed through genuine health care legislation, and then lost the landslide of seats in the House. The real loss the Dems suffered was not of seats, but of opportunity. And that was lost for taking half-steps. If you're going to go down in flames, at least take out a target on your way down.

4 December

It's snowing. Plump wet flakes that slide down the windows and paste the bare limbs of the trees and heap white the yards. This is our fourth or fifth snowfall in two weeks, and the neighborhood is piled high, the streets crested, and the hills are downy sheets billowing out of sight into the low sky. The strange thing is how content I am to watch it come down without the old need to go into it and ski. I'm waiting, or my body is. It's been a decade since I lived in winter and didn't have to drive three hours to it, and my body needs a little more time to absorb the season. But as I light the fire and romp about the living room with Ada and have breakfast with sleepy Anna, a certain spark is lit and starts to grow, a long-waiting pilot light turns up its flame and you can hear the old furnace grumble into action. Diving out into the snow is a little like first jumping into a river: after the cold shock of it, you're warm as you want to be, that is, as warm as your spirit is alive.

That's why kids hardly feel the cold. We bundle up Ada tight as a tick but her engine's so warm already she could go out naked and melt a path across the yard. It's hard to say she loves the snow – any more than she loves everything else about being outside. “Walk” is her word for going out, and it's now her favorite word after ball (and mamma and daddoo, of course.) After a big snow the other day I walked her down the hill to the park where a hundred or more kids were sledding the steep ridge known as Camel's Back. It was a carnival of cruising sleds, scarfs flying. Wisely the park ties hay bails to all the nearby trees to limit knockouts. When I was a kid they skipped the ounce of prevention and just had an ambulance sitting in the parking lot on weekends.

It didn't take Ada long to want to join in the fun. I picked up one of the busted jalopies in the brush and sat Ada in it and tugged her a short ways up slope. Gave her a push and she slid wobbling down a dozen yards to relative safety. Relative because all the while kids were kamikazeing down around her. When I rejoined the girl she had a serious look on her face like she'd either had a fright or was demanding to know what the hell I'd put her through. Then she put her mittened fists together, tapping them in the sign for more. (Anna taught her that small bit of sign language — and I guess that's her other favorite word after ball.) So I pulled her up the hill and gave her a push and she skidded down with great concentration. Seems she took the whole affair quite seriously, like she had some future in it which she wasn't going to derail with any frivolous shouts or peels of laughter. After an hour of riding I finally pulled her out of the sled and she protested with tears. Of course that caved in my resolve to get home and I put her in the flapping plastic sleigh for another couple runs. Still that didn't sate her. On what I thought would be the last of the last rides she saw me coming for her with what must've been a poorly disguised look in my eyes because she got out of the sled and began pulling it herself by the chord up the hill. The tiny puffed critter wobbling and slipping up the ant hill tugging an oversized snowbuggy behind her was too cute of a sight. The girl has spunk, that's for sure. And maybe not a shabby future on skis. We sledded a few more runs and wetted the snow with tears on the way home.

27 December

Christmas was a sweet one. The neighborhood strung with lights and edged with snow. We were invited to a couple parties, Christmas Eve and day, and it was a fine feeling to bundle up and stroll over under the arching maple trees to a warm house full of cheer and beer and new friends greeting you like family. At the Christmas Eve party there were other kids around Ada's age and the youngsters roamed underfoot and played about the house as the rest of us made dinner (paella cooked outside over an open fire) and drank sangria. It was a Spanish-themed party and a good one. Certainly Ada didn't know anything about Christmas but she did sense something was up, the holiday-glow of yet another late night out at a party with kids and toys and music streaming about the place. She was in good spirits, played nice most of the time, and didn't seem to tire, even on the way home, insisting to walk.

But the next day she came down with a fever. Her illness made the experience of opening presents a kind of lurid color dream of slow-motion puff explosions. (Or that was my slightly hung-over interpretation.) Which is to say she liked the present opening sensations more than the toys that issued from them. The grandparents were more than generous and if it wasn't for them we would've had a pond instead of a sea of wrapping paper on the floor.

