Ghost Town, Mojave Desert

I’ve been gone a while, doing things that require work like traveling, writing assignments, lying sick in bed, but today has been a restful day. I took photos of my desk,

my cat,

my flowers,

myself reflected in the computer screen (up above). Then I researched quartz for no compelling reason and wrote a poem based on an experience I had while traveling last week.

Some sad things have struck my family since my mother died last summer, and they caused me to be called out of town. I knew I wanted to write a poem about something that happened on the trip but didn’t know how to begin. At three in the morning Wednesday, sleepless, I wrote down five words ~ ghost, laugh, laundry, edges, beer ~ and posted them as a prompt on Poetry Jam, a blog I’m hosting this week. I wrote the poem Thursday. I’m interested to see what other poets do with the words.

Ghost Town, Mojave Desert

Someone spilled a glass of milk in the sky
and the indifferent wind pushes it
against the barren hills that frame this town.
From the open window of a stale motel
I watch the creamy puddles eddy
among signs that scream for gas, food, lodging
as mesquite brush waffles in a vacant lot.
When I was a girl, I cruised that drag
in a blue Mustang and worked at a florist’s
over there, where that pawn shop squats.
I want to hate it now, with everyone I love
erased from here. But I see my father
teaching me to steer an army Jeep
across the desert, his brown arm braced
against the windshield as we bounce along
and laugh. I see my mother hanging laundry
on the clothesline by the driveway, where
my brothers and their cronies lounge
against their trucks with cans of beer
and shirttails hanging out. I hear my family
working, banging, revving, hammering,
the pop of rivet guns, hissing blowtorch,
the hollow whine of sheet metal
sculpted in their hands. I smell the tang
of ozone, sharp as a knife, after the rain
and I smell the sand, a billion shifting grains
of memory that stick like windblown grit
and won’t wash off, except in the blessed rain
which comes only when it will, not
when you will it. On the edges of my life
the wind still sings its love for the desert
and I taste the sweet bitter fruit of loss.

Bountiful Poverty

You know you live in a small town when the front-page news includes an announcement that Bob's Big Boy is coming to downtown. Don't know what a Bob's Big Boy is? It's a coffee-shop chain that considers itself an art form, using words like "dramatic," "striking," and even "breathtaking" to describe its architecture, which looks like this:

Its diner fare includes the "vintage" double-decker Big Boy burger, along with fried chicken, fried fish, fried steak, and the "classic" chili spaghetti. I can't wait to try that one.

Chili beans used to be a staple in my family's diet, not because of our ethnic background (my dad was from Oklahoma and my mom was from a Norwegian farm family), but because we were poor. In 1966, my parents had suddenly uprooted our family of five and plunked us down in a dinky travel trailer behind a little market on the edge of some sand dunes in the Mojave desert. They had no savings, but Dad had found a job in his trade that was just enough to support us.

We'd left almost all our belongings behind in our old home town. We three kids slept in sleeping bags. For entertainment we had a transistor radio and a deck of cards to fill the evenings with family games of gin rummy. A couple of times a month, a library bookmobile parked beside the little market. Mom's older brother and his family lived down the road, so a couple of times a week all 13 of us gathered there to watch TV. On Sundays we'd all hop into my uncle's World War II Army surplus Jeeps, with my cousins on little motorbikes, and we'd go out in the desert, "boondocking" as my uncle called it, exploring canyons, abandoned mines, traces of old homesteads, and searching for wildflowers in the spring.

Dried pinto beans were cheap and Mom bought them in bulk. She cooked big pots of them, sometimes just plain pintos and onions, and other times with chili and a little ground beef added. We ate many meals of beans with homemade white bread and fresh oranges for dessert. We hadn't had a stay-at-home mom in a long time and not a lot of homemade bread either, so it seemed like a treat. The fresh oranges were wonderful too.

Today I'm thankful for a child's spirit that saw, not the poverty, but the small pleasures that arose from it, and for my parents' ability to make do with what resources they had, even making it all seem bountiful and adventurous. There might have been times I felt deprived, having no privacy, having to adjust to the strange new desert world, but what I remember is goodness.

