Intermission at a Sunday afternoon concert, a knot of people take the air in the porch of Preston Hall. “That’s a beautiful sight,” a woman says, pointing to the rain sweeping in across Mendocino Bay. We are all excited. The weather gurus have warned that this rain is just precursor to a series of large storms expected to hit over the next several days.

“Remember that time we we had twenty, no forty inches of rain in one storm?” someone says.

“What about the time that rogue wave went right over the lighthouse?” Point Cabrillo Light Station, a one-story structure with a turret on top that holds a magnificent first order Fresnel lens, sits on a crumbling headland about fifty feet above the water.

“Not over the light, surely?”

“Over the roof, at least.”

Much damage?”

“Oh yes.”

I mention the first time Tony and I came to Mendocino, in 1970. In Navarro River Redwoods State Park, through which you drive to reach the coast, we were fascinated to see a plaque high up the cliff on the side of the road, marking how high the waters had come in the big flood. The date was 1965, I think. The plaque is gone now, but you can still see evidence of that flood. A whitish fungus covers the trunks of the redwood trees up to the waterline. It is particularly visible at night, illuminated by car headlights, a ghostly presence in the blackness of the forest.

The Navarro River still floods in major storms. Everyone who lives here on the coast quickly learns the alternate routes to reach inland destinations. Tree limbs fall. Mud slides. Sometimes all the roads are closed. Sometimes the power goes out for days. We learn how to hunker down. And afterward, we will have more stories.

The book arrived in the mail, unexpected. Return address BkMk Press. Oh yes, I remembered, one of those poetry manuscript competitions I entered ages ago, where they send all contestants a copy of the winning book. I opened it to skim, and was immediately reading it cover to cover. Tony Barnstone’s Tongue of War: from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, is the most powerful anti-war testament I have ever read. I’d like to quote B.H. Fairchild, who awarded this book the John Ciardi Prize:

“…It is written in forms, especially the sonnet, and of course the meter of those forms, the pulse of human feeling unable to name itself… The diction and syntax are often blunt with the exhaustion and terror of human voices—American and Japanese, soldiers and civilians—struggling to articulate the unspeakable, to make visible that to which we have learned to blind ourselves. …I cannot help but think that having read it, an American President who has himself been privileged to avoid the horrors of the battlefield might be less inclined to send young men and women off to face them.”

An odd rattling sound as I sat at my desk Saturday afternoon. A slightly queasy, seasick feeling in my stomach. A sharp jolt shifted my brain into gear, and I bolted for the doorway.

The 6.5 magnitude quake centered off the coast of Humboldt County wasn’t a big deal here in Mendocino, but it was enough to remind us that we live in earthquake country. I still have vivid memories of crouching under my desk at Stanford University during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, one hand holding tight to my pencil drawer to prevent pens, paper clips and miscellaneous junk from flying all over the room. After the shaking stopped, my office mate and I went upstairs to see how others had fared. We found a white faced co-worker in the hall. She happened to be away from her desk during the quake. Just as well: a large bookcase loaded with heavy binders had crashed onto her chair.

The recent quake is once again a reminder that there are things we can do to prepare ourselves for earthquakes. I look around my office now and am thankful my bookshelves are securely bolted to the wall.

Here on the Mendocino Coast, where winters are mild and rainy, now is the time to look for the first wildflower, Scoliopus bigelovii, commonly known as Slink Pod. The shady bank down by our creek, where I usually see them, was littered today with debris where the top of an old  fir had fallen, but there was still one plant unsmushed by the crash, a new bud opening, and spent flower heads already slinking off to find new earth for their seeds.

Walking on the cliff trail at MacKerricher State Park yesterday, my friends and I watched a flock of Yellow-Rumped Warblers flitting from rock to rock just above the waves. A willow thicket was nearby, so they were not far from their typical habitat. But an unexpected flash of bright color where the white/gray/brown of our regular shorebirds is the usual color scheme. We speculated that they were attracted by the clouds of tiny flies that hovered above a coil of freshly washed-up bull kelp.

I planted garlic this afternoon. I’m running a little late. My friend who lives at Comptche, inland from here, and grows beautiful garlic, likes to plant at Winter Solstice and harvest at Summer Solstice. But I figure January 2 is close enough. Anyway, the solstice was rainy, and today was sunny and mild, an excellent day for being outdoors. After spading in compost from a well-matured pile, I selected a good-sized head from last year’s crop, broke it apart, and dropped each fine fat clove into its hole.

The rest of last year’s crop hangs in a decorative sheaf by my kitchen window, where it’s convenient to clip off a head when I need to replenish my Wild River Pottery garlic jar.  I haven’t yet figured out how to make garlic braids like my friend in Comptche. Maybe this year …

New Years Day. the ritual of changing the calendars. I take down the old  Nature Conservancy calendar, with its beautiful wildlife pictures, and hang its replacement,  the 2010 calendar.  I replace the little tide book tucked behind the portable radio on a kitchen counter. My book shows the high and low tides as a wavy line undulating across the days of the month. My moon chart too is visual: for each month, an arching line of moons, their phases making a dramatic pattern of light and dark across the year. I love these graphic images. I love too, that by comparing the charts for moon and tide,  I can see the pull of the moon’s gravity on water, can glimpse the rhythms that make up our world.

I’m one of those odd people who enjoys ironing. I especially like ironing old linen. Many years ago, I found a dozen double damask dinner napkins at an estate sale. They were yellow with age, their edges hand-stitched with tiny hems. Laundered to a gleaming whiteness, they grace my table at every holiday. Now they are washed again, spritzed with water, and wrapped in a towel, a method I learned from my mother and grandmother. I unroll the bundle, lay a damp napkin on the ironing board, hear the sizzle of the iron as it polishes the fabric until the medallion pattern shines. Once stiff, the linen is now soft in my hand as I fold and set it to air. There is a quietness about that stack of folded linen that speaks of history and tradition and pleasure in beautiful things.

We made the acquaintance of a California Brown Bat yesterday. He had been hiding in a stack of five-gallon black plastic pots on the porch of my garden shed. Daughter-in-law Diana and grandson Timothy needed a pot for some project, and were startled to hear a loud hiss. Two pots down in the stack, there it was: chestnut brown fur, black feet, large yellow-brown fangs chittering angrily at being disturbed in the middle of the day. (Here’s  a picture by Tom Jolly of a similarly angry bat.) Everyone gathered round to look, an opportunity for a conversation with the grandchildren about the useful role bats play in the environment, and about the possibility of building a bat house to encourage more bats to the property. Very carefully, I lifted the pot and set it on its side in a shady place, so that the bat could escape to some more secluded place to resume its sleep.

The last of a wintry sun touches the leaves of the olive tree in my garden. The resident Anna’s hummingbird gathers the last beakful of nectar and comes to perch. A burbling of quail under the bushes. Peace on earth.