ANOTHER WET MORNING

“The silence of too much winter,” I once wrote in a poem, and I might add, “the winter of too much wetness,” as I look out at wet leaf piles heaped in the backyard. A prediction of fog and more rain evokes in me a desire to visit a place I love — the desert of southern California. The feeling is further enhanced when I open a folder that contains copies of postcards my mother collected on a trip to California in the 40’s — cards on which paintings of the desert were shown. The paintings appear on linen cloth cards, and, in particular, I was drawn to two: one of smoke trees in a desert wash and another of Joshua trees jutting into a blue sky.

A great classic book about the desert suitable for the kind of droopy weather we’re experiencing was written by John Van Dyke. It’s simply entitled The Desert, and if you read this tome, you might feel like trading locales, swamp country for desert terrain, for at least a week or so. The author spent three years living in and studying the environment of the desert from a naturalist’s point of view, and he paints with elegant prose what is portrayed in the renderings on the postcards I inherited from my mother.

As I finish up a book of poetry I’m writing — some of the poems based on the desert in Khuzestan Province, Iran — I’m reminded of lines in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “The worldly hope men set their hearts upon, /turns ashes or prospers, and anon,/like snow upon the desert’s dusty face,/lighting a little hour or two is gone.” Since I’ve memorized many of the quatrains in the Rubaiyat, this verse particularly resonates with me because it reminds me of how our everyday pursuits center on vanity and of how much we avoid the desert places if we can. But it’s there that we encounter the Self and our need for a more spiritually centered life. 

I’ve lived in at least two desert places: El Paso, Texas and Ahwaz, Iran, and from 1983-2007, I made annual treks to southern California where the brilliant light often restored my body and spirit. One summer while we traveled to Palmdale, California from Lake Tahoe, which straddles the line between California and Nevada, I sat in the passenger seat of a rented car during a few hours’ journey and was inspired to write 20 poems about the desert places we passed through, e.g., a brief one entitled “Sage Advisory” and another “Near Cartago, California.”

The long green fingers of sage

reach, open-handed, upward,

unafraid of the brilliant sun,

but they are closed,

will store their brilliance

and open their fingers

 only in darkness

when the desert has cooled,

when the universe becomes a plant.

and “Near Cartago, California: Population 75”

Salt flats, fields of uncommon snow

blush at the edges,

brine shrimp wriggling pink.

Not a mile away

from the turn-off to Death Valley 

Joshua trees suddenly jut up,

old men with arms linked,

standing too close to each other,

grousing in the sunlight.

And as I write this, the sky refuses to clear, so I continue going through my mother’s postcards, envisioning her delight… and loving that she, an intrepid adventurer, taught me to appreciate desert life.

SNOW, WILDFIRES, AND PHOTOGRAPHY

In a preceding blog, I wrote about plans to fly out to California to see my younger daughter Elizabeth, 52, receive her RN pin from Antelope Valley College, and I’m now in the desert country of Palmdale, California, a few days past the graduation ceremony. The night before my departure, fires raged in southern California and snow began to fall in southwest Louisiana! During the early hours of December 8, I began making frantic calls to the airport, to a motel in southern California, and to the California Highway Department, to see if Interstate 405, a major artery leading out of the airport, was open. The preceding day wildfires had edged the city of Los Angeles, causing this highway to close. “The 405,” as native Californians call it, connects to Hwy. 14 and Antelope Valley and a closure could have meant being stranded at LAX. Despite the uncertainty about the wildfires and falling snow, we decided to wing it. “Wing it” involved a delay at the Lafayette airport because the plane from Houston had to be de-iced; and upon arrival in Lafayette had to be de-iced again. You guessed it — we missed our connection. We sat in the Houston airport until 6 p.m., climbed aboard a United Air flight to LAX, and finally arrived at our motel in Palmdale at midnight, Louisiana time. I’m beginning to realize that I’m no longer a happy air traveler.

