Molly Fisk's Blog

In this modern world, we don’t always have contact and communication with people live, in person. I have 5000 Facebook friends, for instance, most of whom I have not shaken hands with. Some I wouldn’t recognize on the street, either, because their profile picture is one of their cats, or a grandchild, or a political slogan. When you know people in a casual way, this seems fine to me. But there are a few humans I’ve grown very close to, and not having been in their physical presence feels unnatural.

So when my coaching client of 13 years Dan, his wife Ona, and his guide dog Boone decided to fly from Philadelphia to do a reading in San Francisco, I got myself into gear.

I’m not as spry as I once was, and I’m out of practice driving in cities and in traffic, not to mention both at once, but I don’t need a guide dog, so I knew every step of the way that I was having an easier time than my client and friend, the poet Dan Simpson, who has been blind from birth. When I felt some trepidation about the trip: before and during, I took courage from the way Dan moves through the world: on foot, on trains, on escalators, in Ubers and cabs, getting help from strangers all the time. I’m also in a stage of life that’s about recalibrating what we do to accommodate our age and blooming infirmities, shall we say, and I’m trying to help myself be as courageous as possible. Last month I drove myself to Utah and back, which involved cricket swarms and many mountain passes, but neither traffic nor cities.

I’m not an early adopter, nor very tech savvy, and have somehow ended up with a phone service that can make calls but rarely works for anything else unless there is wifi attached, so using GPS is not possible. What I do instead is to figure out a route on my computer before I go to new places and then take pictures of the directions with my phone. This works fine, though I do sometimes have to stop and read a photograph if the route is complicated, which this one was. I can still get around in San Francisco — the city of my birth — to places I’ve been before, but this reading was in a book store in Glen Park. Where is Glen Park? Somewhere on the slopes of Twin Peaks, it turned out.

I got to Bird & Beckett three hours early, having left my house five hours before. I really hate to be late. I had actually read there once myself, but on Zoom from the comfort of the desk in my own kitchen. Full to the brim with sight-seeing, meandering, and did I mention some traffic?, I wrote a poem in my car, and then ate supper in a nice Italian restaurant called Manzoni. For dessert, I had “eggless panna cotta with preserved cherries.” I had never seen it called eggless before, and no recipe I can find includes eggs, so I assume this is just announced to forestall urban food allergy questions. Me, I would put “scrumptious panna cotta” on the menu instead.

Thus restored and fortified, I went back to the bookstore and there were Dan, Ona, and Boone the guide dog, as well as Zack Rogow, the third reader.

Giving Dan a hug was definitely worth any and all traffic I may encounter, and same for Ona. Boone rested his head on my foot through part of the reading, which I took as a high compliment. Both Dan and I said that because we know each other’s voices so well, it didn’t feel strange to be together in person at all. Zack and Ona each read from recent memoirs, and Dan read poems from his latest collection, Inside the Invisible. (I’ll put links at the end.) The mix was very good, and the whole feeling of the evening was deep and intimate and welcoming.

Bird & Beckett is serious about poetry, as you can see from their new-book section. The place can only seat 25, though, so if you go there for a reading, don’t be late.

The next morning, Dan and Ona and I (and Boone) ate breakfast together in a Brazilian cafe in Oakland called Paulina, as one does, and talked for two and a half hours in between espresso drinks, omelets, and lemon muffins. A good time was had by all. They were staying the weekend with relatives, but I had to beat the Friday and Father’s Day weekend traffic, so we said goodbye. When I go on my book tour for Walking Wheel in 2026, I will visit them in Lansdowne, PA.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/inside-the-invisible-daniel-simpson/19597457?ean=9798987192764

STARRED Book Review: Everywhere I Look

https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/hugging-my-father-s-ghost.html

As many of you know because I talk about it all the time on social media, there are certain phrases and usages that drive me around the bend and other ones I completely adore. My preferences aren’t predictable, even for me. Sometimes I’ll forget all about them until an innocent stranger uses one and sets me off.

Being senior citizen-adjacent, my memory is a steel sieve, and living in the back of beyond, I find out about language innovations nearly a decade after they’ve migrated into the mainstream, whether from black culture, tech cubicles, or anywhere else.

Google office in Mountain View, CA

Someone in a café used “-adjacent” the other morning, and I’d forgotten how much I loved its silliness. I went to Professor Google to find out when people began using it in this goofy way, and after a few pages of serious unironic definitions I found an article from 2019 saying it was about five years old then. So the decade estimate holds true here.

