In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I pulled out the manuscript of a novel I wrote around the time of his death. I had become involved as a volunteer in fair housing issues and wanted to write about what I was learning. I was a new immigrant to the US, clueless about racial issues in this country; the battered manuscript box has deservedly sat in the bottom drawer of an old filing cabinet ever since.

An incident based on my research for the book has stuck with me, however. The central character, a young woman newspaper reporter, works in Palo Alto, CA and goes to East Palo Alto, a black neighborhood just across the freeway, to interview a community organizer. Here are excerpts from a few paragraphs:

The afternoon was hot, and she was thankful for the shade of the overhanging trees as she drove down University Avenue toward East Palo Alto. She had never been there before. There had been nothing to go for. And she would have felt diffident about going to a black ghetto as a mere sightseer, even if it had occurred to her to do so.

As she came down the ramp on the other side of the freeway, she knew she was in a different country. The road was suddenly potholed and bumpy, and brown dust rose in thick choking swirls from its verges. She slowed and looked about her. Such tiny bedraggled houses, desperately in need of paint. Yards littered with junk, yet here and there a brave attempt at order and color. She came upon a few tatty shops. Surely this couldn’t be the main shopping center? Yet soon she could see the sign, NAIROBI SHOPPING CENTER, and underneath, in a language she could not understand, UHURU NA UMOJA.

Showing the predictable set of fears and prejudices about the African-American people she sees around her, the reporter parks her car and walks to her appointment, during which she is invited to sit in on a fair housing case.

She said goodbye, and walked slowly back to the car, past the Louisiana Soul Food Kitchen and the Black and Tan Barber. The heat and dust were almost unbearable.

Back across the freeway, she noticed for the first time the neatly swinging redwood sign: Welcome to Palo Alto. A few blocks further down University and it hit her like a punch in the gut. She pulled over to the side of the road and rested her head on the steering wheel, fighting back an impulse to vomit. The contrast was an obscenity. Huge magnolias here lined the street on both sides, giving deep dappled shade to the well-paved highway. Between the road and the white concrete sidewalks rose great greening mounds of juniper and ivy, and beyond them, with manicured lawns and discreet sprinkler systems, were the complacent mansions of the rich.

On top of the roadbank, I am fastening circles of heavy wire mesh around young Leyland Cypresses. A passing neighbor calls a greeting. “Prison guard-ening?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I reply with a shrug of despair. She too is a gardener. She understands.

Ever since my husband and I built this house at the edge of the forest, we have tried to live in respectful community with the creatures who were here before us. Jackrabbits, foxes and bobcats use our ground-level front porch as a convenient highway. My vegetable garden is fenced off, but the resident blacktailed deer amble through the rest of the garden wherever they please. They even help by pulling juicy weeds from among the deer-resistant perennials and by keeping down the path to the compost bins more efficiently than a lawn-mower.

The only problem I have is with the bucks, who scrape off the velvet covering their antlers by rubbing them against young trees and shrubs. Already some of the cypresses show the telltale signs: a snapped-off branch or frond turning brown, a length of the trunk rubbed raw. It’s a mating signal, I understand, with several facets: the visual sign left by the buck’s rubbing, chemical signals from glands on the buck’s face, and the sound of the buck thrashing branches of the tree on which it is rubbing.  I once watched a large buck do battle with a stiff and spiny Ceonothus bush by the driveway. Again and again he attacked, as if determined to demolish it. Here on this roadbank I have lost a Pacific Wax Myrtle and a couple of Shore Pines to such opponents. The Cypresses are a replacement, to help fill in a windbreak against our fierce nor’westers. I can’t afford to lose them too.

The prison cages are unsightly, and don’t fit with the natural landscape I’d like to have. But Cypresses grow quickly; soon their foliage will hide the wire. Sometimes compromises must be made.

