Güd wrtr

(For Earthlings, especially those born on the summer solstice…
in the northern hemisphere)

Let us tilt ourselves sunward
then, we northerners,
celebrating more hours
of light than dark, the sun
chugging along its
highest path through
the sky,

mindful that our southern
neighbors on the planet
are turning their faces
into the shortest day
of the year, the sun’s lowest
path through the sky—

each solstice a stoppage,
when the sun appears
to pause as if to consider,
if not all the planets,
perhaps this one blue
marble that humans call
home,

some of us lifting our faces
into so much gushing brightness,
some of us hunkering down
in the dark, waiting for the light
to return.

•••

Solargraph photo by Bret Culp / recording the sun’s path over time

“A solargraph is a long-duration pinhole photograph that records the sun’s repeated movement across the sky. It is usually made with photographic paper placed inside a simple camera and left in one position for an extended period. The resulting image often shows multiple solar arcs, along with interruptions caused by cloud cover, weather, and seasonal change.”
—Bret Culp

While she is away, Katie texts
to say that we who are watering
in her absence should feel free
to pluck and eat the tiny rubies
masquerading as strawberries
in her garden.

“They’re small, but mighty,”
she writes.

Thinking of her fledgling crop,
I go to my backyard to water
and peer at Juliet who grows
taller each day and now sports
12 green mini Romas on her
octopus arms, tomatoes in
gestation.

“Look at you grow those babies,”
I tell her, noticing that two of her
offspring are beginning to pinken.
When they go glossy red and come
off easily in the hand, I look forward
to popping the first one in my mouth
to feel its squish.

I think of the late husband, the last
one to grow tomatoes in our yard,
and Buddy dog, who liked to snatch
them off the vine and gulp them
whole. Now, sans husband and dog,
the tomatoes will be mine to eat
and share.

“Tomatoes for strawberries,” I will tell
Katie when she returns, looking forward
to trading small baskets of our respective
crops. Even if our gardens produce only
a few tiny gems, I can already smell
the vegetal fragrance, savor summer’s
sweetness on my eager tongue.

I spent afternoons mostly atop a lifeguard chair six feet above the deck of Roseville High School pool—when I wasn’t taking a turn standing on the opposite side of the deck, twirling my lanyard-tethered Acme Thunderer around a couple of fingers.

I spent mornings trying to coax little kids into gently settling their faces on the surface of liquid turquoise, to blow bubbles, to dunk themselves, bob up and down hanging onto the pool gutter practicing breathing and breath-holding, to float on their backs, small chests thrust to the sky, learning to trust the miracle of water supporting them.

I spent evenings coaching the synchronized swim team I’d joined as an 11-year-old. My sister, two years younger and always more physically adept, caught on quickly, little fish that she was. I was slower but determined to master the three basic stunts—kip, dolphin and somersub—that we performed at meets throughout the summer, and to blend those stunts and other tricky moves upside down in the water with music and a teammate or two or more, which was where the “synchronized” part came in.

I often worked five 12-hour days, then only five or six hours on a Saturday. I loved it all.

My uniform consisted of a red bikini when I was lifeguarding or coaching, a red tank suit when teaching because small, graspy hands could inadvertently prompt what would later be called a wardrobe malfunction. And though I weighed 100 pounds soaking wet and barely filled out an A cup, none of us teenage girl instructors wanted to risk inadvertent exposure.

As if, afternoons, we weren’t showing off most of our bikini’d bodies anyway, our male colleagues outfitted in baggy red trunks over their Speedos, with their taut middles and swim-team muscled arms, all of us patrolling the deck in flip-flops, serious about pool safety. Acme Thunderers twirling like slingshots, we’d occasionally blow them to get some kid’s attention, our peeling noses slathered in zinc oxide, and, as summer wore on, the tops of burnt shoulders and feet, too. T-shirt for sun protection, usually a floppy red hat. Mirrored Wayfarers protected our eyes.

You were not properly dressed for lifeguarding without your whistle and your Wayfarers. I’d learned that as a water safety aide helping instructors and watching lifeguards at the pool years before I became one.

