Crows and lavender

Chance encounters, and serendipity from other Substacks

Check in

This is the 93rd straight week I’ve published Becoming on a Saturday evening. Soon, I’m going to take a vacation. When I get tired of writing.

Hey, that might never happen.

This is way fun.

Color, diagonals and story

I love the patterns and angles in this photo of a house in Portland’s Sunnyside neighborhood.

So much is going on here. The handrail and the stairs repeat the rhythm of the fencing on the garage. Red and green, complementary colors. A plain white wall, a messy blue wall. Birds of a feather, colorful friends. A restful scene with plenty of movement.

What are those birds saying to one another? Photo © Fran Gardner

Creativity begets creativity

My essay on “sere” for Juke has engendered a marvel. It prompted Sue Cauhape, who writes Ring Around the Basin on Substack, to meditate and write. Her effort, a long, lyrical poem, far exceeds mine in scope and wonder. Here’s just one snippet:

Sere is the roiling thunderheads stealing moisture from the land. Lightning strikes the brittle grass, leaving a black scar. The afternoon zephyr brings smoke from the west to obscure the sun and rasp within our throats.

Rush

Most of the times I’ve fallen, it’s been because I was thinking of where I was going, not where I was.

The thing about falling when your legs don’t work well is that you can’t get up.

Not long after I moved back home, I went to plug something in. I was thinking about the socket, not the way to it. I tripped and landed on a couple of rolled up Turkish rugs. There I lay till Robert, hearing me call, came to rescue me.

Only he couldn’t.

We’re about the same size and weight, and he injured his shoulders in a fall on the ice back in January. So hefting me up was not an option.

Nor could we get my legs situated so that I could push myself up on a nearby piece of furniture.

There was nothing left but the final option. Robert called 9-1-1 and soon, three burly firefighters filled our living room.

“Wow, you’re big!” I noted.

“It’s the water,” one of them replied, straightfaced. Evidently they hear this all the time.

In no time I was on my feet. Thank you, Portland Fire Department.

No rush

How many times have we let something like this happen? We might not fall, but having our focus on the destination and not the journey can corrode our mission.

We focus on the checkout line and forget to buy the tuna.

Concentrating on getting to work, we miss the beauty of the trees or that cheerful sweater on a pedestrian, or the children jumping in puddles.

So much we miss when we push our energy to the end of things.

“A map is not a journey,” the writer Phyllis A. Whitney noted in Guide to Fiction Writing (1988). Neither is a destination.

Center your life around journeys, not ends. That’s so much richer.

“Watch where you’re going!” could mean focusing on the destination. Or it could mean noticing where you put your feet.

The path matters. So put your focus there.

You will notice good thing in passing. Strange beauty awaits you.

The Comfort of Crows

In the library of infinite possibilities, I found a little gem.

It was on the brief shelf of “Lucky Day!” books at the Central Library.

These are books in high demand. I recently picked up The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad.

The gem in question is The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl. I’m a sucker for books with “crow” in the title, like Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Or Crow, poems by Gary Snyder. (There’s a lot of blackness in that book.)

This new crow book find is published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint I don’t recognize. It is a lovely volume, beautifully designed and printed on soft paper you love to touch.

Equally lovely is the art, photos and collages, by Billy Renkl.

I’ve been thinking lately of how easy Google has made what used to be reference work. As late as 2000 or so, you’d have to go to the library reference desk to check that huge book listing publishers whose title I can’t recall.

Now I find out instantly at Publishers Weekly that Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau started the imprint when working at Random House. After the imprint was dropped in the merger of Random House and Crown in 2019, Spiegel and Grau left Random House and resurrected Spiegel & Grau as an independent publisher.

They publish many intriguing titles, including Fox and I by Catherine Raven, Imaginable by Jane McGonigal, Codependent No More by Melody Beattie, and Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman.

This crow book

The Comfort of Crows is a collection of 52 little essays, one for each week of the year. Renkl is fast in love with nature, and each writing, only a few pages, is suffused with a giddy appreciation of thing that are observable to all of us, if only we would notice.

Each is so satisfying, you really can’t read more than one. So I have ordered the book, with the idea of savoring one rich item a week. Every Sunday, I think.

The foreword, “Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing,” contains this advice about observing nature:

Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship.

Yes, do that. I know it to be true.

The artist, Billy Renkl, who is Margaret’s brother, has also thought long about kinship. He wrote this about the collages he created:

The collages braid together three threads that also run through the manuscript: the natural world as a source of curiosity when carefully examined with clear eyes, as a source of astonishment and devotion, and as a model for understanding ourselves in relation to each other and the world.

Billy Renkl’s illustration for the chapter “The Beautiful World beside the Broken One” in The Comfort of Crows. Courtesy of Billy Renkl.

I look forward to taking comfort in The Comfort of Crows, words and art, throughout the coming year.

Lavender

When most of us think of lavender, we remember sun, brightness, how its blooms usher in summer.

But lavender has its dark side, too. Think of the deep promise of its heady scent, the bitterness of the leaves as you take them between your teeth. The fastness of slumber that lavender abets.

It’s here, now

Already, you can find lavender blooming in Portland gardens.

Not the plant with the little sky-blue flowers. That’s rosemary. Lavenders are the spiky plants with the brave purple blossoms.

The simpler flowers grace the more fragrant English lavender. The flashy flowers with what looks like purple wings are French lavender. The French version is good to look at and a sturdier bloomer but is not useful for fragrance.

