The sky was already showing signs of blueness when the sun came up last Thursday. This is the blue of early winter, and no matter how I try, I will never mistake it for that late-winter shade that fills me with such joy.
Snow from the previous week had broken a couple of branches on the butterfly bush April gave me all those years ago, after my reading on Bowen Island, so I got out my clippers and removed them. With my clippers still in hand, I removed some of the lower branches from the eight-foot hydrangea that my mother gave me for my fortieth birthday, and which I have encouraged to present like a tree, like I did with the mulberry out front -- purchased from the artist Glenn Lewis in 1997, when he had his Flagrant Flora nursery in Roberts Creek's Babyland.
Speaking of the front yard, I checked on the false cypress I transplanted during the heat dome last summer and found it to be happy enough, the crocuses at its base reaching from the ground like the jointless fingers of some tiny green being. But yes, the heat dome; I'm still haunted by it -- more than the atmospheric rivers. I don't want to go through that again. I feel damaged by it, broken like those branches.
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