A strong west wind

 It's been a while, I know...but words come when they come. 

I have been away to San Antonio after a long absence. So much to say, of course, about my time there. Really, I tell myself, a week's stay is way too short.  There are too many people, places, directions to catch up with and explore. I used to live there, and in a few ways, I still do.

But I didn't have time to write right away, because the garden here at home has taken my energy...not only because of spring, but in good part because of my San Antonio visit.  Gardens, gardens, public and personal, borrowed and scrutinized, walked through and relaxed in.  What do I travel for, it seems, except for gardens and museums?  This time, alas, the museums took short shrift.

Visits with friends...nice, long ones, gratefully often more than one meeting...took up my days. It is so easy to slide back into their stories, lives, doings.  

Knowing streets, seeing their sameness and changes, following old tracks and finding new ones does the same.

There are old favorites to meet at...Twin Sisters, for one, in the heart of New Braunfels Avenue...and new ones, Scratch Kitchen, on San Pedro, which I could walk to each morning or bring friends along. Gardens there, too!  In an old house so native one sank right into its charm, it has  terraces with tables of all sizes settled among shifting shade. 

Succulents in vintage cans along the rock walls set their own mood.

 The food was fresh and wonderful, the coffee and teas good. Each morning, pastries from their commissary arrive; you have to be quick to grab your favorites...often they are gone by noon. The proprietor, Becky Medellin, whose father, a Navy cook, inspired her love of catering, with recipes handed down from family, and her helpers are cheerful and accommodating.  Begun in Edinburg, Texas, she has owned the place here for six years, and clearly the neighborhood of houses and offices is grateful, not only for the cafe in just the right spot, but also because she and her husband have been slowly restoring the historic property.

The weather in San Antonio was its gift to me...gorgeous blue skies, temperate air...and those breezes...the same each day except two, when one day welcome rain came to lift  things a little and another rose to over 90 degrees, though it began and ended with a nice chill.

With friends and on my own, afternoons found me in one garden or another, beginning with the Botanical Garden, just north of Fort Sam Houston, gated as of old.  It seemed to me that things had become a little more formal there than last I saw it...plots of seasonal blooms on one hand, laid out within rock walls in the sun; mazes of high stonework along more stone walks holding shadier blooms.  I found myself wandering more quickly over the bridge through the small Japanese garden to find the paths into the gardens where the real natives crowd each other like lazed sunbathers.

The town is getting ready for Fiesta, an April event going back forever, it seems.

At Maggie's ( "Welcome to Mexico," she says of her garden pots and house) San Antonio's colors come alive, but she's planning more.  

So, one afternoon we squeeze in a visit to Shades of Green, the garden store on Sunset that I always liked.  We consider options, but I am the one who finds plants...she has to wait on her choice to come in.  

What's that, you ask?  You shopping for plants in Texas...why?  Because...

I haven't told you about the house I stayed in that week, an Airbnb hosted by a young couple, Reina and Adrian, in a part of town I am fond of, it being near everything, walkable, explorable, homey.  And old...one of the secret older neighborhoods San Antonio has, not on the tourist maps.

The house is an old bungalow, built in 1910 by Reina's great-grandparents, where her grandmother was born and other relatives have lived all these years.  Reina and Adrian have been leasing it from the family, and hope to own it themselves one day to return it to a home for a family.  Meanwhile, they live in the back part of the house, and have turned the three rooms in the front...spacious, high-ceilinged, thick-walled spaces...into the calm, peaceful, comfortable and comforting guest quarters I was lucky enough to find.  

But back to plant-buying 1,500 miles from home.  Driving to my airbnb the afternoon I arrived, I looked at the house and wondered whether anyone lived there.  The double squared yard in the front was almost empty of growth,  a few plants left to hold ground.  In the last years, South Texas has had some unusual freezes, which you can see in the brown edges of the ubiquitous palms along the streets and yards.  Things will grow back, of course, barring a terrible drought this summer.  In the temperate weather of my trip, they had begun to green.

Per directions, I parked in the back of the house, and rolled my suitcase down the carriage-wide driveway and up onto the front porch, where the house suddenly wrapped me in its spirit.  Inside, Reina's clear, clean, artful style and Adrian's renovations both took me by surprise and bade me home all at once.  I began to love that house.

You have to know about houses and me.  Either I fit into them or I don't.  It doesn't matter whether it's my house or your house or a rented room, therein I nest, or soon fly unsatisfied. (I've been known to rearrange furniture in a hotel room.)