My frequent morning hang-out and eavesdropping perch: Three Forks Bakery & Brewery, Nevada City, CA

If you read this New York Times article, you’ll find that a writer named Lionel Shriver, in Harper’s, is wondering whether we’re starting to use geographic language, words of location and placement, because we need to keep our bearings more firmly “in the digital world, where everything’s floating around. We’re living increasingly in a world beyond space, beyond physicality.”

Saturn. Photo from Meteored Argentina

I am physically sitting sideways on my sofa as I write this, listening to the afternoon school-pick-up traffic noises out my open front door, as well as one chainsaw, one lawn mower, and some excitable wind chimes in a minor key. Things may be floating around inside this laptop, but here on Newtown Rd. on a warm day in March at 2500 feet above sea level, we are all in our usual places.

Mimi, sleeping.

I also discovered that last year there was an Adjacent Festival on Memorial Day Weekend on the beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It took some searching, but this turns out to have been a music festival involving bands I haven’t heard of like the Linda Lindas and Hot Milk. I have no clue about the adjacency part of it: adjacent to Manhattan? Adjacent to Atlantic City? Or the Atlantic herself?! I might be too old to understand the meaning of this without help, so if you have the lowdown, please explain in a comment.

Screenshot of the Adjacent Festival’s website’s landing page.

Speaking of clueless, I’ve been informed that I am a real senior citizen now, no adjacency about it, having reached my late sixties. I’m rebelling against this idea for the moment, and will consider myself forthwith to be elderly-adjacent. What are you beside, next to, abutting, neighboring, nigh, adjoining, contiguous with, proximate, and otherwise snuggling up against? Do tell!

[The tulips in the featured photograph for this post are both themselves tulips and tulip-adjacent. That might be a goal.]

At some point every January for the last ten years, I’ve taken an inventory of my books — the books I’ve written — for tax purposes. This is a little random, as I have boxes of my first poetry book in my shed from when the publisher closed its imprint, and I never count those.

Photo in situ by Ruth Bavetta.

I think there are 8 boxes left of 76 books each, but since they were free to me, calculating profit doesn’t make sense. I do count all the others, which I have paid for at various times, and many of them published myself, so we can see how much they cost and how much money they have made me.

The short answer is: very little, if you mean cash money in hand. But the winding, meandering, sauntering, longer answer is more interesting, though useless for tax purposes.

They have made me friends. They have made me mildly famous in my own town. They have kept me out of certain kinds of trouble, especially the kind involving other people’s spouses and motel rooms.

They have entertained readers and listeners and brightened a lot of days, people tell me, particularly when I describe my own foibles, bloopers, ridiculousness, and personal array of human failings.

Steve Baker, Program Director of KVMR, introducing the first radio commentary book at my book launch.

I’ve had a wonderful time designing their covers with my friend Max. Our first one involved finding chickens on the internet who might look good together, and setting them up on a blind date.

We sat in the original Summer Thymes cafe, in not very great light as I recall, trying to figure out what background would look a little rural and farm-y but not too cliched. I can’t remember who discovered or suggested a weathered gray fence, but it was a great idea.

Susan Crocenzi reads Blow-Drying a Chicken on Lady Elliott Island in Australia.

I’ve had a good time selling them to local stores: book stores, gift shops, and both branches of the local IGA.

Books for sale at Clothware in Cambridge, MA. Photograph by Sarah Putnam.

I also did readings and once even got a member of 4H to blow-dry an actual chicken (named Sunflower) before the audience, since no one initially understands that the title is not a joke. If you don’t understand either, there’s an explanation in the book.

Sunflower is not dead, she is enjoying a warm air massage. Photographer unknown but it might be Sandy Frizzell.

Readers have sent me photos of them. Many, many photos, not all of which I labeled correctly, alas, but here are some.

Heidi Vanderbilt’s dog, whose name I might not have ever known.

Max and I chose the cover colors so they would look cute together but be differentiated. Many years later, my web designer repeated some of those colors to make my website seem related to the books. This was a snazzy idea I’d never thought of and might indicate that my marketing is “on brand,” whatever that may mean. Not everywhichway.

One year I sent boxes of books out as a marketing move, and had the box reposted on Click & Clack’s Facebook page.
Photos and box design by Heidi Levell.

The second book features an orange ’53 Chevy half-ton pick-up, the actual truck I learned to drive on in 1971. My father and I bought it together for $500: $250 each. Three on the tree and its linkage liked to stick but you could open the hood and rattle something to unstick it, which I sometimes had to do at stop lights in San Francisco. We were looking for a turn signal, to point out that Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace, but no good examples showed up online.

