frost bitten

I wrote yesterday about the bad time the locust trees had in the hard frost a few days back: this illustrates what I mean.  There are a handful of leaves that seem to be flourishing well - more on the top branches than the lower - but many that are not, and this year's pollen seems to have withered entirely, which is bad news for bees.

 

April sky

This looks like real winter, but in fact the temperature was in the high sixties when I rolled into Eldorado this evening.  I'm here on a very, very, very flying visit to check that all's ok with the house, which it is, in basic terms (by which I mean: no mouse invasion, nothing dead in the walls, and so on).  I'm not at all sure the heating's working, but there are ways round that.  However - there have obviously been some crazy strong winds - various things outside have flown in all directions, and there's a large tumbleweed nest by the front door.  The one real casualty outside seems to have been the two big locust trees in the back yard - let's hope they can make it.  I'd heard that trees had been caught by a super-heavy frost a few days ago, and almost all the young leaves seem completely withered with cold.  But if I'm lamenting what happened here, the real damage has been done to fruit trees, here and further north.  It went down to 19 in Dixon, 17 in Española - and that's a lot of people's livelihoods.

 

honors presentation

I was really happy to hear my honors student Gracie Garrett read from, and talk about, some of the thoroughly unsettling short stories that she's written for her honors dissertation in English: she toggles between realism and what she calls "environmental surrealism" - in the spirit of Karen Russell, so far as writerly influence goes, but also very much prompted by Ron Nixon's theory of "slow violence."  For she writes about the natural world gone askew: morphing; decaying; combusting; turning up in the wrong places.  One never quite knows whether she's writing about hallucination; or invention and imagination; or, most scary of all to contemplate, a kind of future reality.  Conceptually, she's driven by the question of how - in the frame of a short story - one might narrate "slow violence:" the dispersed effects and slow accretion of environmental damage.

Or, to put it another way, it's been great to be fed a bunch of brand new short stories; read them - comment on them, yes, but it's been a whole lot of fun.  

 

garden, native flowers

I go away for a few days, and the garden has exploded into flowers - the wildflowers (largely poppies, but some penstemon and other things), and the always over-the-top matilija poppy.  The tree was deliberately planted as a tree, but all the wildflowers come from seeds that I throw around just before first rains with a great deal of optimism: optimism that seems to have paid off this year except in those patches where the soil became too hot, too early.

 

seeing blue(ish)

A sizable chunk of today was spent waiting for Alice to have cataract surgery in her right eye (the left one will happen in a few months - scheduling things can get complicated, in the summer); waiting for her to from the immediate discomfort; putting drops in her eye ... I lie: handing her little bottles while she put drops in her eye, since I don't seem to inspire confidence as a drop-dispenser, and as someone who suffers from dry eyes, she's used to it.  I breathed a deep sigh of relief: I dreaded putting in drops after my father's glaucoma treatments.

And so, very soon, she should be able to see blue properly again, instead of a muted bluey-grey.  Ironic, then, that the Keck waiting room should have quite dreadful faded landscapes in a blue-ish color; an off-blue water dispenser, and so on (and if I see these object in this shade, I imagine that cataract sufferers must see a very sullen grey indeed).

The patient is doing very well - at least, so it seems to me: check-up first thing in the morning ...

 

perfect coffee shop

I always dream of finding the perfect coffee shop to work in , and today I located one: good coffee, to be sure, and an almond croissant - and a desk to work at, and plants, and art work, and bare brick walls, and doors open onto a courtyard, and interesting-looking other people (who weren't - New Orleans not being LA - all writing screen plays).  I'm glad to be home, to be sure - but Fourth Wall was perfect.

 

New Orleans - last full day

It completely poured with rain overnight, and the temperature dropped 30 degrees, so this was rather chilly weather for visiting the Honey Island Swamp - 70,000 acres of pristine wetland, full of alligators, and birds, and (though we didn't see any) raccoons and javelinas.  And bees - here are some flying in and out of holes in a tupelo tree: hence (for Van Morrison aficionados), Tupelo Honey.

It was ... swampy.  Here's a heron,

and a very young gator;

and a Common Egret admiring its reflection.

The egret then took off: this was my favorite shot of the day, and definitely an album cover of some kind.

This monstrous thing is an invasive Apple Snail - huge, and it eats crawfish, which makes them a local enemy - so big brown birds (we saw one, rootling around) called Limpkin have been introduced to eat them.  They are especially insidious since semi-amphibious - they have gills and lungs.  They also lay their toxic eggs - like lumps of gooey coral - up trees, so they're not going to get readily eaten.  Despite my snail fondness, these are like something out of sci fi.

At every turn the tree reflections are stunning ...

Ooh, look who's swimming up to the boat!

- to be thrown a lump of - of what? gator kibble - by our guide.

By the time I was back in the city, the sun was vaguely coming out: a bit more house admiration round the French Quarter;

including a very large crown on a porch: left over from Carnival, or from a No Kings demo?

Waling round the Louis Armstrong park (yes, there was another procession, with tubas, etc), I cam upon this boarded up, desperately in need of restoration, complex.  The building on the left is one of the oldest Masonic Halls in the US, built in 1820 as a Masonic Lodge for Creoles of Color, and home to some very early jazz performances.  The others have mostly been moved there - and the whole site has the most vexed and complicated history, belonging for a while to the National Parks Service, who then handed it over to the Preservation Resource Center a few years back; damaged by Hurricane Ida - the more one digs in online, the more one finds so many people want to save and renovate them, but who has the money? whose responsibility ultimately is it? The whole area, indeed, has a troubled history: about ten blocks were demolished in the 1960s, largely displacing lower income Black people, for the building of a big (also didn't look at all functioning) concert hall that would supposedly encourage more white people to come to the area ... but leaving 18 or so acres of empty land, which in the 70s was turned into a memorial park (lakes, bridges, trees and shrubs, turtles) for Louis Armstrong.  

Heading back into festival land, here's a timely sign (if you look closely, it says YALL MORE BOOZE LESS ICE)

and here's a performance by Jade Perdue, who is, among many other excellent things, an educator and a National Parks Service interpreter for jazz history.  She can really sing.