Anna made blueberry pancakes and fluffy scrambled eggs while I got the fire crackling and put on Christmas records: Loretta Lynn, Bing, even a Kitty Wells Christmas that Anna found at the thrift store. After all the excitement we lay down on the bed together to rest. Poor fevered Ada was as docile as a wounded bird. She's never like that, so when her engine idles you know something's amiss. Later though, after some napping, she popped back with enough convincing pep that we decided to make a go of another friend's party in the neighborhood. We bundled up and walked down the hill and across the park and west a few more blocks to the home of our new dear friends T. and J. They had a fire going — oak that J. had split from one of his downed trees — and T. was baking away in the kitchen. She is a wonderful cook, a wonderful Italian cook, and to show up at her house is to be offered fresh coffee and treats of all kinds from her oven. This day she had delicate pastries, ham quiche, sizzling wursts, and rich cheeses set out on the kitchen bar, where we sat and drank flutes of prosecco. Other friends of theirs arrived and Ada ran about flirting with the teenage boys of the house. Already she's got a thing for older men. It was a lovely afternoon and we were sad to go.

Sadder still for that despair that always skulks in towards the end of Christmas day. The neighborhood looked a little grey and the house lights beginning to glow did so cheerlessly. There's always a hangover to good times, isn't there? Physical, spiritual or otherwise? Even the sweetest times leave a bittersweet nostalgia in the wake of their passing. But that's life, right? Still, we couldn't help but envy our families in Germany and Italy, where the Christmas season isn't a couple day pause in the work week, but a season of celebrating that lasts almost as long as winter does. Ada slept well that night. We watched a little of A Christmas Story and pretended for an hour that the world was still plump with magic and swirling martinis. And the next morning it was: Ada's illness was somehow gone, I got the records and the fire roaring again, and Anna made another delicious breakfast.

The Trey McIntyre Project

2 December 2010, Boise

If you haven't heard of the Trey McIntyre Project you either know as little about modern dance as the rest of us, or don't live in Boise. The dance company moved here from San Francisco a couple years back and besides bringing a boatload of talent to the area, their spirit of community and creative camaraderie has galvanized the arts scene here. And having seen them perform I can say they made a modern dance lover out of someone who had appreciated it the way a linebacker might appreciate hearing a bird call in the trees at the edge of the field during a break in tackling drills. Which is to say, I haven't paid much attention to dance over the years, but on one viewing its beauty sang deeply into me. Nothing touches it, except perhaps jazz or opera. Like those arts, modern dance combines the physical with the meta-physical, within a rhythm or field that is at once predetermined and spontaneous, stage-set and otherworldly. A friend of mine, the writer Robert Mailer Anderson, once described opera as glass blowing while walking a tightrope. Well these guys are doing something just as impressive, not with their voices but with their springing dashing contorting bodies, and so you might say they're skipping rope over hot-blown glass, making Murano-like patterns in the molten air around them. Again though, for folks around here, better than their feats on stage are their contributions to the community, on scales both large and philosophical, and small and personal as a drink at the bar. In fact we were at a bar downtown when Trey said to me: I love Boise. You have to put up with some small town stuff, but there are great people doing great things here, and you don't have to put up with the big city crap. Besides, the big city crap is always there when you want it.

So TMP puts on an annual art show called 9+1, in which invited artists working in a range of mediums —from film, to oils, to installations—come up with a project inspired by the dance company. There are nine dancers, and Trey, the choreographer, is the plus one. Anna photographed the dancers as they practiced a Basque-inspired piece called Aranza. By slowing the camera's shutter speed and obscuring the focus, she produced a batch of photographs that were darkly blurred with ethereal orbs of colored light. She then made realistic paintings of the photos. The result, with their glossy dark backdrops, are what you might call Dutch still-lifes with light. Ribbons of movement caught in the moment, a twirl, a blur, captured and held closely to view, still and potent and vibrating, revealing the dancers for what they are, light and energy, which is to say spirit. The paintings are meditative works. By viewing them they put you in a serene state of mind. Your function follows their form. And in that second of release, suspended in the air between worlds of thought and hassle and ambition, you become a dancer yourself.

