Microclimates

Running in an unfamiliar neighborhood, I passed a house, back up against the park, with a banana and two palm trees in the yard. Three blocks later, two more palm trees. It was raining hard, but not cold--around 60 degrees, gray sky offsetting the heavy June greens. For a moment, I was somewhere tropical, on a beach, maybe, or just before a real storm. A couple more blocks and yet another palm had pride of place in a full-on Victorian Eden poised to lure susceptible travelers into a B&B. It was a small palm beside a huge house, three or four stories, gables and gingerbread and tastefully bright purples and blues, easily twice the size of any house nearby, defining its own private world on a street of modest homes--a world with a lily pond and a cast bronze heron and that out of place palm tree next to the dogwood (still in bloom).

Either I'd found a little-known local torrid zone, or palms don't grow only where I think they grow. Or gardeners are out at night with felt blankets and smudge pots and buckets of horticultural love. Making their own weather within the invisible borders of those garden rooms.

There were Frisbee golfers in the park that afternoon as well. I felt a little foolish out there, ready to explain to inquisitive passersby that I needed to run and this was when I had time to do it; oddly enough, no one asked. Not because they were all safe inside. I crossed paths with people hauling groceries in flimsy plastic bags and man on a tippy bicycle loaded down with returnable bottles and cans. I didn't ask them, either--they needed food/cash and this was when they could get it. They had the course all to themselves. 

Sometimes you just need to get out of the house. Sometimes it's all in what you notice. It wasn't an unusually rainy afternoon, not for this climate. The palms weren't the towering coconut palms of fantasy white sand beaches, but they weren't planted last week. But so what if they were there all along, if only I'd bothered to look? It's the looking a different way this time--whatever the reason--that can redefine a landscape.

It's raining again today. I'm inside, looking out, revising and reordering and plodding through mental weather. No soggy socks, no silent explanations to strangers on the street. My garden has no palm trees. Dogwood, rhododendron, vine maple, cedar, an aging Ponderosa pine. Weeds. But maybe it's warmer than it looks from here.

May memories, Mayhap, May help

When I was little--four or five--we used to hang May Baskets from the doorknobs of elderly neighbors. My mother instigated this, of course, but I enjoyed filling the construction paper cones with garden flowers, placing the surprise, ringing the bell and running away. It's not a tradition I ever tried to continue with my children. They're too old to appreciate it now, but it strikes me that, pleasant as those May Day memories have always been--and I can still see the stone porch back in central New York, across the street from my best friend's house, up the block from ours, pale green trim and maybe gables; I can see myself on that porch, arranging my offering, hurrying away--it never really occurred to me to "try this at home," so to speak. Granted, our elderly neighbors when my daughter was four frankly disliked us, disapproving of our lawn mowing skill, or lack thereof. Still, the elderly part isn't an absolute requirement, and we did have other neighbors, more forgiving. Double nostalgia then, my own childhood long gone and my children's littlehood, too.

I observed this spring morning on my own. Grayish sky, hint of sun--just a hope of that bright sun against gray velvet clouds  and sharp pink plum trees that I love at this time of year. When I set out to run, it was almost warm (not warm enough for shorts, but I realized that too late to turn back and change). Ducking under the neighbors' full-bloomed apple tree as I headed down the hill, I remembered I had dreamed last night that I was pulling snails off a fruit tree still in bloom. Anyone who has gardened in Oregon will understand this dream, this waking nightmare, this continual struggle. . . never mind. I dreamed a spring dream, and along with it, a cry for help. 

So mayday, not just May Day. My dictionary gives the definition of this international distress signal as the French (venez) m'aider, (come) help me! Who knew? (Not me, obviously). A not-quite translation, a homophonic or sound translation--historically, as David Bellos notes in Is that a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, a rich source of vocabulary growth as languages come into contact and their speakers try to mimic foreign words using the closest sounds they can muster from their own experience. Turns out, again, translation is everywhere.