Max used a photo of the truck, one of a series taken by my brother Peter when I was going off to college, but for purposes of design and current relevance, she added some mountains near Lake Tahoe. What I love most about the result is that the rear-view mirror is reflecting my hometown of Mill Valley, while the rest of the landscape is outside Truckee somewhere. This is a secret you might not have noticed unless I told you.

These book make great gifts for all ages, and I designed them to be a cute, purse-or-large-pocket-friendly size. Who took this photo?

For the third book I wandered around looking for appealing possums on the internet and found one in Toronto, of all places. I tracked the photo down to discover that her name is Morag and her person, the photographer Aefa Mullholland, is a also writer. She lives half-time in Wales and agreed to sell me use of the photo for $100.

Book display at Sierra Mountain Coffee Roasters in Grass Valley, CA.

I did not set out to have only females on my covers, but Ina, the tiger on Naming Your Teeth, (book four) is also a girl, a 10-year-old in the zoo in Vienna, Austria.

I try to publish just before Thanksgiving. Photo by Eileen S.

Purchasing her visage as she flosses her teeth on a bare winter branch was a little complicated. Once I tracked down the photographer it turned out she did not speak English, and my German is limited to a single high-school semester. We did manage to figure it out, she agreed to the same $100 price, and then I spent an afternoon with my favorite tellers over at Westamerica Bank calculating the exchange rates and transferring Euros.

Many people read my books over breakfast. Photo by Francesca Bell. More breakfast reading. Photo by Talei Hoblitzell.

I didn’t make any books during the pandemic, but afterwards I felt I should resume this practice so people would have something to give their friends for Christmas.

Photo by Nickie Wilkinson.

But I could not think of a good title. Months went by, my brain coming up with really awkward, terrible suggestions. Finally, taking the on-ramp to Highway 49 from my town’s main street, it hit me.

Some people are long-time supporters and collectors, like John Pollack.

I did not crash the car, I didn’t even swerve, but I did shout “Yes!” And then “Hooray!!” Sometimes you need to be your own cheering squad.

I didn’t have a clear enough photo of my own for Everything But the Kitchen Skunk, but luckily Pascale from our cutting-edge local organic news organization Yubanet raised her hand to offer up several. Feral skunks like to eat the birdseed cast off by sloppy avians under her feeders. The covergirl of book five is named Mama.

My books are often posed with people’s pets, or in this case, Solomon Bassoff’s sculpture. This is either Usha or Misha. Photo by Nynke Passi. And this is Misha or Usha. Photo by Nynke Passi.

Well, Ian from the library has just called and asked for 30 assorted titles to make displays with because this year’s Nevada County Reads focus is poetry. That cleans me out. So for the purposes of simplifying my tax math, I’m going to say the January, 2024 book inventory is zero.

From The Book Seller, Grass Valley, CA

Even when we all know a writer’s work is done alone with pen and notebook or computer inside the small acreage of her own mind, you can see that I get help making books not just from my generous community but from the entire wide and turning world.

My book launch for Possum was packed and we had fun. Sierra Mountain Coffee Roasters. Some people even get two copies, one for their cat. Photo and styling by Laura Cherry.

I spent more time in and out of hospitals this past year than I have in decades — a week as the patient and then many months as a sister of the patient. My personal adventures were a little scary but mostly diagnostic, without much pain involved and lots of welcome sleep. The diagnosis was inconclusive and then I went home feeling mystified but healthy.

My brother, on the other hand, was in a coma for 11 days, in the hospital for 33, lost his mind to something called ICU delirium and it took a month to return, and now he’s in a skilled nursing facility relearning how to walk and getting dialysis three days a week.

Here’s what each of our windows looked like, mine in Sacramento and his in San Rafael (a northern suburb of San Francisco).

Mercy Hospital Sacramento, third floor vista Kaiser San Rafael, third floor vista and neon blanket

They gave him a green neon blanket that I frankly would never have been able to sleep under, it was so bright.

We spent a lot of time visiting Sam, when he was under and then when he woke up; my sister, who lives closest, went daily. A dear friend took me to the ER in Grass Valley, visited me once and brought flowers from my own yard, and picked me up in Sacramento to drive me home when it was over.

I think I talked once or twice to people on the phone, but mostly I was sleeping or being nice to everyone who came by for blood, blood pressure, and various tests to figure out what had given me the blinding headache I collapsed with after swimming in the rain. The whole time I was basically fasting because of tests that were coming up and then postponed to the next day.

Into a tiny hole they insert their camera to slip up through your artery and look at your heart

I haven’t been in hospitals that often, but this was by far the most charming of my experiences. The end result was medical proof that my heart and arteries, even the carotid!, are in good shape, as well as my brain and lungs. The stent from 2007 in my circonflex artery has worked, no blockage there. The somewhat vague conclusion was a “thunderclap” headache, a one-off due to either exercise or cold or high stress, all of which had been true that day. My brother’s diagnosis was predicted and half-way prepared for, but suddenly he almost died and thank god for kidney stones is all I have to say. Pain took him to the local ER where they discovered his kidneys had just failed, and saved his life.