“I have not written these poems, nor even read them; this is a spoken book,” declares my friend Diana Neutze on the back cover of her latest collection, AGAINST ALL ODDS. The title refers not just to her illness—she has battled Multiple Sclerosis for well over forty years—but to the difficulties inherent in transforming poems from her mind to the printed page. As MS closed down her body, she progressed from longhand, to one finger on the computer, to voice recognition. “But now I dictate to Gabrielle, my editing carer. Even the editing has been done by voice, backwards and forwards in the air.”

I was privileged to receive a copy of this handsome limited edition. Written over the past three years, the poems chronicle the poet’s recognition that her death is imminent and her determination to live each remaining day in the beauty of the moment. The poems are rich with images such as: …a tangle of branches/ peremptory against a crystal sky. She asks:

If I died tomorrow, what would

happen to the poems in my head?

Christchurch, New Zealand, where Diana lives, has suffered a series of devastating earthquakes and aftershocks that figure in many of the poems. In “Elsewhere” she writes:

…the earth where I thought

to lay my final bones

is writhing like a wounded snake.

The earthquake draws her mind outward to share a communal grief:

I mourn for the lost, the mained, the dead.

I mourn for our grieving city.

The experience of working with composer Anthony Ritchie on a song sycle of her poems draws her to a new awareness of the importance of people in her life. The final poem in the book reworks “Goodbye,” the final poem in the song cycle. Keeping the opening lines:  If this day were to be/ my last …,  she traces the trajectory of her preparations for death, from spiritual and inward-looking to a recognition of a fear in which …I relegated/ my friends to the outer suburbs. The poem ends:

If tonight were to be my very last,

I would be desolate

at leaving behind

a lifetime of friends.

I have been friends with Diana since our freshman year at the University of Canterbury, fifty-four years ago, where we met in English Literature class. During school breaks we worked as kitchen hands at the same remote fishing camp. We lived next-door to each other as young marrieds, and shared survival tips as penniless expatriate parents of small children in London. Over the years and across the globe we have stayed in touch, supporting each other as best we could in times of grief, commenting on each other’s poems, occasionally visiting. I honor this lifetime of friendship as I read AGAINST ALL ODDS.

Archetypal, the dusty parking lot

with hand-scrawled signs,

willows thick along the stony creek,

late-summer dry.

Body flattened to the ground,

small brown curly-haired dog

wills her three sheep smoothly

through all four gates.

Oblivious to all else,

a child sits in the dirt.

His hand through the chain-link fence

caresses a miniature goat.

Scent of fresh hay,

sweetness of animal dung.

At the ice-cream stall

a tot in her father’s arms demands

a chocolate-covered cone.

Unseen by the child,

the server also hands the man

a bowl and spoon.

Slices of heirloom apple

crisply tart on the tongue.

Angora rabbit pants as she

submits to being shorn.

Her cloud of fur becomes yarn

on the spinning wheel close by.

Ferris wheel whirl and squeal,

diesel rumble, carousel tunes.

Pink-cheeked above the white and green

of her 4H uniform,

a child sets down her golden trophy,

takes her bantam cock from the cage.

It nestles in her arms.

After I disturbed a quail on her nest in the walled garden in back of my house, I kept the gate closed for three weeks, which I learned was the typical incubation period for quail chicks. This morning I crept in, anxious about what I might find. I eased back a branch of thimbleberry, and cautiously lifted the thatch of dry blue-eyed grass. I glimpsed the rounded shape of an egg. Oh no, had the nest been abandoned? I looked closer. There were empty eggshells aplenty, neatly halved and stacked together in the grass-lined bowl of the nest. Eight or nine chicks have hatched and headed out into the big world. I’ve not yet seen them, though I’ve heard parental burblings from the bush-covered hill above the wall. Bon aventure, little ones.

I also had a chance to study the eggshells more closely, and realize I was mistaken in their color. They have a bluish cast, but the color is more of a creamy tan, speckled with brown blotches.

