Morning Sun Notes 0
A second day working at my desk in our new house. The windows look out on a small garden of rocks and moss, awash with sun until lunchtime. We are below street level on this side of the house, so there’s a retaining wall covered with a tangle of jasmine vines. Did you know jasmine leaves turned yellow in fall?
There is also a whispy tree covered in fronds which join the balcony to frame the morning sky.
At the root of the tree, shadows gather as the morning wears on. I sit and work on a dissertation year fellowship application (I’m doing 4 this fall), struggling with how to make it different from last year’s application.
This takes me through documents of random writing from last fall, which surprisingly or not, are about many of the same things still on my mind a year later: wanting children, dreaming about writing children’s books, and struggling to find creativity in my dissertation project.
A large, black, neighborhood cat poked its head through the open window as I read, startling me with its wide green eyes and plaintive meow.
It is all making me wonder, how much do we really change in one year?
Contrasting days 0
We live on the fog line now. The towering hills hold back the billows of gray some days, other days they weigh too much and pour across the peaks, wet and dripping. Today, a clear fall sky, a dry wind whipping the neighbor’s palm when I step out on the back porch.
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.