It’s interesting how you can’t tell what skills people have just by looking at them. The rotating crews at both our hospitals seemed like people you’d see on a bus, or taking the Red Line into Boston from Cambridge. Their scrubs were sometimes color-coded, but their faces betrayed no sign of surgical precision or excellence in phlebotomy. I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon since I was a kid and a friend of my dad’s who made sandals for a living turned out to be a whiz at playing the stock market. “How can this be?” I thought, at age 12. “Why couldn’t we tell?!”

What you can tell, in hospitals, is that the staff is confident and that’s a great thing to watch. In my brother’s delirium he would snap at nurses cleaning his ports and wounds. Not ferociously, his tone was exactly how people reprimand a cat who wants to wrestle with the sock you’re trying to put on. Stop that! He would say. No! Don’t do that! Ouch! After I witnessed this once I had to leave the room when it happened, for fear of laughing. The nurses were both genial and firm about it, which also struck me as funny, since my brother was in no shape to be reasoned with.

It’s not a good idea to laugh at delirious people until they’ve recovered, they can get very offended. But we all wanted to laugh at odd moments, it was just such a relief that Sam was alive. We bubbled over like shaken champagne from the stress having been lifted.

Sam, Susanna, & me

This year California had a record amount of snow and rain, which was a problem when trees fell and creeks flooded but in general cheered everyone up. Long droughts are wearing like any chronic illness, and the relief is wonderful.

Cat fence down facing Newtown Rd.

The snow collapsed parts of my cat fence, which I haven’t had time or money to get repaired yet, but my roof is intact and various branches that snapped off the silver maple and one blue oak have been dragged away. You can’t sell wood this year, there’s so much lying around if anyone needs it. Although I had a lot of oak in huge sections from the year before that I was able to give to the firewood-for-seniors program. A spry senior even came over to chainsaw it into small enough chunks that he could load it into his pick-up.

Two of those chairs have a roll of the fencing laid across them, which is adding to the lumpiness.

What the moisture has done is inspire so much blooming that none of us can believe it. Neon green pollen coating our countertops and the surface of the lake. Peonies the size of your head! I have two pink Oriental poppies that usually give me one blossom each. This year, seven or eight and a third plant volunteered that’s adding to the glory.

My garden is pretty haphazard — I plant what people give me and what looks good that day at the nursery. I plant trees to honor people (two birches for my mom and Aunt Net), or what I’ve loved at others’ houses (the smoke bush tree beside Aunt Mary’s blue front door).

Japanese barberry in front of the smoke bush tree.

When I moved here 23 years ago, I read a lot of gardening magazines, which is where the Japanese windflower (not blooming til September… its leaves just in front of the barberry in the photo above) and Purple Mountain Ash came from.

I can’t kneel or bend very well right now, so I get a lot of help in the yard, for which I’m grateful. I refuse to add up how much this costs because it might make me think I should move. The beauty of what’s here keeps me going in a way that can’t be calculated. It’s like swimming in the lake.

Jupiter’s Beard (Valerian) pink in front and white in back, pink peonies, blue catmint.

Jupiter’s Beard and Love in a Mist have spread like topsy after I planted only two four-inch pots each. Once they bloom I whack them down so I can walk on the paths again, unimpeded. Butterflies love them. Just as their pink and white recede, the orange day lilies begin to open. The whole shebang could easily be set to music.

Cecil Brunner arch over the stairs to the outdoor shower and my studio.

I made a rule years ago — after killing a lot of store-bought plants due to underwatering — that I have to dig the hole (or have it dug) before I buy anything. Sometimes I even follow this rule! Today’s plan is to refill my back deck pots so they can receive purple fountain grass, million bells, zinnias, and full-size petunias. The zebra grass and chrysanthemums wintered over.

These bearded iris came with the property, though I sometimes dig them up and move them around.

 

 

If you know me — have read my work, are a friend, hang out on social media, etc. — you’ll know that for the last 14 years I’ve been swimming in Scotts Flat Lake, a reservoir near my town in Northern California. At first, when a friend brought me to the lake, I swam every couple of weeks or so in the summer, to cool off or have some social time with people. Then it evolved… well, maybe that’s the wrong way to say it. Then I was dragged kicking and screaming… no, that’s not really it, either. Then we had a really hot summer, and I started swimming every day. For heat relief, for the beauty of the lake water’s color, for a feeling of having a vacation even when it was the end of a weekday, for all kinds of reasons.