Joshua tree

However, Elizabeth now has her nurse’s cap, the fires have moved to other points in southern California, and we’ve begun to explore plant life, searching for several trees that will be included in my forthcoming book of poetry entitled Let the Trees Answer. The biggest find is that of ancient Joshua trees, and my grandson Joel photographed one for me to include in the book. We also visited Prime Desert Woodland Preserve, Lancaster, CA, 100 acres of untouched high desert, with two miles of hiking trails that showcase a diversity of desert plant and animal life. We were able to get shots of the Western Cottonwood tree to accompany one of my poems. The site had a plethora of desert plant life, and we trekked the dusty trails long enough to photograph all the trees I’d hoped to find while visiting southern California.

Western Cottonwood

Grandson Joel, 14, loves to take photographs, and I’ve included several of his subjects in this blog to encourage his interest. Joel was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis shortly after he visited me in Tennessee when he was seven, but he’s a cheerful trouper — plays basketball, swims, is an active member of a church youth group, is teaching himself to play a guitar using an “app,” attends “Elizabeth’s Home School,” and is a whiz with electronic equipment. He also spends time teaching Zeke, his African gray parrot, to talk; however, Zeke only talks when we try to watch a movie or television show. 

Joel at his mother's graduation

Temps have remained in the 30’s and 40’s here in Palmdale, but we’re still enjoying the abundant light from sunny skies that I’ve enjoyed periodically for the 34 years I’ve been coming out to this place my father once called “Diddy Wah Diddy.”

SOARING

According to an article written by Xi Lin in the Department of Educational Foundation Leadership and Technology at Auburn, Alabama, 61 percent of the adult student population enrolled in colleges and universities of the U.S. are female nontraditional students. They are the fastest growing segment of all groups in higher education. Most of these students have multiple roles as parents, spouses, and employees and are challenged by child care, financial, and school responsibilities. They sometimes feel marginalized and excluded from traditional campus life, and they run a formidable race to achieve their educational goals.

I read this article only yesterday, and I know the facts presented in it on a firsthand basis. I know those facts because my youngest daughter, Elizabeth, at age 52, will be capped as an RN at Antelope Valley College in California (the college that former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan first entered) next week. She entered at the level of a freshman, and at the entry level, I think she underestimated her ability to succeed. However, she’s a highly-determined young woman. Her great-grandmother, Sarah Nell Greenlaw, once said that “she’s a stubborn child, but that isn’t always a bad quality.” Elizabeth was two when Grandmother Nell voiced this declaration.

Elizabeth went out to California at 18 and married before she could begin her academic experience. She has three children, ranging from age 14 to 34, and she home-schooled (and still home schools the youngest) all three, two of whom graduated from the school I playfully refer to as “Elizabeth’s School.” A few years ago, she decided that the time had come for her to continue her own education, and she entered Antelope Valley College. During her years of attending college, much of the time in Honors classes, she has been a homemaker, continued to run her home school, managed the stress associated with her youngest child’s juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and dealt with other family illnesses. I watched Elizabeth “ace” Chemistry, and Anatomy, and marveled at her ability to excel in classes for which she had no background education. She says that one of her most difficult classes was an Art History class, mostly because she had to visit museums for six weeks, several as far away as Los Angeles, which is a two-hour drive from her home in Palmdale, California.

I couldn’t resist celebrating Elizabeth’s achievement via a salute in a blog. I plan to fly out next week to attend the capping ceremony, and I’m sure it will be an emotional event.We’re a family of late bloomers. While raising a young son, Elizabeth’s sister, Stephanie, graduated cum laude in Psychology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette at the age of 29; my daughters’ father received two degrees from Louisiana State University at the age of 31. I know that their level of self-confidence, while pursuing higher education, was often low, and the gap between high school and entering college was a hurdle they had to jump before they could catch up to traditional students. However, every time the bar was raised, they sailed over it. In Science of the Mind, I recently read and champion the idea: “…the energies …increase over time with the intentions you create, the words you chant, and the focus of your mind…”

I’ve resisted putting photographs of my offspring on Facebook for years, and family photos seldom appear in my blogs, but this event deserves notice, so here’s Elizabeth of whom the family is proud (as proud as I was when Stephanie was cited as a cum laude graduate in 1989). After visiting Elizabeth in California one summer, I wrote a poem entitled “Elizabeth Growing” that appeared in Soaring, one of my books of poetry, and I think of the last few lines this morning as I celebrate Elizabeth’s achievement: 

“You do the heart work,

cultivate fruit trees and marigolds,

small plots in sand drifts,

soul seeds that grow upward

toward the stars under which you swim,

entering the realm where you, again,

‘trail clouds of glory.’”*

Salud, Elizabeth Alice!