The 9+1 opening was a kick, too, to say the least. Held at their studios in one of the old warehouses by the river, the show was bisected into two rooms, one a traditional gallery space, the other, deemed the lowbrow room, more like a carnival setting. You could sip wine and ponder in the former, or swill beer and yak it up in the latter. One of the hits of the lowbrow room was an installation piece by Amy Westover and Jennifer Wood. Their elaborate Dance-O-Matic human-vending-machine took your money gladly and gave you back something to remember, a keepsake of dancer trading cards or a jolt of spontaneous human-mechanical interaction, depending on your fancy. The DIY boutique Bricolage set up a whimsical shop, where you could browse or buy artwork of theirs and others, notably the precociously insightful color-crayon portraits of each dancer done by a certain five-year-old by the name of Soren. It was a hell of a fun night. And judging by the number of pieces that sold, both locally and elsewhere, the event was a pecuniary success as well. But like a dazzling performance on stage, you had to see it in person to truly know, and remember, the brilliance of the moment.

Devil in the Woodpile

22 October 10, Boise

Yesterday I went to collect firewood. There hasn't been much doing for work around here and it felt good to have a solid task at hand and to be in charge of it, to be able to make something which, if it wasn't money, was just as valuable as we'd be needing the heat this winter. After cleaning and tuning the Stihl 290 I loaded my truck with the saw and a shovel, gloves and ear muffs and saw tools, coffee thermos and a small lunch, and drove down the hill to Eight Street. The dirt road climbed steeply winding into the Boise Front. Below was the wide valley, the sky hazy from four days of high pressure and a fire somewhere off in the hills. Below timberline were sheep grazing among the sage. There was a white canvas shepherd's wagon parked on an open ridge and later, driving back down, I'd see the dark-skinned man in charge of the sheep and wonder if he was Basque or Latino, riding a horse and leading two hobbled horses down the hill.

The road passed the grey poles of standing dead from the 95' burn, then switch-backed into the living pines. It joined the ridge road and I followed the latter north, leaving behind a few kooky cabins in a draw for a sunny stretch of open ridge that picked my spirits up. I couldn't understand why, but I was strangely a little nervous about the venture. Nothing of the task was foreign to me, I've always felt comfortable and confident alone in the woods, and my objective was basic enough: find some good firewood in the form of dead standing or slash piles, limb and buck the poles, stack them in the pickup, be careful not to slip with the saw or trip over any rolling limbs, and enjoy the quiet and the view as much as possible while still hard at work. Yet I was on edge somehow, riddled by the feeling that failure was at my heals and unless I was diligent and even a tad lucky, I would be driving back down that road with an empty truck and perhaps worse, a bandaged limb.

And at first there were problems. I found a decent slash pile and hauled out the few long poles worth bucking and got to work. But soon the saw began dying on me. I figured the idle was too low for the altitude so I used my tiny flathead to adjust the carborator but the engine kept bogging down at low speeds. Every time I let off the trigger, the saw hanging from one hand, to haul over or reset a trunk, the saw would sputter dead. It became so unnerving, as though something larger was after me, a pestering fate that did not want me to succeed. And in my impatience, instead of taking ten minutes to sit down with the saw and solve the problem, I pushed on, gassing the saw in idle, the chain rolling while I worked with my other hand. It was foolhardy of me and I knew it. If I'd been my squad boss I'd have given myself a good earfull over the matter.

After gutting the first pile, the truck bed less than half full, I drove back along the road to another area I'd seen. It was less a pile than a clearing where some logging had taken place and there were skid trails running down through the brush to a stand of big grey widowmakers. They had left a number of logs and kiln-dry poles were everywhere. This was the pile I should have hit when I saw it instead of driving on to scout further. My spirits picked up seeing the stash. From down the hill I dragged about a dozen twenty-foot trees up near the truck, took a minute to eat an apple and granola bar, and before getting started fiddled with the saw. Indeed the problem was with the idle speed, and once I got the mix right, I felt some relief. I topped off the gas-mix and the bar oil, and pulling the chord felt the saw roar to life. Then positioning myself around the perimeter of the criss-crossed logs, worked my way in, lopping at the ends. The work began to calm me. It was going well and finding a rhythm I soon forgot my worries and the strains in my back and forearms and after a couple hours of cutting and stacking and hauling up new poles to buck, the truckbed was nearly full: close to three-quarters of a cord. I had to force myself to stop. I would have cut more, but time was running out, as I'd promised Anna I'd be back by mid-afternoon to watch Ada so she could paint.