That gray line on the shore is the dam, which one can walk across, if one is crazy and doesn’t mind heights and isn’t busy swimming. The near boat is Gary’s, who runs this side — he drives garbage over to the other side, the “main” side where the campgrounds are, to be disposed of.

I can’t recall how I came to be swimming with Sandy, but she was a person who also swam every day, often when I was there, and I knew her because I always drank lattes in her coffee shop. Some alchemical phenomenon of me seeing her looking relaxed and happy at the café after a swim, or watching her elbows flash as she and her friends Pat and Lori whizzed by me in the water, moved me to keep driving the 18 minutes up to the lake every day, too. And back. One year she talked me into not stopping even though it was about to be October. I learned to keep swimming down to 58 degrees.

There are eight boat moorings on this side of the lake. I don’t know why, but every day I count them, to make sure there are still eight.

I mean look at this color! And I took the photo this morning from the boat ramp. It’s even more beautiful when your eyes are three inches above the surface.

This is looking across the lake, which is about a mile. Its length is more like three miles, but I haven’t boated around the perimeter to verify that. I like boats, especially the unmotorized kind, but given a choice I will always opt to swim. And I’m not even a good swimmer. This summer I have secret plans to get better, but I mostly breast stroke and side stroke along, hauling my untiny self through turquoise and teal and blue and sometimes a gray that’s nearly black, if we’re having a storm. We don’t swim when there’s lightning, but we’ve swum in rain and hail and snow.

We’ve had a terribly long, cold, wet winter around here, and some of us are not good at coping with life unless we can swim in this lake. Naming no names. I personally appreciate all the new water, because look how full it is! Water on the third step! In a month there will be a little beach below these stairs, and in three months (mid-August) there will be a big beach. The boat ramp will get longer and longer as they let water out of the dam and the lake level falls. In drought years, such as we’ve had recently, sometimes they let out so much water that the boat ramp ends, and then I have to drive the hour up to Donner Lake for a real swim. I was not built to clamber over large slippery boulders in order to get to the water. That’s what’s at the end of the boat ramp. But let’s not talk about that now.

Facing what we call The Santa Fe House, whose square roofline you can see just above the brown stretch of land in the middle. This is where we usually swim to, and back.

Let’s talk about the fact that this morning Sandy and I swam for 40 minutes in 67 degree water, and went past that buoy you can barely see just left of the center of the shoreline in this photo. This was my fifth time in the lake: two dunks, one paddle, and two real swims. Yesterday, after Sandy got home from her first dip of the season, she wrote me and said, “I feel like a person again!”

My towel is never scrumbled up like this. I leave it folded very tidily on top of my flip flops and dress when I swim.

EXACTLY!! Swimming saves what’s left of my sanity after a winter of bad news reels and random disorganized infrequent exercising. Once I’m into that water, my limbs know where to put themselves, my eyes know what they’re looking at. We saw an osprey yesterday. Today we saw a huge trout, right by the dock. The new green is still on these trees. I can feel my gills getting stronger, and the flukes of my tail.

It’s the middle of May. We’re two weeks ahead of our start date last year! I’ve already dunked with Sarah M. and paddled with Siddo and Josie, and I’m due to meet Sandy at 9:30 tomorrow morning. It’s started. There may be snow melt to deal with, and those weird days when the lake “rolls over,” a concept I don’t completely understand that makes everything much much colder. But those things, as you know, are quite trivial. We’re swimming.

My Poseidon shot, taken by Sandy in September about four years ago.

 

Before the Pandemic, I was slated to do a poetry reading in Ukiah, CA, but the virus put paid to that idea. Four years later, they invited me again, and I said yes. I hadn’t done any out-of-town readings since the world opened up, and felt as though I needed to practice being in public a bit. This was a great opportunity. Plus, Ukiah is only an hour and a half from the coast, and my heart was longing to hear some uninterrupted surf and smell that salt air.

The Pacific Ocean, facing west.

Some poets are paid a lot of money to do readings, and flown around the country for the purpose. That has happened to me twice, and was lots of fun. But most of the time, if you go to a reading, the featured poet has driven in from wherever they live—5, or in my case 150 miles away—and is getting a small honorarium and if they’re lucky, a gas stipend. I was lucky. I was also housed in the lovely tree-house guest room of one of the organizers (thank you Dan Barth!).