*"Intimations of Immortality” by William Wordsworth

Painting on cover of Soaring by Paul Emerson Marquart

VISITING IN DADDY WAH DIDDY

By Doug Dolde, public 
domain, Wikimedia

Although I'm fond of California, eight years passed before I finally made a trip west to visit my daughter in the high desert of Palmdale, California last week. I've missed my annual week of revivification in the warm, dry climate that clears up allergies, arthritis, and other maladies endemic to the Deep South. When I was eleven, I developed a liking for the climate and landscape of the desert during our sojourn in "Diddy Wah Diddy," my father's name for California.

I was shocked to see the skeletal-looking Joshua trees (my favorite species of desert trees) on the landscape, but shouldn't have been as the high desert in California is experiencing severe drought—the region has averaged only about four inches of rain in several years.

The Joshua tree has been called the "cultural signature of California's desert landscape," and grows only in the Mohave Desert. The seedlings of these picturesque trees are shriveling up and dying before they can put down roots, and scientists say that the trees may lose up to 90 percent of their range in the 800,000-acre Joshua Tree National Park by the end of this century if the drought persists.

My daughter lives in the Antelope Valley where water usage has been limited due to the drought, and water agencies have begun planning for more storage facilities to capture water available during wet seasons—some have even suggested building a Bay-Delta twin tunnel project and to limit the amount of water being diverted to protect the Delta smelt. Currently, my daughter is abiding by the mandate to limit outdoor water use, and her once-green yard reflects that limitation. She's considering graveling the entire expanse of front and side yards.

Big Bear Lake, CA

We also visited Big Bear Lake (elevation 6743 feet!) while traveling in Diddy Wah Diddy and found that a four-year drought has resulted in the lake being eleven feet down from full. For the last three years, this area has experienced a drought condition that resulted in fifty percent less than the average amount of inflow into the Lake.

But back to the Joshua tree, a succulent known as Yucca brevifolia. The tree grows up to forty feet high and lives more than 200 years, sporadically putting out yellow and white bell-shaped blossoms. Unfortunately, during the 1980's when Palmdale and Lancaster, aka the Antelope Valley area, were booming, 200,000 Joshua trees were replaced by housing tracts and shopping centers (my daughter lives on one of the housing tracts!). Then, during the 1990's, exotic grasses began to grow among the trees because of conditions triggered by El Nino, and the grasses caused the forests of Joshua trees to become vulnerable to brush fires.

As we drove through the Mohave, I kept lamenting about the stricken forests of trees and consoled myself with the fact that because the Joshua trees grow for about 200 years, I wouldn't witness large-scale die-offs during my lifetime, but I hated to see the demise of any of these desert beauties.

Mormons named the Joshua tree after the biblical character Joshua. They were traveling through the Cajon Pass to Utah in 1857, and it is said that they envisioned the trees as prophets and that their outstretched arms pointed the way to the promised land.

While traveling from Lake Tahoe back to Palmdale one summer, I scribbled twenty poems that included a brief notation about sighting a Joshua tree, a snippet entitled "Near Cartago, California: Population 75:"

Salt flats,

fields of uncommon snow,

blush at the edges

where brine shrimp wriggle;

and not a mile away

at the turn-off to Death Valley

Joshua trees suddenly jut up,

old men with arms linked

standing too close to each other

grumbling to the sun.

And if you want to read more about these dying desert attractions, there's a "tome" online entitled Joshua, My Love. The book was written by Mary Austin, a woman who fell in love with Joshua trees when she moved to Antelope Valley in 1937.