Oops!

Opened the kitchen curtain one morning recently to see this.

Not sure who precisely was responsible but suspicion leans heavily towards Felonious Feline, the feral roommate. As usual with this maddeningly evasive domestic cat-gone-rogue, proof of guilt is all always circumstantial. I’ve previously seen them perched with precarity on this very bird bath….

Birds of all shapes and sizes are heavily invested in the water source being upright and perpetually filled with water. Felonious Feline is heavily invested in stalking and terrorizing said birds.

Resistance is robust. Normally solitary robins have been gathering in great numbers around this oasis. Gorging on pyracantha berries and painting everything with splooshy orange hued bird poop (is robin guano a thing?) is thirsty work.

Speaking of an exquisite excess of orange, Queen butterflies (Danaus gilippus) are currently loving the last gasp of summer as expressed in a great Tithona blooming of flowers so intensely orange they are almost scarlet.

The gift of unseasonal warmth can’t last but some of us are enjoying these gilded days to the max. First frost is immanent, but until then the roommates, of the flora and fauna kingdoms alike, and I, are dancing in the Garden of Earthly Delights. There is no tomorrow when frost could wipe it all out tonight. But then again it might not. Party on!

The hot blondes of the outback (Sante Fe guero peppers) are gathering in to meet their fate, probably pickled.

I continue to eat well out of the garden with meals like this plate of oven roasted eggplant, sliced San Marzano tomato topped with aromatic Genovese Basil and pomegranate. Avocado from Mexico and crusty green chile cheese bread from a local farmers market are the only imports on this day, besides, of course, the olive oil on the eggplant slices.

Saffron harvest is almost over for another year.

The precious threads more valuable than any misers’ material horde are drying on a plate, featherlight on the scales against gold bars. Imagine a world where a saffron thread not gold coin is the measure against which all souls are weighed?

So too the amaranth everywhere all the time is more than ready for harvest, offering an infinity of tiniest black seeds. Scattering, impossible to corral completely.

My farmers market table recently reflected on the season.

This too shall pass. This diary is a record of brevity.

Recommended Reading:

A novel, this time, and unusual for me who doesn’t do all that futuristic fantasy genre stuff, set in the not to distant future.

Migrations by Charlotte Mcconaghy (2020) is one of the more compelling novels I’ve lost myself to this year. It’s an excruciating, heartbreaking and rigorous work, taking migration and unfixable brokenness (on the personal and planetary scale) as its theme yet somehow also manages to imagine hope into all the footloose, nothing left to lose drifting brokenness. This skillfully crafted novel hurt to read and left me bleeding, in the same way tattoos hurt and bleed like hell when flesh is being needled, but heal into indelible things of beauty. Is healing from extinction even a possibility. Can we survive our culpability?

Environmental fiction greats like Edward Abbey and Barbara Kingsolver wielded their imaginations and words this way, once upon a time, way back then, with different voices, in different eras, but their books have been gathering dust, and even derision (oh the level of delusion and willful ignorance!) on shelves. Another voice, possibly more haunting because of the chronicle of death foretold aspect, has joined the conversation.

If you haven’t already, read Migrations. The imperative is urgent.

Then go back and reread A Chronicle of Death Foretold, by Gabriel García Márquez, (1981) where the true mystery is why no one was willing or able to stop the murder.