We used to joke, when we saw our pool friends in non-summer times, “You look different in clothes.” We knew we were lucky not to be toiling in fast food or scooping ice cream like so many of our school friends. We practiced math taking attendance and a quarter from each kid who came to swim. (I figured out geometry years after I’d more or less failed it by plotting synchronized swimming routines for six or eight girls.) We learned chemistry by performing three-times-a-day water tests to check the pH and acid levels. We taught each other what we needed to know about opening the pool, resupplying toilet paper in the bathrooms, locking up at night.

A half century later, I wonder what the grown-up bosses we rarely saw were thinking, how impossibly young we were to be trusted with so much responsibility.

We didn’t think of ourselves as cool or confident or accomplished, though I realize now that we were all three, frying under the bicentennial summer sun in that concrete chapel of chlorine with so, so much life ahead of us.

•••

With appreciation for and love to all my pool buddies still in this world and the ones who became heavenly bodies, swimming happily, I hope, in the mystery.

(for Autumn Thompson and Brett Jeffries
on their wedding day)

Now the California heat, warming
everything, growing every thing,
if we add enough water,

vegetables leaping in gardens
like hurdlers, up and over,
sustenance for weeks,

the zucchini on stealth runs
making a break for it, somehow
ending up on neighbors’ porches.

If we are fortunate—and we are—
the bounty of summer is a form
of love made visible,

the earth giving what it always
does, even when rudely assaulted,
even in times of such hardship

in the greater world, so much of it
human-inflicted, unnecessary.
Yet, look: Love thrives as

a couple pledges their forevers
by a mountain lake shimmering
with June’s brightest sapphires.

And miles away in the Sacramento
Valley, hose in hand, watering all
manner of show-offy flora

that feeds bees and butterflies—
which in turn give back to us—
we salute what grows, what thrives.

We study the still-green tomatoes
on the long-armed vines, check
the cucumbers, eye the peppers,

eager, when it’s time, to share them
with someone, anyone, everyone.
Love made edible.

The offering, we know, will
bounce back tenfold, filling us,
warming us, cooling us,

like the Delta breeze
tickling the tiny hairs
on our sun-browned arms.

Today that would be me, figuring out
the drip system routine for just part
of the magnificence on the corner
of the Santa Ynez garden goddess.

I had another one next door years ago
named Inez, who politely asked if she
could plant the strip between her
apartment building and my house,
and, after I eagerly agreed, she filled
it with succulents and ferns, gardenias
and roses and canna lilies that grow
a foot taller than me each summer.

Before she moved away, Inez made me
promise to take care of that strip of
loveliness, which I still do.

But Katie, the young garden goddess
who lives in an apartment on the corner,
has turned that formerly bleh swatch
of weedy “lawn” into bordered beds
profuse with foliage. In her absence
three of us tend the acreage I think of
as hers—a volunteer labor of love
that has me stretching long hoses
across the sidewalk to water beds
of tall daisies and even taller bamboo.

I don’t know what I’m doing, but I talk
to the plants anyway, a rah-rah without
pompoms: “Atta girl, you pop out those
purple flowers.” “Good going, you tall
fellas.” “C’mon, little one, here’s some
water—perk up now.”

When I’m finished, walking home
to my little front yard, it looks, I think,
like a kindergarten—a starter garden,
which it is. But my cosmos are still
growing tall, and the red salvia
is already starting to bush out, though
one of the lupines has died, and the new
black-eyed Susan wilts every afternoon
in the heat.

But I take up my own hose, aiming
the magic water wand at the little sprouts.
“Keep going,” I tell them. “One of these
days you’re gonna be as big and strong
as the big kids down the street.”

It all comes down to water and love.
As they dampen under their daily
shower, I feel the newbies rise a little,
stretch their roots a bit more,
getting on with the business of growth.

(for Lisa Morgan and Stuart Morgan)

The day I came to your mother’s house
to gather donate-ables you were kindly
giving to a woman needing pots and pans,

spatulas and big stirring spoons,
you had snipped a rose from her garden,
a perfect blushing pink.

And there it sat on the counter
by the sink, for the one who
no longer stands there looking

into the back yard that you both
keep tidy in her memory. I am
always touched by the ways

we honor our companion spirits,
how we bring them into what
were once their spaces, now ours.

Because, of course, there she is
in those prettily unfurled petals.
And yes, the rose will die, but

the scent will linger, as we say,
nothing left but the love,
which turns out to be everything.