I packed the saw and fuel cans and the empty oil containers some assholes had left on top of the stacked wood, took a minute to gaze out at Shaffer Butte, granite humps shining in the sun through the blue pines, then started the drive down. The truck moved like an overloaded donkey down the narrow, deep-rutted road. Which is to say, slow and sure-footedly. Once I had to pull to the side of the hill to let an up-coming truck pass, and suddenly I felt the bed slide and pitch into the gully. I had been feeling pretty good about my accomplishments, but in that moment of sliding all of my anxiousness returned. But what the hell was I so touchy about? And why wouldn't the condition pass, even after I'd achieved my goal? I put the Nissan in four and the old donkey pulled easily out of the gully. Everything would turn out fine, the trip would be fruitful. Yet my apprehension would remain until I pulled into the driveway of our home.

And I think to some small degree I can sympathize with what people were going through during the Great Depression. I have been without a steady dependable job since February, and our savings are getting low, the shrinking numbers like the shrinking hours of daylight as winter nears, and the one thing for now that I can do to stave off that mounting cold is to cut a truckload of firewood for the house; the one thing immediately before me, in my hands, that I can do and which no boss or no dithering potential employer can take from me: a cord of wood, better than money in the bank, stacked against the house like a big security blanket.

Yet if I should fail at this small thing, then what does that say about the greater project of bringing my family up here to Idaho? If I can't go up into the hills and come back with a load of firewood, how can I manage to find a good job and pay the rent and put good food on the table? That is what is weighing on me, I realize. Stacked atop the cord of wood is a much larger pile of worries. But I can't let myself be preoccupied with that larger thing. I must watch each step, each revving of the saw and sinking of the blade into each log, white petals of sawdust spitting onto the ground. I must watch the uneven ground and the growing pile of bucked logs and not stumble.

Birds Nest

27 Sept 10, Boise, Idaho

Just in time before the cool days of Fall, we've moved into a new house, a rental that we might have the option to buy. And after six turbulent months – involving three moves, and four different jobs for me – the place feels like a true destination for us, a homecoming. On the edge of the North End, where the hills begin to rise out of the canopy of trees above Eighth Street, our mid-century brick home is perched on a terrace that looks through sycamore and silver maple and crab apple trees into a wide western sky deepened with slot views through the roofs and trees across the street. We can see the high, grass-tan ridge of Camel's Back park glowing in the afternoon sun to our northwest, close enough it seems you could throw one of our crab apples and hit it. Our front yard is terraced above the sloping street with rip-rapped walls of basalt from the desert plain. A swing for Ada hangs from the bulking limbs of a sprawling sycamore right outside the living room window. The house has wood floors and a fireplace and its airy floor plan is at all times of the day dappled with light and adrift with the sounds of birds and lawn mowers and the occasional barking dog in the neighborhood. It's quite a gardened, day-dreamy little place. One of my favorite features is how my study (also known now as the guest room), like my study in SF, faces out with a view of the terrain and western sky ahead. There's a feeling of being a bird aloft in the trees, able to study the animal and human creatures below, to see what's coming from the weather, the scheming clouds. Able to daydream a little, or write, or ponder what needs or doesn't need pondering.