The inside of the house was perfect for me...high ceilings, cool color on the walls, walls which sent air from below the house up into the rafters.  I turned the air conditioners off and enjoyed the freshness through the front screen door.  At night traffic and train hummed and bumped along the nearby streets, but I slept through.  In the old kitchen, the table by the window gave me a space for coffee, my journal...and a sketch pad on which I drafted designs for that front yard.  

Yes.  Because that house needed its garden and I needed that garden there.  I wandered the neighborhood and looked at the possibilities.

Now, I knew perfectly well that a young couple working hard on a house they loved, while working their own jobs as well, didn't have time to get to a garden yet, though the bones of the old one was clearly evident.  I considered a way to minimize what they'd have to do and still have a garden the house would appreciate.  So I laid out a plan, got out one morning to pull out dead plants, and then, to get Reina and Adrian started, Maggie and I chose a few they could ease in with.  The resident expert at Shades of Green helped by sharply pointing out the errors on my plan.  "Everyone thinks that water is the problem with keeping a garden.  It's not.  It's sun...plants need to be in the right relation to the sun."

When all this planning was revealed to them at last, Reina and Adrian thought me an odd guest, to be sure, but seemed more amused than offended, and talked about their own plans over a spring dinner together on the porch on my last night.  The evening was fading when we gathered ourselves together to part.

There were other gardens in my wanders, too...the sculpure garden at the McNay disappointed a bit, though the walk through was peaceful.  I took back roads to get everywhere, driving or walking, so the yards both plainly and elaborately landscaped were lessons in the way to flower a dry climate.  (Grass isn't the way to go.)  Spring is (mostly) kindness itself in South Texas, bluebonnets still here and there, and pinks.  On the highways I didn't get a chance to travel, I imagined the Mexican hats and spikey orange wildflowers I can never remember the name of taking their turn to dazzle.

Slices of the heart otherwise remain in San Antonio.  In due course, I drove out to the cemetery.  Cleaned off Michael's grave, put down stones...some for me, and some for others not able to be here, I tell him. It is his birthday, so I talk  about the garden I am fixing for him at home, which, after nearly two years, I have finally settled on (indeed, I got right to it when I returned...that's what's taken my time this week).  I talk about the day, beautiful, with cool breezes...and sorrow, the sharp edge to life.  I walk around to see that others I have known have come to rest here.

Near the last day, I ventured with difficulty down to La Villita...street construction blocked nearly every road...where I found Ron in an artists' coop, a portraitist who drew on, of all things, fine sandpaper.  He showed me why it worked so well for him.  Walking through the old village, then along the river, filled now with eating establishment and tourist shops, I looked in vain for the galleries that were once  among them.

Instead, the walk led me, accidentally, to a museum of Western Art, where curiosity drew me.  Though I am not a fan particularly, of what's usually called western art, the three floors over two buildings lent me its sense of history, its art on walls and podia, its carefully preserved collections on floors, and its family history in videos...another lesson in the lives which built the region we know so differently.

Tired by then, I remembered that Bonnie had told me to come see Grant's ceramics, his work for decades.  At the driveway, I looked at his totems and masks and creatures in the front yard...goodness!  I thought.  I am already in another museum.  Inside, even moreso.  In the foyer, a wall of beautiful, delicate, starkly faced masks stopped me (I neglected to take a picture of them, though they were my favorite.) They'd redone their house some years ago, and made it a showplace for his art, as well as the African art they had begun with.  

From Maggie, too, whose paintings and drawings make a museum of her house, though they shift from space to space, I felt surrounded by a culture that blooms as richly as gardens. 

 In the same way, Susan and I talk books and whole worlds open from her reading.  She leaves me with two I would not have found, perhaps, on my own, and writes me about another, which I immediately order for home...Gail Caldwell's A Strong West Wind, a memoir of a life in the west; it arrived yesterday. 

In the morning, my last in the town, I drive back to Maggie's to return a cloth she lent me to carry those plants back to the house, and end up in her back garden, chatting, looking over its layout, planning.

Quite a vision of gardens, or gardens of visions, to put together into a whole, isn't it, this trip?  You can see why it's been difficult to relate it to you here.  Even with all this (I wish you the patience for it!), there is so much more in the spaces between left unsaid.

Red shoes

Dancing shoes

Spring has me looking toward bright things...green, of course, for new shoots to plant, admire and serve up, and red, for shoes to step out in, hereabouts and abroad.

Planning menus and trips is my fun these days.  First, menus to sort out and invitations to send. Wherever I've lived, it's been sort of a hobby to invite people over for brunch or dinner or tea or something...holidays, birthdays, anytime...why not?  Though I'm glad for the company and its always illuminating conversation, I enjoy as much the strategy.

