daily fieldnotes

Stalking Color category archive

Elegance 2

Isn’t the detail on this porch just full of grace? It’s my favorite place to be in the summer here. All yellows and whites, and bright greens. An amaryllis, spider ferns, impatiens, and marigolds. In the mornings the air is cool, and the wind rustles the tall white curtains. We eat breakfast looking out, the breeze keeping the heat at bay for a little while. I can’t imagine coordinating my own porch so perfectly, or hanging up curtains outside, but they are so beautiful.

Ginkgo and Maple Light 3

It rained hard last night, and this morning the sidewalks and buildings looked scrubbed clean, waiting, like the floors of a restaurant not yet open for the day. Outside our house the rain drove the Ginkgo leaves to the ground, fanning around the tree like a skirt whose elastic has snapped. Fall comes late here, the leaves only beginning to fall with the post-Thanksgiving cold mornings and dark rainstorms, so it’s easy to forget it happens at all when other parts of the country are already talking about snow.

I am writing more, making phone calls, filling out papers, jotting down lists, finding hope in routine and action, inspiration in fiction (I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, which I can’t believe I’d never read given how much I loved The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer). It’s been a dark time, but the yellow wildness of these leaves on smooth city pavement, and satisfaction of moving at last, calms the worries.

As does my wonderful guy, with his humor and warmth and habit of not shaving until he can comb my hair with his chin.

And time with my dear friend, and her smiley little girl, playing in piles of yellow and red maple leaves, keeping the baby from eating (too much) mud, walking and talking about moving and our nomadic lives and how hard graduate school can be.

Did you know shaking a branch into a hail of yellow leaves could make a baby giggle endlessly? You should try it, there’s no feeling sad when your hair is full of leaves and an 8-month old is chuckling with glee in your arms.

A Dose of Fall Color 2

Went two states north for fall color this year, a last-minute trip to Seattle to spend time with an old friend. Someday I hope to live where there is more of this; San Francisco definitely leaves something to be desired in the fall color department….

Stalking Color 0

In the heat of summer, the fog descends, whipping past trees, blurring the edges of buildings, chilling the city like an air conditioner stuck on high. Day upon day of gray mornings, unchanging days, cold gray nights, the light at 7am hardly any different than the light at 7pm. It tends to depress me.

So recently I grabbed my camera and went stalking color, inspired by a series called stalking wonder on a blog I enjoy. Somehow it made the summer gray more bearable to think about bundling up, going for a walk, and looking for color amidst the city buildings shrouded in fog.

And I found the most glorious PURPLE bougainvillea. Turns out it grows in brilliant color all over the city, especially in the residential neighborhoods.