•••

In memory of Gaynor Stuckert Morgan,
Sept. 27, 1929–April 20, 2023

We packed this very room,
the sanctuary, really, with
more people than expected

for the Lavender Chorus debut
on Pride weekend in our city,
two of us staunch allies among

many cheering and tearing
at each moving song, celebrating
diversity in harmony. We came

to hear our dear friend raise her
voice in song, that voice ringing
from our high school stage

as we two played in the orchestra.
This afternoon we sat in a pew
among hundreds, thinking of those

we’ve known more jeered than cheered
for who they are or were, swept up in
harmonic hope as this new chorus sang,

In this very room there’s quite enough
love for all of us, and in this very room
there’s quite enough joy for all of us,

and there’s quite enough hope and quite
enough power to chase away any gloom,
for love, our love, is in this very room.

As it was this day, may it forever be.

•••

Lyrics from “In This Very Room” by Ron and Carol Harris.

Thanks to Lisa Morgan for her good company in so many
musical events since our high school days.

As family members look on,
Henry double-dunks two balls
and declares, “bassa-bah,”

in the new basket on the brightly
colored stand a bit taller than he is,
gleefully chasing the rollers-away

to retrieve ’em and dunk ’em again
on the same day the Knicks win
their first NBA championship

in 53 years. We grownups are
oblivious to the celebrations
in New York, so focused

on the red-haired boy and his
equally red-haired little sister
chasing down bassa-bahs

indoors at home to the cheers
of their loved ones, all of us
grinning through crumbly bites

of mini chocolate cupcakes—
could anything be sweeter?—
on this hot day in June.

•••

With thanks and love to my fam who made the babies,
one generation after another, and to us lucky aunts and uncs
who get to enjoy them!

Once upon a time (because all bedtime
stories must begin that way, right?),
there was a young-old woman

with a too-big bed that no longer suited her—
too hard, unforgiving, not supportive
where it needed to be,

and the man who loved her had been saying
for years, “I’ll buy you a new bed.”
But it seemed like too much work,

and how could you know how it’d feel
after lying on it for a few minutes looking
up into a showroom’s fluorescents?

And the old bed surely must’ve been glued
to the floor by now, and who would show up
to move such a behemoth, and that old

floppy mattress would fold like a pancake,
making it hard to move, and… But finally,
the young-old woman sighed, gave in,

asked for help, got advice, and, as always
happens, helper angels appeared, saying,
“We can do that for you,” and they did.

Other helpers in sister and friend form
nudged her (“It can be returned if it’s not just
right“). And today two men showed up in a

huge truck with the new bed and adjustable
platform and remote control (for a bed?!),
and they set it up on the freshly cleaned

floor, and, as she used to spell it in her
sixth grade notebooks, “Wallah!” And even
before she put on the sheets, she had

to lie on it, looking up a ceiling that had
sheltered her for nearly four decades,
close her eyes and thank the gods

of mattresses, for helpers, for all who
seemingly moved heaven and earth
to set her floating on this cloud,

a peaceful raft inside a cool house
on a hot summer day, amen,
the end.

•••

With gratitude to my village—Dickie and Donna and Lisa
and Neil and Timi for the nudges and strategizing, and to
Marissa and Leon, the movers/taker-awayers,
Robert the mattress seller, housekeepers Gladis and Lupe,
and Jose and Juan who delivered the new bed—
and all behind-the-scenes people who made this happen.

First, what ho—rain?
In June? Here?
Whaddowe think this is—Hawaii?
Warm, friendly rain, though not much.

But enough for the descending sun
to shoot through a prism of drops
and yep‚ throw a leg of rainbow
(not the whole half) against the sky
as we drive home after dinner.

But wait—there’s more. Earlier
in the day, an indoor rainbow
aimed through the front door
peephole landed on a closet door,
maybe a once-a-year occurrence.

Same day. Two rainbows
thanks to the merest bit of rain
as clouds chugged up the hill
for afternoon showers on
mountains accustomed
to such phenomena.

But we parched valley dwellers,
well, it just gets our hopes up.
We know what’s coming.
Can’t dodge the dry heat forever.

But it gives us something
to remember, rain dashing by
on a warming summer day,
waving, promising, “I’ll be back.
I really will,” as it heads off
to vacation in cooler places,
like the luckier ones among us.