I decided to go to the coast before the reading, rather than facing higher prices and larger crowds afterward since it was a weekend. A friend of mine recommends a particular motel in Fort Bragg, sitting right on the bluff above the water, so I took her advice and stayed there. There’s a paved path that runs for miles up the coast right by the motel, and part of the fun besides walking on it is sitting in your room and watching… …everyone else go by. Strollers, wheelchairs, skate boards, millions of bikes, couples of all ages holding hands, dogs and their leashed owners, you name it. They don’t look in the motel windows much—the height and angle is wrong—so there’s a nice sense of spying on them that I greatly enjoyed. In addition, each room has a miniscule balcony, so you can go sit out there and drink your coffee if you want.

The Ocean View Motel in Fort Bragg. First floor room.

Besides just being on the coast, I wanted to write, and walk, and sleep. All those goals were accomplished. One morning I got up at 9, unheard of lateness at my house! I was in bed by 10, and I didn’t watch any streaming entertainment either, a nice surprise, which I’m a little bit addicted to at home.

Denik notebooks are famous for lying flat, and they have artist-drawn covers of many styles.

I worked on some poems, and wrote another installment of my big project, which is describing in detail what it was like to have memories that I’d never heard of come back to me. Those red glasses are computer-distance readers. My reading readers are blue. Drugstore versions right now, after cataract surgery, which for a while has exempted me from wearing glasses all the time. Apparently that will change, but right now I’m in the clown stage of switching glasses back and forth (and sunglasses when I drive). It’s fairly ridiculous, but I do like being able to see.

Scraggly wind-blown cypress.

Unbeknownst to me, back inland the temperature was rising, and heat in the valley and foothills draws the fog onto land from its banks out at sea. But I did have some clear hours each day for walking and not wearing my red sweater.

I found lattes and a good Mexican restaurant for dinner, and met a very forward gray squirrel, who jumped on my balcony one afternoon, clearly expecting to be fed. My life at home is filled with skunks who think the cat food bowl is theirs, and also the cat door, so I was not going to indulge this little unit, although he or she was cute. Fast, too. At one point when the door was open he came right into my room. Luckily, he didn’t climb up my leg or anything. I spoke to him firmly in Norwegian, and he went back outside. You may not know this, but all squirrels understand Norwegian.

This moon is barely half-full.

The moon was not full while I was in Fort Bragg, but my iPhone’s camera didn’t seem to realize this. I haven’t seen moonlight on water since last August’s full moon, which I watched rise over Scotts Flat Lake.

Just before I left to drive south to Mendocino and then east through the Anderson Valley to Ukiah, I visited MacKerricher Beach, a few miles north of my lodgings. The sand is not white.

MacKerricher Beach State Park. Free until sundown, then there’s a fee.

You can see the fog trying to fill up the air. It’s very sneaky. But it keeps the temperature nice and steady.

By the time I got to Mendocino, the views were completely socked in by fog and I donned the red sweater, ate an expensive lunch at the recommended Mendocino Cafe, and then began my drive. New to me on these winding roads from the valley out to the coast are many signs saying you should pull over if there are cars behind you, and many pull-outs to make this possible. It was a little tricky to take off my clothes at one of these spots without being seen so I could get into hot-weather-wear, but I managed. Being intrepid in late middle age is one of my super powers.

I didn’t take photos of all the apple orchards in bloom, but here are some poppies. I passed swaths and swaths of “super-bloom” locations, but you know how it is when you’re driving. Hard to stop the car.

It was 93 in Ukiah and we had a wonderful reading at the Grace Hudson Museum: me and 8 or 10 poets reading at the boisterous open mic to an audience of 30. A good turn-out for a small town and a not-local guest star. I sold and signed 10 books. If they ever invite you to read there, you should say yes.

The Grace Hudson Museum & Sun House, where Ukiah’s Writers Read series takes place.

Sometimes I envy my sister Sarah’s vacations, but this year when I discovered she was going to Fiji for Christmas, I did not: I was only delighted. I wanted to borrow her apartment. You can see this wonderful place in a previous blog post here. My friend Susanna was having a birthday, and both of us like to get away from our small towns now and then to visit the big city. Sarah lives in Berkeley, very close to our favorite store in the world, Tail of the Yak. My brother Sam lives on the north side of the bay, in Forest Knolls, and had been talking about taking me out for dinner on my birthday (last July!). And Susanna’s cousin had some birthday plans of her own that I got to join in on.

Tail of the Yak, on Ashby [photo: gentlethrills on Instagram]The theme of the trip, besides birthday fun, turned out to be lollygagging… we left town only about two hours after we’d planned to! Since we had made up the plans and weren’t due anywhere until 6 p.m., this was not a problem. We got to Berkeley and went straight to Tail of the Yak, pretending we might need last-minute Christmas gifts but hoping to find treasure also for ourselves. And we did. Very small treasure, as this store will break your budget without a blink. We both bought some ribbon, out of which I have since made a lavender sachet; Susanna found an excellent pickle Christmas ornament and raced down the block to mail it off to a friend; and we skipped the $2,500 vintage pearl-and-ruby earrings. Then we went back to Sarah’s house for a nap.