And it's a damn fine and fun yard for Ada to play in. The big canopies of limbs stretching above and the glimpses of limitless sky through their leaves. And of course the swing: she loves that thing like a pet pony and every morning now she points from the breakfast table window out at the dangling contrivance with an urgency that leads to tears if we don't go out. Once we do, and she's swinging away, she sings and hums and trills to herself as she takes in the world around her, the skittering squirrels and the scouting cats and the crab apples making a fruit salad of the yard. Anna loves the place too. Soon we'll have her studio set up in the garage, and the handsome house is suited to our mid-century-Americana-contemporary leanings in furniture and décor. But it's more than that. There is a serenity here, a garden calm at the edge of the hills, a good fung shui to the house's orientation and character, and Anna finally has a place that feels home to her, where she can decorate and create and flourish. We feel deeply good here, as rooted as the big tree in the yard, and I'm grateful for that. Though sometimes I come home from a night shift, walking up the rise into the opening stars to our sleeping home and wonder how I got so lucky, and thank whoever or whatever loaded the cards in our favor. Though I have a suspicion it was Anna who did that, as believing in and deserving of that kind of spiritual fortune stuff as she is.

All for His Country

15 May 10, Kuna, Idaho

We drive out onto the Snake River Plain to see my old professor and friend EB. It's been a warm weekend and the maples, elms, oaks, and lilacs are in full canopy as the dainty flowers have wilted away. The anticipation of summer is mixed with a sentimentality of spring's passing. When we pull up EB is sitting on his front porch, in the shade of his birch and Russian Olive trees, enjoying the panorama of his five acre property with a view of the snow-streaked Owyhees to the south above his fruit trees. EB hobbles across the yard to greet us. The tough old bird, gone portly and half-blind with illness, gives us hugs and smiles and lights up like a kerosene lamp when Ada reaches her hand out to him. We install ourselves on his porch and get re-acquainted. It's been two years since Anna and I last saw EB, and while his wits are still sharp, his humor still playfully cutting, his spirit tough and independent as ever, his body has suffered from the mysterious ailments that have beset him since the week he drove his truck to New York City and volunteered to help in the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Centers.

“Polymailgia is what the doc says I have. Many pains. Hell, I could've told him that,” quips EB. He shows me how he can move his left thumb like a flipper. “I broke it reaching for something that wasn't there. When the doctor looked at it, he said, 'I don't see it on your records.' That's cause I didn't come in. The doc wanted to know why not. I told him, 'You know, my dad used to say, if it doesn't hurt worse than a mule kicking you, walk it off.”

EB's story of late is an unjust one. Here is a man who flew reconnaissance flights over the USSR during the cold war, and over Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt during the years of struggle for self-rule in those countries, and who again volunteered his services for his country during 9-11, an effort that resulted in his present afflictions. Yet somehow he doesn't qualify for VA health care benefits and therefore must pay close to three thousand dollars a month for his health insurance and myriad medications, a cost that is fast eating away his retirement savings. Add to this scenario the temperament of its protagonist, an authentically independent Westerner, a man who's voted Republican his whole life and has rarely asked for help from anybody except when the orchard or fields demanded it (and then he paid for that help), and you get a very ironic study of the present state of health care in this country; of a society that promulgates the ideals of rugged individualism alongside heroic sacrifice for country, yet provides little or no reward, or social safety net, for those who act out those ideals. A man fights for his country, suffers for it, votes for a political party that is antagonistic to health care overhaul, and thereby must continue fighting the rest of his life just to keep alive. It's a story Anna has urged me to write, and one, as we sit around talking and catching up on our lives, I consider asking EB about. But the timing never feels quite right, and I holster the urge for another day.

After a little while we get up to walk around the property. I lend EB a hand to get him out of his chair. If he sits or lies still for more than twenty minutes, his body starts to seize up with pains. It makes for a rough night of sleep, he tells me, without a hint of complaint. We stroll through the tall grass down to the orchard. EB points out the tiny apricots starting on a bough and names all the different apple and apricot and nectarine trees. Every tree on the verdant property was planted by him, except for one big blue spruce, over the last twenty-two years. I hold Ada up so she can put her nose in an apple blossom. She's learning to smell flowers, artlessly breathing in through her nostrils as she clamps her mouth shut, her face pensive as if it were a vintage wine or cod liver oil being sampled.

