Associations

I’m growing more potatoes this year than ever before because I fear there will be a food shortage in the near future as a result of economic and agricultural turmoil resulting from America and Israel’s needless war against Iran, and if not a shortage here in America than certainly much higher prices for food. I hope I’m wrong.

When I say I’m growing more potatoes that doesn’t mean I’m growing lots of potatoes. I can’t grow great quantities of anything in my nine big tubs. Mostly I grow salad greens, carrots, scallions, zucchini, and radishes, and the aforementioned potatoes. I’m simply honoring my impulse to be more self-sufficient in response to what I’ve learned in the last few months regarding our government’s unprovoked assault on Iran.

Marcia and I take a walk almost every day, a half-hour circuit that goes through a pine forest and along a road lined with blackberry bushes. We’ve taken this walk thousands of times, and yesterday for the very first time my attention was drawn to a little fragment of an ancient fence. Why hadn’t I noticed this photogenic fence fragment before? And why did I notice it now after all these years of walking right by it?

A week or so ago I was in town doing my errands and went to use the one and only public restroom in Mendocino. The Men’s restroom door was inexplicably locked. So I walked down a little-used trail onto the headlands and whilst taking a piss marveled at my surroundings and how lucky I was the restroom door was locked.

We met Sally and Molly for a beach walk recently. I’m usually in charge of flinging the ball for Molly when we go on our walks, something I’ve been doing for thirteen years now, during which time Molly has gone from indefatigable young runner and swimmer to being a slow old dog, though she still lives to retrieve that ball if she possibly can.

Molly loves to swim and seems ageless when she’s swimming.

Some of the big logs adorning the sand flats of Big River have been there for a long time. Who, I wonder, is Kalin? Is he also Chavez? It doesn’t matter, yet every time I see this engraving I wonder if Kalin is Chavez and if the faint heart above Kalin is the work of another artist? In any case, I love this calligraphy.

This stand of daisies greets us on the uphill stretch of our daily walk during the summer, vanishes in the fall, and rises anew in the spring. I photograph these daisies on many of our walks hoping to capture the majesty of their totality, though what’s missing in the best of my photos is the wind and the air and the pounding of my heart.

Fate Or Karma a piano improvisation on a very old piano from Todd’s new album Much Too Beautiful