At 6 p.m. we showed up at Trader Vic’s in Emeryville to meet Susanna’s cousin. I had no idea there were any Trader Vic’s left in the world, but this, the last remaining one, is right on the water and a birthday tradition in Susanna’s family. I had a very fancy umbrella-laden piña colada-type rum drink of the kind I always ordered here when I was in college and my father took us out to dinner, but without the rum. It’s interesting to think about the intervening 40 years – someone should write about how and why Trader Vic’s for one generation became Trader Joe’s for another, but it’s not going to be me. Yes, they do still serve the famous Pupu Platter.

After many small and large plates of food and much laughter, we rolled home to Sarah’s place and slept dreamlessly for ten hours each. Susanna has one cat and one dog, together comprising a small circus, and I have five cats, ditto, so uninterrupted sleep is a fabulous birthday gift.

Our original idea was to go to museums, but it turned out nothing enticing enough was being displayed. When we thought about what we really wanted to see, the answer turned out to be the Conservatory of Flowers, that beautiful glass building in Golden Gate Park, and the bridge-end of Crissy Field. Also Flax, the fabulous art supply store. So the next day we followed the sexy Australian voice on Susanna’s telephone around San Francisco.

“La Rose Des Vents,” a blown-glass sculpture by renowned Parisian artist Jean-Michel Othoniel.Stained glass reflection inside

I don’t know why I wanted to visit Crissy Field exactly, except people talk about it and I hadn’t been there since I was a child. We found a cafe/shop at the end, run by the National Park Service, and bought an excellent Christmas present for Sam, which we gave him a few hours later over dinner at Barefoot Café in Fairfax.

Susanna and Sam are old friends.

After another night of excellent sleep in Berkeley, we met Susanna’s cousin again for brunch at a place I’d never heard of named Skates. Everyone else has heard of it, apparently, but somehow I was behind the door that day, and have wasted decades of my life not going there and looking exactly across the Bay at the mouth of the Golden Gate. This place is at the very end of University Ave. in Berkeley, not hard to find at all, and even looks from the outside a bit boring. That’s because there’s no need to fancy up the land-side of the building when the bay-side is so gorgeous. Floor to ceiling plate glass, and the building is on pilings so you really are in the bay itself, not just beside it. See?!?

I got to gaze at my favorite mountain, Tamalpais, in silhouette, as well as some sailboats cruising by.

Susanna and her cousin ate oysters and told stories.

Two kinds of oysters on a bed of dry ice.

I ate salmon, listened to their stories, and thought about how much love one person can have for another and/or for a body of water. We saw some birds we like: Buffleheads, Western Grebes, a few California Gulls, and my least favorite bird of all time, the American Coot. Every time we tried to photograph them, though, they dove under, so no proof here.

The city has a new skyscraper whose erection (ahem) I hadn’t been following. Just what we need: a dark, forbidding lozenge on the horizon. Those alien space ship lights are part of a chandelier inside the restaurant that was reflecting in the window glass. (Do not be alarmed.)

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but we spent three hours at this table: talking, admiring the view, eating fishes of every kind. (Good food, not wildly expensive, and excellent iced tea, btw.)

Susanna and I were thinking of dropping by the Lace Museum in Berkeley on our way out of town, but we spent so long watching the clouds and the water change, that was enough lace for one day.

If you are planning to get older and celebrate your birthdays, you could do a great deal worse than zip down to the City, overeat, oversleep, not go to museums, shop sparingly, drive around, laugh a good deal, and then come home again. Just saying.

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All photographs by Molly Fisk, except where noted.

I didn’t know that fruit grows in cycles until I moved to this house 19 years ago and started a long-term relationship with fruit trees. Some years are stone fruit years (plums, in my case, but elsewhere peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries) and some are not. Here, it’s an every-other-year pattern, and this year is an on year, plus we got tons of winter rain, so every plant in sight is growing larger and faster than usual. Last year I had about 15 yellow plums on the tree that volunteered in front of the garage. This year there are probably 500!