The gray foxes are back in our Mendocino neighborhood, a meadow at the edge of the forest. We’ve seen them several times, mostly at twilight. They use our low-to- the-ground front porch as a highway. One sat for a long time at the edge of the driveway, observing the meadow. A few evenings ago Tony called me to a back window. On the hill above the wall, a fox was eagerly digging at a gopher hole. A few moments earlier I had seen its mate running up the middle of the road, and soon there were two moving side by side into the thicket. I’ve heard them bark, a raspy single note, like a cough.

Although gray foxes are typically crepuscular, we’ve seen them in broad daylight too. As we were walking across the commons yesterday, not long after noon, a fox dashed across our path with some small creature in its mouth, probably a vole or gopher. It’s likely that nearby was a nest burrow where hungry kits were waiting to be fed.

There’s a nice description of the gray fox, with pictures, in the newsletter of The Watershed Project.

An excellent excuse yesterday to give up weeding an overgrown part of my garden. As I reached for a dandelion, a hen quail scurried from the vegetation just inches from my hand. She stopped a few feet away, chirping her displeasure. I apologized for disturbing her, but to no avail. She fled to the thicket up the hill and raised a frantic alarm. Curious, I reached under a thimbleberry bush and lifted a soft handful of last year’s blue-eyed grass. Underneath was a nest filled with speckled green-blue quail eggs. It was a perfect site for a ground-nesting bird: a small, enclosed garden, the house on one side, a high retaining wall on the other, with fences at each end to deter predators. The nest was right up against the wall of the house, sheltered from spring rain by the house eaves, and from wind by the thimbleberry.

I gathered up kneeling pad, implement and weed bucket and retreated to the gate. Closing it quietly behind me, I kept watch from a distance. After a few minutes, the hubbub faded. The hen flew back to the top of the wall, accompanied by her cock. After a few more minutes of hesitation, she fluttered down to the nest.

Soon cute fluff balls will poke around among the ferns and violets and learn to scale the wall. The weeds can wait.

For more than forty years, my friend Diana Neutze has endured the relentless thefts of  multiple sclerosis and grief for a son lost too young. Throughout that time, she has continued to write powerful and moving poems. Recently, her body closing down, she commissioned the New Zealand composer Anthony Ritchie to set some of her poems to music. The cycle of seven songs, “Thoughts from an Inner Garden” premiered April 2011 in a performance at Diana’s house in Christchurch, New Zealand. Diana recently sent me a CD of that performance. I’ve been playing it over and over, overwhelmed by the beauty and intensity of the work.

From Diana Neutze’s published collections, A ROUTINE DAY and UNWINDING THE LABYRINTH, Ritchie selected poems that express the poignancy of the poet’s sense of connection with the tangled garden that surrounds her house, a garden that has become her world. Transcending the nightmare of her chronic illness, she finds meaning in the details of the natural world: the play of light and shadow, the song of a bird.

The cycle opens in a minor key, an ancient, timeless sound that describes a day of wet greyness without wind when the garden is holding its breath. In “Bridal,” the second song, the poet, showered by autumn gold, imagines the roses and smoke bush as witnesses to a marriage between herself and the garden. The mood changes in “Chronic,” where Ritchie’s urgent rhythm reflects the tick-tocking of illness/ relentlessly. “And the Birds Sing” is a meditation on the cycles of life and death. “A Scent of Water” offers a fragile hope in the face of grief:  a frosting of growth/ a shivering of buds in the morning light. The rhythms of an old folk dance come to mind in “Meaning.” A moment in late afternoon, a blackbird singing in a weeping elm,  and the day is flooded with meaning. The cycle closes with “Goodbye.” The poet recalls the garden images she will die loving. The theme of a Bach partita enters the music as she describes its architectural splendour … arch after musical arch soaring upwards.

