Just returned from a long, wonderful trip to Southern California
where I soaked up a big, fat dose of sunshine, friendship, and family. The malls, rush-hour traffic, and the general, all-around sense of everywhere people-ness more than gratified me.
The first few days, I felt like someone beamed up warp-speed to an alternate universe - popping eye candy. I come home with five senses overflowing -
brain brimming with color - the orange and blue of California in its' multiple shades -
from peach tan to faded cerulean, Sunkist orange to blue man blue- red light/green light/yellow - on and off ramp - Mini-Cooper and Hummer, black beamer, white Jeep, then silver, Toyota 4runner, Lexus, Mercedes, F150 and gas prices falling like Humpty Dumpty...diesel smell of gas and rubber, the low, slow brown of pollution hovering sun heavy on the horizon, the blonds bleached natural and spray booth tan -
the ten, the fifteen, the six-oh-five, the J. Paul Getty
a favorite Van Gogh painting, discovering Fernand Khnopff's "Portrait of Jeanne Kefer"... girl-child bonneted in soft charcoal, an entire world behind a pale blue door she leans against...
then homeward - the familiar trudge through airport security, an aisle seat,
disembarking -just enough time for a Hudson News stop and another magazine in Seattle before the long darkening ride over the Pacific and the jostle down fast approach to
Anchorage where it is cold and gray-lit night- where we stand waiting for the shuttle -
home still five hours by car and a hotel bed away-home still there standing square
against the bay, home a gray box lit the color of fireweed lingered into violet...
the mountains smudged ink among pink dribbled sky... the tides and glaciers, all their coming and going....how twilight and soft they will be.