Here's how it happens.  Hmmm, I think while a new season entices me.  I grab a white square of leftover art paper (the thick kind, 60#cardstock or better) and begin to scribble, heading the paper with some upcoming or imagined theme, like "Thanksgiving" or "Brunch for Newcomers".  Headings next: APPS, MAIN, DESS, DRKS.  Lots of crossouts, lots of rewriting. ("Or" is a frequent caret.)  I have little pieces of such tucked all over the house, ready to be revised, ready for who's company and a date.  (The one above hasn't been tied down yet...want to come for dinner?)

In Spring, the greener the ingredients, the better.  And so many to choose from:  fresh peas, spinach and chard, butter lettuce, arugula.  In the pots outside the kitchen door herbs are showing their bright sides...parsley, mint, rosemary, a speck of thyme...still too cold for basil.   

These days are ripe with possibilities:  Besides Friday night dinners (last week, we had a great crowd), there's a few which had me happily flipping through cookbooks. First, Joseph's birthday in a few days, for which company and menu danced in tandem.  Then, needing another excuse, I thought that PORCH, our local hunger relief organization, could use a fundraiser, so I'm trying to arrange that, I hope, at the Dead Mule.  Even more fun:  the other day my friend Jim and I put our heads together to do a small New Spring/New Friends dinner for later in the month, because we are always saying, "You need to meet...", so we are inviting people who can invite people they know whom they want us to know, and vice versa.  

Nope!  Sorry, I'm not disclosing any of those menus, as two are a surprise and one has still to be negotiated.  But I will give you a list of dishes I'm imagining and you can set your imaginations on those:

   Beet hummus.  Orange and saffron rice with fresh peas and pistachios (I've been using pistachios a lot lately).    Breast of duck (organic) with citrus and chinese five-spice.  Avocado and mango salsa.  Blueberry shortcake with lemon cream and mint sprig. Ricotta and spinach puff bites.  Spiced shrimp on arugula. Asparagus roasted with lemon zest.  Lemon pudding. Halibut with persillade. Peruvian chicken drumsticks (and other parts) with green sauce on the side.  Cole slaw, the green fresh kind with carrot.  Baked beans with zucchini (a recipe I concocted in a pinch long ago and, being successful, stayed around).  Ina Garten's easy chocolate mousse with macerated strawberries..

 Enough for now.  Anyway, this post is entitled "Red Shoes", isn't it?  So on to that.

I'm planning for trips, too, but this year domestic.  The first will be to see Aunt Sadie in Hershey in a few weeks, and the next soon after to revisit South Texas, where friends and a little business await.  As usual, I woke up one morning with that idea, and in an hour or two confirmed arrangements.   A little more thought (but not much) went into the third trip, in June, to a photography workshop in Santa Fe.  It's called the Haiku of Photography,  teaching a different way to focus when I'm pointing my camera phone.  (You, readers, will be glad of that.)

Oh, San Antonio in April...and Santa Fe in June, I thought.  How lovely it will be, wearing light clothes and sandals again.  But a glance up the shoe rack made me order a new pair.  Red ones, called something more exotic (I forget what, now).  They arrived yesterday; I walked around awhile on the bedroom carpet, and liked the feel.  So, whatever the lower closet comes up with in the way of spring garments, I'm set.

The thing about red shoes began last September, when packing for that "get out of town" adventure...you remember.  I needed a pair of walking shoes that les rues de l'automne in Paris would tolerate, so Mary Ellen and I stepped into SAS in the mall (I'm not a mall-shopper, but we were close by), and there in front of me were these slipons on the right...comfortable, pretty sturdy, and easy to wear.  They came in tan and black, too, but why would one go to London and Paris in those dullards?  I chose the red.

I'm not much of a clothes horse or shoe fanatic.  Or a shopper.  I race through stores (or online) as fast and infrequently as possible.  Necessity calls the shots.  But a few lucky times, I've run in and found not only the necessary, but the enticing..  Some years ago, I came across a pair of back-strapped Riekers in orange (or apricot, or desert sienna, if you paint); I have worn them to a scuff, but will not part with them.  Later, when I saw a pair of Campers in the same color, I knew they were fate. Clearly that orange experience got me from safe neutral to high color.

It may actually have started in my subconscious, this red-shoe thing.  I'm calling up a memory of me at four or so, at the shore, leaning into the rails of the stairwell while a movie, The Red Shoes, is playing.  My aunt has to take me back up to bed, because, quite frankly, something in the frenetic, despairing dance has frightened me.  I didn't remember the story itself, only the emotion; but watching it as an adult, I found the premise scary enough.  Nonetheless, here I am, 75 years later, ordering red shoes that take me off somewhere.