English lavender. Photo © Fran Gardner

Both lavenders bloom most of the summer, and are hardy perennials in Portland’s climate.

French lavender. Photo © Fran Gardner

Harvesting lavender

Later in the summer, when about half the buds have opened, you can clip stems of the English varieties and hang them to dry. Shake the dried flowers into a paper bag, and you will have captured one of the great summer scents to fill sachets and add to potpourri.

Lavender’s contribution to better sleep is well known. Dreams induced by lavender may be sweet or dark. I couldn’t say.

Lavender kills harmful viruses and bacteria, too. You can make a household disinfectant by adding a few drops of lavender essential oil, some vinegar and a dash of castile soap (made with oil, not animal fat) to distilled water. The vinegar and soap help cut grease, the soap and lavender are antimicrobial, and it smells good .

Herbes de Provence

This spice blend was popularized by Julia Child. We think of it as including lavender, but the French don’t. Lavender is only added to North American versions.

• 1 tablespoon dried summer savory

• 1 tablespoon dried rosemary

• 1 tablespoon dried oregano

• 2 teaspoons dried thyme

• 1/2 teaspoon dried lavender flowers (optional)

Lavender

Little girl’s color
Marry with pink.
My children’s jackets
Came with white trim.

Lavender dreams
Sharp-smelling herb
Put the flowers in tea,
But you might prefer mint.

Here’s another poem, with rosemary, not lavender. I wrote it in 2004 on a visit to the Oregon coast.

Manzanita

It’s hot, this April,
Too hot for the beach
The surf spreads in submission.
The heat muting its roar.

A garden settles in warmth,
Bees fat and full in the cool of the rosemary.
Rustles from another yard—
Not a wild thing,
Just the neighbor.
Sticks crack,
Hard in the stillness.

The air is hot, breathless, but nothing is still.
Leaves push, indolent, at the pressing air.
The wind pushes back, rustles the underbrush, buffets the birds.

The rocks sing, silently, in their clamlike voices, mingling
With the chatter of crows.
Brave purple flowers bare their petals.

You sit languid,
Accepting, in the heat,
The sun on the crown of your head.

Elijah comes to you then, in the wind,
Whispering words you are too frail to understand.

We take care of each other

Robert is feeling poorly. He’s sitting in my recliner—our recliner now that I’m back home. He’s under the flannel-backed quilt, but I can see he is still chilled, so I bring him a blanket.

Perhaps his malaise is because he’s hungry. I offer him some cottage cheese, and then some miso dissolved in my homemade chicken bone broth.

Later, when he feels better—food helped—he brings things to me. A (refillable) bottle of water from the fridge. An Americano, made with espresso I had brewed earlier and hot water.

Later still, Robert makes supper, adding some frozen shrimp to packaged paella from Trader Joe’s. I contribute a salad of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes sprinkled with dried dill and sliced shallots, dressed with white-wine vinegar and the basil-infused Oregon olive oil I found at Savory Spice in Sellwood.

Robert makes ratatouille, too.

Shared tasks and love

We eat well night after night, sharing the cooking—though from habit, inclination and love, I do most of it.

This week we had tofu cutlets with a huge vegetable stir fry. I made Vietnamese hot and sour soup with shrimp, pineapple and bean sprouts, and more of that bone broth. Flavors included lime, tamarind, spicy Korean gochujang and fish sauce.

We talk about taking a night off and going out to dinner, but something one of us wants to make always comes up. So we dine in.

Check out

Chance energy

I’m writing when the doorbell rings. My visitor is a woman named Chantal, who is selling a carpet-cleaning service. She is discovering that houses in this neighborhood, most about 100 years old, don’t have carpets. The floors are hardwood, oak.

Despite that, we have an involved and empathetic conversation. She talks about her pregnant sister, who is being induced this day because her pregnancy is more than 40 weeks. The little girl’s name is Jordan.

But really, we are exchanging good will, love and energy. Her face is alive with emotion and vitality.

We say goodbye, and Chantal moves off to find another home with carpets. I go back to my laptop, refreshed by her energetic spirit.

We all have a job to do. Hers is to induce people to get their carpets cleaned, winning them over with a sparkling personality.

Mine is to write about a chance meeting that changes my day.

Takeaway

You just never know when an encounter will enrich you, bring something new into your life.

Chance, coincidence, synchronicity, serendipity. Whatever it is, it happens when we are paying attention. When we move past our ego, tamp down our natural narcissism.

We are encountering another, and that person is reflecting our own essence back at us.

Whom have you met today? Just be aware. Be open. Embrace.

End with a quotation

Suzan Colón writes a Substack called Yoga Mind. On Week 21, she wrote:

I consider my time and my precious life energy—our only two non-renewable resources—and I ask, “To knit . . . or not to knit?

Plug your favorite pursuit into that phrase, even if it’s only Law & Order or video solitaire. Maybe cooking, quilting, walking the dog?

It’s your time. It’s your energy. And both of them flow just one way, forward. Gather those rosebuds, and cherish them. Then pause a moment in gratitude.

Or end with a photo

These roses were eager to have a conversation with a passer-by. They had many secrets to impart. And they were very aware of their own beauty.

Photo © Fran Gardner

—30—

If you enjoyed this post, hit the ♡ to let me know. More of you are doing that, and I so appreciate it!

If you have any thoughts about what I write, please leave a comment (click on the thought bubble at the top of this posting).

If you think others would like it, hit re-stack (the interlocking arrows at the top of this item) or share.

Pay me

Also, if you have been enjoying Becoming week after week, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you in advance.