Just in from celebrating the grand opening of the Caspar Uplands Trail. Very rainy and muddy but an excellent walk up from Caspar Beach through a lovely stretch of forest, including the southernmost grove of Sitka Spruce in North America. The brand-new trail, which is part of the California coast trails system,  is the work of the Mendocino Land Trust, in collaboration with State Parks, county and state government, and the Caspar community. An excellent addition to the community.

As I grieve the earthquake destruction in Christchurch, New Zealand, I have been remembering  my time as a reporter on The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand’s city newspaper. I worked afternoons and evenings. When no deadlines pressed, I would gaze out my window in the Press Building, which overlooks Cathedral Square. The Press Building is badly damaged, and the cathedral spire in the center of my view has toppled. Rummaging in old files, I found fragmentary notes typed on yellowed newsprint, the small sheets we used to turn in our stories. They are undated, but would have been written in 1960 or 1961.

###

From here, with the afternoon sun through the window, people walking the square are mere silhouettes, with long shadows reaching out towards me. I can sometimes pick out what they are wearing, but they are mostly a pattern of shapes, against the curved lines of the square that isn’t a square at all, but the shape of a cross, with gently sweeping curves of the cathedral grounds in the center. A pleasant curve below me, with its little stone wall, a comfortable height for sitting on. There was a woman sitting there, by the entrance with the knobs on it. She was wearing a cream coat and a bright pink hat. It was a cheerful hat, and now her escort has arrived, and she has walked across the road with him.

Lots of people jump over the wall—it is much more fun than going through the entrance with the knobs in the proper manner.

A little choirboy runs to a bicycle parked against one of the buttresses of the cathedral. He has been to sing Evensong. Now he is joined by two others, three, four—they pour out, shouting and jostling. Neat little grey suits and red caps, schoolbags swinging in the dust. Singing is just part of their everyday living, as much as football and schoolwork.

The right of way by the cathedral is patterned with people coming to and fro. It is the back-lighting at this time of evening that makes the scene so attractive. Sunlight through the plane trees by the war memorial, a golden outline on each figure, long patterns of light and shade.

Silhouettes—the big cross on the memorial, the slender cross on the top of the cathedral spire, the stark criss-cross of the scaffolding round the spire, wrapping it in a blanket while it is cleaned and whitened. The sunlight through the green glass of the tower windows, tall narrow windows with diamond patterns.

###

Delicate tracery of bare branches outlined with sunlight on a winter afternoon. Dew silently falling—streets slowly dampen, although the sky is cloudless. Towards the west, the setting sun fills the sky with smoky pink. Buildings are grey silhouettes, slowly darkening to black. Cheerful red of transport buses the only touch of color.

###

To gather the texture of the square in the rain into a handful of feeling—dreaming out the window, with the rain spattering gently down, and the dazzling light reflected on the road, the long street lamps—white streaks, and the neon signs flashing on and off, endlessly—“Don’t be vague, ask for Haig,” and the white outline is filled up with a rush of red—“Be sure with Trufit,” hidden behind the “Choysa” oval. The “s” in Choysa is a bit wobbly—it won’t last long. The blue bird endlessly getting bigger, and then disappearing in the TEAL sign. “Fly to Australia” fades off into nothingness—it has had it too. The stars go round and round on the Monarch Shoes sign.

The colours of the neon signs are reflected in the pattern of puddles on the road—blue, purple, red, green, orange—vivid and glowing, shimmering in the circles of raindrops.

###

The gentle curve of the street below, with cars swishing round it. Not many now. It is before picture time, and only those with business at this time will be out on a night like this. An occasional bus sweeps into the stop, or lumbers out, almost empty.

The spotlight on the cathedral is smoking, as the rain hits the warm glass. The cenotaph is a black silhouette against the misty light.

Sometimes a black figure scurries across the square to the bus stop, head down, umbrella leading the way. Even the Bodgies [a youth gang] are gone from their usual haunt by the Embassy Theatre.