In fact, I'm wondering why, in London last fall, I didn't buy those black Clark's in red, instead.  Though the shoes fit and fit well...they are my everyday staple now...they could use a little pizzazz.  Maybe I should buy them a pair of red shoelaces. 

Happy Spring, my dear readers. May all your colors be bright and new.

_______________________________________________________________________________

*Ah!  Here's a sobering turn of mind:  On my way to order those shoelaces just now, I discovered that there is another, quite serious, side to Red Shoes, which needs mentioning.  One artist, Elina Chauvet, does large international installations of painted red shoes to bring light to violence against women. Can we hope that her work helps the world recognize that abuse and begin firmly to intervene against it?   

Elena Chauvet, Red Shoes

In this installation in a Mexico City Square, the women who have been harmed by the abuse against them and their children are represented by all these shoes, painted like blood...life and death together.

    

    

A Change in the Weather

This spring-like February has had me out in the garden, raking leaves from around  whatever plants have survived January's chill, and watching (with cheer and a bit of  trepidation) the daffodils blooming here and there around the yard. Just in the last days the quince blossoms, their passionate pink budding on as-yet darkened stems, join them.   Earlier this week, I removed some old wooden frames from a once-raised garden, gotten some help transplanting gardenias and other plants with the rich dirt it once girdled, and, after an eager visit to the ag center, seeded wildflowers in the now-flattened site. 

When I woke this morning, however, all the energy this spring weather gave me in the past few days seemed only a dream.  It took me a while to gather my wits to figure out the day.  I dressed in whatever hung nearby, sat for a while, nothing doing or coming to mind, then went out with a broom to clear away some leaves.  (It reminded me of my mother, who, when upset or distracted, would take to sweeping.) My sweeping was lackadaisical, at best.

Some broken pots in the ivy, though, reminded me that, rather than throw them away, I'd had an idea to plant a few succulents in them.  Okay...now I had something to do:  return to the nursery to get what I needed.  A destination, a plan.

Choosing was easy and quick...three in hand, I headed to the register, where a sweet young woman whose accent marked her as an Australian transplant admired my favorite, one funnily called Hen and Chicks.  Yesterday being Valentine's Day, it seemed a perfect reminder of a happy, if harried occasion of children, parents, a meal together, too much chocolate and lots of red cards, some entertaining, some dear.

On the way out of the nursery, I found myself in front of the UNC Horizons program for child development and maternal support.  Theirs is one of the food banks our PORCH community supports, so on a whim, I went in.  I found a woman in the front room sorting books on a table in front of a colorful and well-stocked library for children.  A few words with her, and another direction opened:  I could interview her, and other PORCH banks, and send photos to our neighborhood each month showing how much-needed their monthly bags of donated food and checks are...pictures, as the saying goes, being often more useful than words.

I drove home wrapped up in these two objectives which had sprung like Athena out of a moody, mind-clouded morning, and then went to work planting the succulents, and making a list of food banks I could contact.  I called a friend I hadn't heard from in a while. But slowly, the pale of morning returned, and though usually I'd be in my workroom, pulling together paper, paint, glue, wood, metal...anything in reach...I took a book out to the porch to read instead.

I'd barely opened it, when a new wind pushed through, changing the temperment of the afternoon. Clouds had drifted across the sun since early morning, but this breeze, shaking the last few holding-on leaves across the yard, brought with it a thickening  cover of gray, east to west, north to south.  My desultory mood returned for real.  The book seemed beside the point, and the clouds weren't even bringing any useful rain.  I could have taken a walk in the 67 degree F weather, but nothing spurred that on, either.  On my phone, I watched, passive, a movie about a young woman forced to return to China to learn to support herself.

It appears that this change in the weather, as well as my cloudiness of mind, is going to last the rest of the day.  Over my long years, though, I've learned, that today's blankness prefaces tomorrow's sharper focus.  It isn't unusual to need a day of nothing to support the somethings of more energetic life.  Great inventions more often begin in boredom or silence...as it happens, something a group of tech-obsessed middle-schoolers are trying to wrap their heads around this week in their critical thinking class.

As for me and my ennui, I know enough just to wait it out.

Postscript:

After I closed this, Mary Ellen, emerging from her work upstairs, declared, 

"I need a walk!"

Given all this epistolary grousing, I had to admit that I did, too.  So off we went. I took this photo just before the entrance to the Community Park...it reminded me of me, today.

somebody lived here once