And the memories make me smile: discovering the desert in bloom, listening to the new band called The Monkees on the evening radio, the taste of butter melting on warm fresh bread, the joy of getting white go-go boots ... even hearing my father use the word "shit" for the first time, when he gathered the three of us kids to announce we were driving our mother crazy, and we were to stop it immediately if we didn't want her to leave us.

"If she says 'shit,'" he told us at the end of his speech, "you say, 'Where and how much?'" That was frightening and funny at the same time. One of us, I don't remember who, actually said that to her the next time she said "Shit!" and got back-handed for the literal interpretation of Dad's edict. But it became a legendary family joke, and I'm grateful for a child's sense of humor in what might have been a scary adult situation. The look on my father's face, when he was called to account for his child's smart-aleck behavior, was priceless.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Spider Living in a Small Town

While things heat up in American politics and violence boils over in the world, I worked off some frustrations in my small-town yard last weekend.
We have a spider the size of a Mack truck in our garden. It has provided a lot of entertainment for several people over the many weeks it has spent in our yard.
In truth, the spider is only the diameter of a ping-pong ball when its legs are outstretched. Wearing natty stripes of yellow, ivory and brown, it's an orb spider whose web is an architectural marvel of concentric circles woven on supporting spokes that span five feet.
It lives in our shrubbery, surrounded by sweet alyssum and rose bushes. It moved there five or six weeks ago after first trying out a web in the nearby agapanthus, which was lower to the ground and must have proved ineffectual as a trap.
Now sprawled out on a web the size of a small trampoline, the spider is living proof that the secret to doing good business is location, location, location. It prospers on all the fly-by traffic, and at any given time it usually has a couple of good meals wrapped up like mini white burritos on its web.
It's just one of the fascinating neighbors we've gotten to know since we came here to this small town. After what was for my husband and daughter a lifetime in Los Angeles, I promised them nothing except we would live in a beautiful place.
They had already seen it on visits to my hometown over the years: summer's golden humpbacked hills studded with oaks the color of jade; spring's undulating green expanses slashed with ribbons of orange poppies and purple lupine.
It was no risk to promise them that every day we'd go forth into God's country, where hawks wheel on updrafts and deer come down to feed in the long, low light of evening.
We had no guarantees we'd prosper in the move - and in fact found, like many others, that wages lag behind the cost of living here.
We had no certainty, either, that we would replace the deep friendships left behind, forged through years of barbecues, riots, earthquakes, and backyard croquet games.
And indeed we've found that it does take time, years of it, to put down roots like that.
But we've been well-rewarded for our investment in the small-town way of life, in unexpected ways I never imagined, even though I lived here as a child.
Our daughter struggled through years of self-doubts to claim a spot on a volleyball team in high school. There was pride shining in her eyes as she put on her uniform and put her skills to the test. As a young woman now, she has found her place in a physical-therapy gym, certified in massage and loving her work with the recovering injured.
My husband, Joe, still gets mileage out of the mountain lion he saw one year, loping across the field of his headlights in the pre-down darkness. The great lion ghost gets longer and taller with every telling.
A few years ago he was hurt on the job and had to retire, and we had some rough times. Now he volunteers at a local school and works with a dozen recovering alcoholics, and he loves his new life.
Neither of us will ever forget the night we watched a local jeweler and a city councilman save a retired teacher’s life at a community party. Wally's heart had quit, but Pat and George did not quit—and today Wally is bouncing around town, lending a hand wherever he can, being of service in many different ways.
Working among people in this town has taught me that the real treasure of our area is as much in those who live here as it is in our beautiful landscape. I love bumping into people I know on sidewalks and in shops, taking time to share a few observations about the day's discoveries. My time here has given me glimpses into the lives of hometown heroes, small-town miracles, and wonderful neighbors.
Here is a thought along those lines, expressed far better than I could do, by Holocaust survivor and writer Corrie Ten Boom:
"The tree on the mountain takes whatever the weather brings. If it has any choice at all, it is in putting down roots as deeply as possible."