chocolate cake

One side of the hill browned and blackened, charred locusts at the edge of the burn, a high patch of cacti and tamarind still green, the road red dirt. A flock of young peacocks pecking in the dry, rocky ground rush across the charred landscape in their way, heads jerking. The road curves again, toward a house built in the West Indian style, like the houses planters built with European minds, their bodies moored in the New World–long, wide galleries and the lower floor set nearly into the dirt. In the distance the house looks empty, shuttered, the only movement a windvane turning in the lazy breeze. Everything brown and pale yellow, a sepia photograph, the gray pile of gravel meant for the new road standing out brightly against the stretch of burn and the shadowed house that seems to murmur to itself, saying things the earth tells it.

portrait w/ sunflowers

mmmm, salty

burdened vessel

jeeves, would you bring the car around?

T and Aunty Robin

Path of the Blazing Sarong stutters to life again, born, as usual, of frustration and wonderment. Without that feeling, it seems I have nothing to say. Since last November, I've devoted myself to the project of learning to write fiction, which is something I suck at. So, I haven't been writing much of anything else because that is so impossibly hard and takes all my willpower and time stolen from the rest of my life. This amorphous thing, motherhood, seems in fact to have unlocked any fragile/occasional talent (today is a day for pessimism, tristes tropiques), which is something I should write down. Anyway, my attempts to develop a plot recently devolved into a multiple choice game, one like How to Survive a Disaster, which I found in the children's section of the local library.
Why did the man disappear?
a) He was murdered.
b) He was having an affair.
c) No real reason--he was always unreliable.
I should have a firm grasp of whatever logic is at the heart of this story, and everything should be turning inevitably on that fulcrum, as solid as industrial steel, be taking shape as ineluctably as sea water turning into rain. The other world has to be real. Oh well.
Now we have passed through Tortola and Virgin Gorda, the bliss of coral sand and aquamarine the Caribbean sells. On an isolated beach across the sound from Richard Branson's private island, I rushed into the surf, which constantly renewed its clarity. Tallulah and I roamed the beach, finding shampoo bottles and shoes obscured by vegetation at the high tide mark.
Sea Wolf is back in Moorea, still for sale, and we've had the good luck to become custodians of a Bahamian ketch, a former charter boat 45 feet long and 14 feet wide. Headroom.
At the moment, and likely for months to come, we are anchored in a bay in Culebra next to the island's only town, called simply el pueblo, rather than the name Dewey which, unpleasant in English, was forced on this settlement by the US Marines. We've been here for two or three weeks and my knowledge is superficial. I walk past the small houses of families who might have lived on the island for a hundred years, their doors open to catch the night air, gathering words here and there, windows, or your sister, or a package of galletas, the everyday things that people say to each other and I feel the familiar longing to share in their understanding of what things mean, to be initiated so that the way the s's tumble off the ends of the words might perfectly express my own relation to the world. Tallulah used to go and stand next to people we'd encounter and look at them, waiting, as if to say, Tell me what you know. Give me your culture. I look on with the desperate irritation of unrequited love. And yet I find I have come to accept myself as bourgeois, occasionally amusing, and awkward. It fits as comfortably as anything else, one of my disguises.

Tongariro crossing

Billed as one of the greatest day hikes on the planet--how could I resist?


We most definitely did!
For the eye of Sauron lay heavy on our hearts.


Follow the black cinder trail.Hobbit sign.


Whenever the Path takes us to foreign lands, we always try to go a little native. In New Zealand, this has meant visiting sheep-shearing exhibits and thermal pools, etc. But when given the opportunity to hunt a real hobbit, I, of course, jumped at it. The Tongariro area is one of the last places where hobbits can still be found in the wild. And, even though it means a significant hike and uncertain success, this was definitely on.
Finally spotted one:
He didn't get away.
Near the summit my native guide, Dan, winged one with his first shot. By the third arrow, this hobbit was down and out.
We grilled him back at camp, and as the guest, I was given the dubious honor of eating the "tenderloin." It was quite juicy, surprisingly filling and delicious! Now I feel like a real New Zealander.
Oh, and the hike wasn't bad either.

lifeonland

glass 3/4 full
visualize
firepower or lookout jojo
grampadan & T
grammadonna & T
singalong interuptus
first jet flight out of Rotorua: we were there
T is stunned, needs to be dragged home