“It's been a hell of a spring,” says EB. “I keep a weather journal, and this is the coldest, windiest spring I can remember. We used to pick cherries in early June. Now it won't be till July at the earliest. The farmers are all having to replant because the soil temperature hasn't gotten above forty-five. We're mid May, for cryin' out loud. Look at my roses there, died off from the frost.”

Anna asks when the fruit trees will be ready for picking, and EB tells her in August. He invites us to come out. “Hundreds of pounds of fruit that'll just rot on the ground if you don't come pick it. I can't do it anymore.”

“I'd like to can some of it,” says Anna.

“That's easy enough. Apple sauce is my favorite. Core, peal and chop, put it into a cooker, go off with a six-pack, and when you come back, apple sauce. Can it, and later you pour it into pies. That's what I like to do.”

I ask him about the plastic detergent bottles hanging from random boughs. “Fly traps. For the European fruit fly, also known as the … maggot around here. Put water and a little detergent in the bottles and the flies can't get out. Better than pouring pesticides everywhere. I don't go for all that. Besides, what's a little worm here and there? Cut around it, use what's good. The worm won't hurt you anyway.”

Listening to him makes me think of the summer afternoons I'd spend with my grandma cutting and canning fruit, and doing just as he described with worms or bad portions. Simple, practical, unsqueamish attitudes about food and making it.

The orchard is a serene and dreamy place, it's white- and pink-flowering limbs delicate against a pale blue sky marbled with clouds stretching above the Snake River Plain. Ada is as content as ever, and I want the feeling of the orchard to sink deep within her, to be there as a place, both of memory and of aspiration, a dreamy childhood sensation, and perhaps an artful hope and pursuit of her latter years. Speaking of pursuits, EB asks of our search for a property in the North End, and I tell him if we could find a place that had even a portion of his open garden space, we'd be delighted.

We make our way around the back of the house, past his bird feeders and the back porch that faces to the north, to his wide-open garage. There, among yard and hand tools and lawn mowers and old bicycles, EB shows us the project he's been working on the last years. From willow and other semi-hard wood limbs he's stripped and lacquered walking sticks of all proportions, fastening them with leather laces through a bored hole at the top and a rubber shoe at the bottom. He sizes us up each with a stick.

“You'll have to make one for Ada,” I suggest.

EB's eyes widen with the charge. He then instructs me to pick through some of his “redundant” garden tools, and encourages us to get to work planting. “At least tomatoes and peppers, in pots, so you can take them when you move.”

We sit again in the shade, and make plans to visit again when the fruit is ready, and soon it's time to go. As we say our goodbyes, EB hugs Ada and Anna, and reaches out shake my hand. There is a funny precedent here, one that EB and I have a habit of re-enacting. Nearly twenty years ago, after EB and I had first become friends at the University, I hugged the old codger after a long afternoon of walking out on the Plain. It took the man aback, and he said to me quite seriously, “You're the only man I ever hugged.” Since then he would bemoan the act, yet somehow expect it, whenever we parted or greeted each other. So now, after Anna has gotten her hug, I say to EB, “What about mine?” The old mule laughs, says, “You make fun of me every time,” and then gives me a warm embrace. “I don't hug men,” he re-affirms to Anna, “Unless they're gay. Gay men, I'll hug. That's what they do.”

As we pull out along the dirt road and drive around the back of his property, I give a couple taps of the horn, in lieu of the waves we used to exchange when he could make it to the top of the knoll in time to see me off through the olive trees.

Down from the Roof into the Garden

6-10 May 10, Boise

Coupeau, a roofer who occupied a 10-franc room on the top floor, had his tool bag on his back . . . “Say, what weather this is for May! It's biting cold this morning.”

– Emile Zola's L'Assomoir

Six am; the thermostat reads twenty-nine degrees as I happen to read this passage in Zola's novel and start at the coincidence; a little cozy reading before I go out into the cold to work on the roof and install siding on the neighbor's place. It's damn cold; how dearly I'd rather be reading about Coupeau's toils than have to go out and endure them myself.

