My oldest friend

This same moon saw me crying through the back window of my parent's car as a song on the radio broke my heart open, it watched me spin around and around with a group of people to Rembetika music outside a cafe in Chios , as it rose blood red over the Mediterranean. I can even imagine it catching my attention as a baby slung over my mother's shoulder on a summer evening a brilliant, glowing ball on the horizon.

One of the first things I look for when I go outside in the evening is the moon. Throughout numerous moves, lonely evenings spent smoking out back (when I was smoking) and times of transcendent joy it has been there. So much changes, but it has been with me wherever I go and whatever I'm doing.

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It doesn't matter how well you know yourself...What matters is how you relate to what you do know. ~Mark Epstein

Every Thursday evening I drive along the Braes Bayou to the meditation center and the moon is there keeping me company in the damp green heat of Houston. Over the last month or so this winding road past trees dripping with Spanish Moss has moved me past something, a resistance I have had all this time to this place and myself in it. My feelings about sprawl and a car-centric city haven't changed, but something has shifted. I'm not looking to leave here unless something very specific comes looking to take me away.

I had dinner on Friday with a friend at a restaurant I had been dreaming about since we moved here. The entire menu was local and the food was stunning. I told my friend that I was tired of always wishing myself elsewhere, not to mention moving, and that we will make our lives here as if it is the only place there is to be. We walked outside the restaurant and I stood under a peach tree full of velvety ripe fruit and saw the moon through its branches and thought of it shining on my own garden: the fig tree, meyer lemons, blackberries and muscadines.

I thought, where the moon is, that's home.

Coming out of the shell

We found this snail shell on a morning walk. The snail either abandoned the shell, doubtful, or was plucked up and emptied by one of the herons that sometimes hang out in the trees of our neighborhood which is bordered by one of the many bayous that make this Bayou City. For the uninitiated these are not pronounced Bye ooo as I did when I first landed on these humid shores, but Bye O. Anyway, this snail is no native either. A gourmand or entrepreneur (or so the story goes) "introduced" them to the area hoping for a windfall in escargot. I do love escargot, but have never gotten up the courage to harvest them for consumption. Which doesn't mean my hands are clean, as I do round them up and make them "swim" in order to save our garden harvest. They can wreak havoc.

This snail is a good metaphor for what's happening in our lives in these parts soon. The shell is what I've surrounded myself with the past several years; taking care of others, putting my own needs and desires on hold and also just holding on to what came before in a way that keeps me from moving forward. I'm hoping to leave that all behind. A tall order, but one worth pursuing I think. I feel like this is a watershed year for me. I turned 40 and I'm about to spend an entire month on my own without my family. When I come back I will embark on a new career path.

The kids are heading out together to spend two months with their grandmother on a farm that has been in the family since 1885. I'm so happy that they can sit by the fireplace with books I read as a child and listen to their grandmother's stories.

And all three of us girls, heading out on our adventures, have a wonderful guy who supports us in our need to expand our horizons holding down the fort!

Here

This weekend there are no fixed plans a relief and a luxury after over a month of weekends on the go. Fridays are traditionally family nights so we had dinner and then Madelines and tea outside with the local wildlife.


Sofía is my nature chick. She reminds me of myself at that age. I spent hours staring into a creek bed, catching frogs and even more hours turning over rotting logs to see if I could capture newts. I wanted so much to be a herpetologist and to write for National Geographic. My own father saw his dreams of being an "ologist" in me. The last time I visited him he pulled out a record he found that was made in a booth when he was 10 where he talked about wanting to become a scientist "geologist, zoologist or some kind of ologist." He used to hang out around the staff entrance of the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC hoping to learn more about the things he found, and he learned how to do taxidermy from one of the scientists who must have seen some potential in him. The sound of his young hopeful voice made me very sad. College was so far out of the reality of anyone in his family and he never managed to make it there. He had a family to support instead. I grew up with snakes and lizards and preserved these pets when they died in the formaldehyde my dad kept in his closet. I regret never having been challenged in science and I do think a lot of it had to do with being a girl. Sofia announced this evening that she wants to be "a natural scientist that studies frogs and toads" that would be a herpetologist! No pressure, but it would be cool!

The only fixed plan I have this weekend is to go see Marjane Satrapi with Micaela. My very good friend Adam gave Micaela her first book a few years ago. We have yet to see the movie, but Micaela is looking forward to getting her book signed for her collection of books signed by women authors including Isabel Allende and Gloria Steinem(a picture of her getting the book signed and she wasn't 9 she was 4!). The only man in the group is Ira Glass who we saw earlier this year.

I'm feeling rather insular these days...I'm trying to be here in my life even when it sucks, which the 8-4 part definitely does. This too shall pass.

The Giving Tree

When we had our house inspected we were told we should take down this tree:

It is too close to our foundation and also has some sort of disease so it is pretty sad looking. Juan, determined not to pay anyone to do it, bought a chainsaw with an extension and started bit by bit taking it apart. I was helping him lower branches pully style when I realized the branches were covered with lichens Parmelia sulcata to be exact.


My next thought was dyestuff so I spent a few hours scraping branches and filling up two ziploc bags with fungi. Supposedly it yields a yellow to golden brown color.

The weather is gorgeous and my plan today was to garden, but I got derailed, not to mention sore fingers, from working to scrape off the lichens. The day is still young though so I am going out to plant jasmine, water our new plants and transplant the dye plant seedlings.

The tree isn't down completely yet. The big fall is what makes me the most nervous. Juan, as always, is underwhelmed by the task. I'm glad he's so handy. The past two weekends he spent digging a French Drain all the way around our house. The rains here are biblical and there is a slope towards the back of our house. The soil here is "gumbo," which is to say heavy red clay making this an epic job. Here's the after shot of the back of our house. The plants in front, which will come back, are Ruellia, which the hummingbirds love. The vine on our house is Fig Ivy.