Including the eye of the beholder. Later, out the bus window on the way to work, I watched a woodpecker pecking away at one of the small, tasteful signs the city places to urge trail users to "leash pets" and "obey scoop laws." A kind of live underscoring, subtitling as highlighting. But I've also seen (and heard) the woodpecker--presumably a different woodpecker; it was a different spring--attacking the STOP sign down the road, the gong of its beak meeting metal louder than any distress call.

Message here? I'm not sure. But it's spring, hope springs eternal, memory and mayhem and possibility dancing 'round the May pole, one big happy family. Happy May Day, everyone!

Imaginary Weather (running and writing)

I have gone back to a draft of a story that takes place on a hot day. A really hot day. 

Today is not a hot day, not where I live, and it is taking a strenuous effort to muscle my imagination anywhere near air shimmering over asphalt, t-shirts sweaty around necklines, glare that makes you squint. Anything more inventive than the clichéd sizzle of eggs on the pavement.

If I want to sweat today, I have to run. If I run, under (or over) the sweatiness, I will be cold. Not freeze-your-eyelashes-together cold (thank goodness I no longer live in that climate) but throat-stinging cold, tug-my-fleece-beanie-a-little-lower-on-my-ears cold. Most of all, mud puddle cold. Only in the winter is the much vaunted ventilation of my running shoes really evident. The air goes right through them, along with the water when I inevitably misjudge as solid one of the floating islands that decorate the jogging-trail-cum-mud-wallow where we crazies congregate. Kind of the local variation on mad dogs and Englishmen, here where there's not much midday sun this time of year.

So, I'm going to run (because it clears my head even if it sogs my toes) and I'm going to try, flexing my leg muscles, to push that mental muscle back toward that hot afternoon when my story is supposed to start, the heat that is somehow motivating to my character (how? when has she ever experienced heat that would make you choose? where does she live, anyway?). 

I know that more than a few of my brilliant insights-while-running are lost among the woodchips before I get home--how else to explain the recalcitrance of certain drafts that stubbornly resist revision? So I don't run too fast, hoping any laggard inspiration might have the chance to catch me up before I round the bend. But as a plan, a run right now seems more promising than one more sunny-side-up stuck on the metal bus stop bench in my little urban desert that refuses, today, to be more than a mirage.

Running on Sunday

I set out to run on Sunday, either over toward the Paraná River and along the bluffs on the shore for a bit, as I've done before, or maybe taking Blvd. Oroño in the other direction, toward Parque de la Independencia [map]. But I found that the boulevard is closed to vehicle traffic on Sundays from 8:00-1:00, so I stayed right there and ran in a loop. No, I didn't run in crazy circles (though I did recall an old friend's reference to Quito's Avda. Amazonas as the tontódromo; think hippodrome, then insert "idiot" in place of horse), but it did make me happy.

Blvd. Oroño; no cars, plenty of people

There were still a few pauses at intersections. On corners with traffic signals, most of the assembled strolling/running/biking/ambling/skating/stroller-pushing crowd dutifully waited for the light to change; other intersections had police directing traffic, so cars wouldn't gush right into the non-motorized stream. 

Change the air! Recreational street.

The air seemed cleaner than when I've run on weekdays, though that may have been an illusion. The sun was out. One of the first things I did on arrival was to buy a pair of black sweatpants to run in, so I blended right in with all the other women of a certain age (i.e., mine ± 25 years). A girl on a little pink bike with training wheels pedaled madly after a teenier dog leashed to her handlebars. The occasional driver wondered how to get his car out of a corner gas station. Unlike some pools where the swimmers can be quite fierce about sharing lanes for lap-swimming, there was no particular directional regime; folks went up and down both traffic lanes and the sidewalk median. 

I went back later with my camera. I liked the green and white signs the city put out. I wanted to capture the flow of people. But I never feel comfortable sticking my camera right in someone's face--aside from family, I take a lot more pictures of flowers and buildings.

You go ahead; not your car.

And it wasn't that crowded. It was open. People had hours to take advantage of the car-free zone, and did. I don't know how long the initiative has been in place or how long it might last. Maybe there was controversy, maybe it's someone's crazy plan, maybe it's a tradition of long standing. I'll have to ask someone. I've met a couple of women who love to tell stories, so with any luck, I'll get an earful.