It's been a blustery, dramatic spring. Whereas the winter was mild, with snow fall at sixty to eighty percent of normal around the state, its passing has been a convulsive death throe. There was one warm spell in March, but since then the weather has been at turns frigidly blue or stormy wet, providing only a handful of days warm enough to go out without a coat. The lilacs have bloomed early, their cones of purple and ivory held in the air pertinaciously as hail lashes down from torn skies. But if this sounds like a complaint, it's not. Yesterday, two stories up on scaffolding, I looked out over the greening trees at the tall white islands of cumulus drifting across the turquoise sky, the clouds shining and coved with shadow, the ranks of them going on as far as you could imagine to the west and possibly even to the sea. This last week our weather has arrived from Alaska, the chilled currents whipsawed down here by the jet stream.

A new friend of mine, M.L., who owns a modern furniture store here, loves the weather. He's from Boise and is accustomed to the usual warmer, more gradual springs. Yet being a gardener, he likes what this prolonged cool spell is doing to his garden. “The roots really get a chance to sink in, establish themselves, before the heat comes on.” I don't know much about that. I do know my hands are rough and split and the mornings require a hat, down vest, jacket and shell to keep the breezy cold from paralysing me up on the scaffolding. And that I'd rather be inside reading. But that's often my plight, regardless the weather.

And I know the Boise river is flowing high, nearly bank-full, though not as high as last spring. And if you go to the farmer's market on Saturday morning all you'll find for produce are hot-house varieties and starters and herbs. But most of the shade trees are in leaf now, their green a bright new shade that should darken in the coming weeks. Only the catalpas and sycamores in town and the alders and willows in the hills are holdouts. The warmth will come. And then the hard-driving heat. And hopefully by then we'll be inside doing the finish carpentry on the house.

- - - - - -

Yesterday we were the picture of domestic pastoral bliss: me mowing the lawn that had grown tall as alfalfa in the front yard, Anna pulling weeds from the flower beds and sweeping clean the sidewalk as Ada toddled about the mown portion of the yard, pushing up on three points while trying to put a stick in her mouth. The clouds had broken and the warm breeze tossed white shreds across the blue sky while we worked contentedly outside for an hour or so. I was tired from work, but nothing like a cold beer and a kiss from the wife to give you your pep back.

Going round the yard, ducking under the thick-leaved maple trees, watching Anna sweep, her fine brown arms showing from her blouse, glancing over to be sure Ada wasn't getting into trouble, I had the thought: “wow, we're Boiseans now. We're playing house and tending the yard and I've got a steady job and Anna has her routine and has found her way about town and it could be 1950, or even farther back, if it weren't for the cars passing on the street, and we're a little pioneer family settling the outskirts of the new town on the edge of the Rockies.” Or something a little silly like that. All we needed was a cow in her stall and chickens floating about the yard. (The neighbors do have chickens, by the way.)

There was such a serene and industrious pleasure in our all being at work together. I think that's my single greatest complaint about having a job: spending eight-plus hours a day with people who aren't my family, aren't even good friends. Certainly working with family has it's strains and dangers. But Anna and I work well together. We've got similarly proportioned senses of industry, completeness, aesthetics. . . and we've talked about going into business together. The field that keeps popping up is interior design. Anna with her artistic and design and color-consultant skills; me with my building, electrical and lighting and cabinet installing abilities, and my own decent eye for design. We might have something there.

Last weekend we went to the Boise Green Expo, where we made some good contacts that could provide a means of getting Anna more experience with interior design. Anna's big worry is that neither of us have any business sense: we're not coin-chasing capitalists, or even small-business savvy in the least. Of course that's key. But I think we've got something more than that. We've got taste. And the schooling and experience to back up that taste. And that's something most business types don't have. You see proof of it everyday here with poorly laid-out or decorated stores and shops (faux finish! faux finish!) and houses that cost half a million but look like they hatched right out of the suburbs. There are some good designers here, certainly. The question is whether there's enough demand to go around for them and ourselves, the new couple in town, looking like a pair of hayseeds in our front yard working away until the sky goes pink in the west and Ada starts to get fussy for dinner. We're all pioneers in some way or another, when you start out at something new.