highjinks58

Spring Bloom

A cool blue evening and a rich coral sunset provide the setting for this graceful branch in “The Last of the Almond Light.”

Spring has sprung!
A few days ago, I knew that spring was really here to stay when I noticed tiny spots of young spring green on the local grapevines. But in truth, spring has been teasing us for weeks now.

It began in February with the almond trees. It wasn’t like this last year, my first in the area. Last year, the flowers began to appear in January, were quickly hit with a hard frost, and that was the end of the almond bloom. This year, the trees waited a full month longer, and wow, did they put on a show. I’ve never lived near almond trees, and I felt like a kid in a candy shop; I didn’t know which way to look, and it kept getting better. One day I was out driving, and I realized that the fields and hills were dotted with what appeared to be little puffballs, soft white with a hint of pink. Everywhere I turned, puffballs. It was the almond trees, in full bloom, and it was enchanting.

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Carnaval 2019

Lynne and Maryse — With my friend Maryse at the end of the Carnaval parade, 2019.

When I was in high school, one of my favorite times of the school year was Homecoming. A big dance, a football game, cheerleaders, the queen and the king, the marching band… And the parade. Every class created a float for the homecoming parade, and my class was pretty darn good at making floats. We’d get together to come up with ideas and after that we’d sketch out designs; the fun really began once we were ready to start building that float. Every year, for four years, we built our float at Cami’s house, because her family had the absolutely perfect float-building setup. For a few weeks, we’d all go there after school and on the weekends, to socialize and put things together and socialize and paint and socialize. Those were golden moments wrapped in fun and problem-solving and hard work, and I remember all of it with great fondness.

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Southeast Asia

I spent the Christmas and New Year holidays with my cousins, who live in Singapore. They’d invited me for a visit, and did a stellar job of hosting me, showing me around Singapore and bustling me off to Malaysia for a week. I offer you a rewrite of a few scribbled diary-like notes, plus some photographs that cannot begin to convey the atmosphere. If only I could figure out how to create a digital scratch-and-sniff photograph that could move beyond rich visuals to include multi-sensory scratches for the strange and tantalizing scents, the mix-tape of sound, myriad flavors, and the heavy weight of non-stop heat and humidity.

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With a cherry on top

Seeing red (and pink)
I once knew a beautiful woman, tall, with dark hair and sparkling dark brown eyes. She dressed to own the room, and she knew what she was doing. She once told me that she only wore red twice a year: on Christmas and on Valentine’s Day. Many years later, I’m still puzzled by such a rigid dress code outside the military, but I once saw her in red, and she absolutely owned the room that day.

Well, sartorial rules aside, we find ourselves between my friend’s two official “red” holidays (plus a third that she didn’t mention), and in honor of that, I’m posting a selection of red and pink, flowers and hearts, plus a few pithy quotations, all in the name of love and romance.

Citou Rose — An outrageously luscious rose in the tiny village of Citou, France.

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Everything new…

Ho’o pono pono
We have arrived at the early days of a brand-new year. In western cultures, the new year is a time to make resolutions, to make a list of things to do/change/work on in order to become a better person. Or to become slimmer. Or wealthier. Or more patient.

There is a long, long list of potential New Year’s resolutions, and cultures all over the globe have their own practices, as well as their own timing, for these celebrations.

In Judaism, the most holy and solemn time of the year is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. It occurs just after Rosh Hashana, the New Year, which generally occurs sometime from September to early October. Yom Kippur is a time to take a close and honest look at our intentions in order to discover the true source of our words and actions. The belief is that when we learn to act from a place of love and connectedness, those values grow exponentially in the world.

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White Christmas

In “White Sunset,” a snowy hillside and a cloudy sky are brushed with the same heavenly palette of pinks and golds on a late-winter evening.

Blanche
Once upon a time, I knew a man who drove a very old, very white station wagon, dating from the early 1960s. He had named the car “Blanche,” and that has long topped my list of clever car names. I’ve always assumed the car was named for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, but maybe it was simply a way to acknowledge that the car was white. Either way, I find it clever.

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