Volunteer Mirabelle plum tree, lower left

The plums are cherry-tomato sized and yellow-gold. When I consulted Farmer Google, it seemed they might be a fairly unusual variety in the U.S., the Mirabelle plum, originally from France and now banned from import here for secret French proprietary reasons. Since my tree volunteered, which means it was probably brought to the yard in an animal dropping (since they grow from pits and birds don’t eat the pits), I’m wondering where the mother tree is, and if it might be one of Felix Gillet’s fruit trees. Gillet was a French botanist and arborist, a contemporary of Luther Burbank, who had a nursery here in Nevada County in the later 1800s and contributed greatly to the nascent agricultural life of the west.

Same tree, lower right

One of the quirks of growing up in Mill Valley, CA, where I did, was how many plum trees and blackberry bushes were scattered all over town in vacant lots and by roadsides, untended. This meant that we could forage, and my friend Peggy and I did just that, bringing home buckets of fruit to make into jam and pies and — when my mom and her friend Judy were on a Chinese cooking jag — hoisin sauce.

This is about half a basket of plums, filling half my porcelain sink

Those early years bred in me a conviction that you should use up all the fruit you have or can find, and not make jam out of store-bought fruit, which is cheating. Kind of ridiculous, I know. I have several times gotten a flat of peaches at the farmer’s market or passing through the Sacramento Valley at a fruit stand, because I live too high up to grow decent peaches in my own yard. But that’s really the only exception. I jam up what I can harvest or what people bring me.

Squashed plum flesh, put in jars and refrigerated just because it’s too hot to make jam in the middle of the day right now

One basket of plums that I picked this week at dusk when it was cool enough to be outside has yielded three quarts of cooked plum flesh. This is just the base for things: a huge pot of plums cooked down with a little water, and then the pits and skins taken out by running it all through a colander and stirring half the afternoon with a wooden spoon. To this I will add some chardonnay (we are very fancy around here), in a ratio of 1 c. to 4 c. cooked plums, and then with sugar and heat and hot jars and all that stuff, make jam.

A friend helped pick today, and got two baskets so full we had to carry them from underneath

The only problem is that there are probably at least five and possibly eight more basketsful of plums on that tree. Luckily, some are too high for me to reach, even on a ladder, so those will go to the birds. And I’ve hired a young and nimble, long-armed friend to help pick. But I am going to get very done with jamming before the plums run out. This is when I, sober for almost 30 years, will run to the store and buy a lot of brandy. If you put washed plums into sterile jars, really stuff them in, and then cover them with brandy, they will be preserved for a very long time… years, apparently. Put them in a dark place for at least a month, and then they’re delicious (if you like alcohol). You can chop them up and eat them on vanilla ice cream, warm them up and eat them with a dollop of creme fraiche, just eat them with your fingers and then drink the brandy, whatever you wish. Good presents, no cooking required. Here’s a recipe for all kinds of boozy fruit someone sent me after I mentioned this on social media.

Mirabelle plums in brandy (decent but not priceless brandy)

Now that I’ve been straightforward and scientific about these plums, let us move to the more important side of my nature. The real true reason to pick Mirabelle plums and make jam is the color. Everything else is justification, rationalization, perhaps frugality, a love of not wasting things, maybe a cock-eyed belief that home-made Christmas presents are better than store-bought, you name it. Poppycock, in a word. I make this jam because I love the color. Period, end of story. Everything else, though convenient, is entirely irrelevant.

I’m a writer. This is my work.
If you found this post interesting, entertaining,
or otherwise helpful, please consider sharing it
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xo Molly

I’ve always had a theory that a town or city’s resident doesn’t frequent the tourist attractions of that town or city unless guests come for a visit. This was proved once again when my friend of 40 years, Ellen K., came to see me over Labor Day Weekend and mentioned that she loved little, out-of-the-way museums. Well, if there’s one thing the Sierra foothills has, it’s little out-of-the-way museums, and I’ve seen hardly any of them! It was hot, we knew we’d be going swimming, but a dose of history and culture is good balance for splashing around, so first we went to the Northstar Mine Powerhouse and Pelton Wheel Museum, a place whose parking lot I had driven past for two decades without going in.

An assay office is where the gold or other mined substance is tested to determine its ingredients and quality.

I’m a big fan of antiques and rustic whatnot, so my eyes began to sparkle at the corrugated tin walls and metal items.

Model of the mine tunnels, the land contour shown at the top.

I also love seeing representations of things, like this series of mine tunnels underneath where we were standing. You couldn’t pay me to go down into a mine, mind you, but I like being above ground and seeing how things work.

I don’t recall what this building is for, as I’m writing the blog in January and forgot to take notes, but I love the windows on the side with their teeny sills. Small open structures like this remind me of doll houses and make me want to play with them.

As well as old things and models, I’m a sucker for a good diorama, and fell in love with the long johns on the line here, and the deer, horse, and squirrel. I can’t tell if the black animal is a panther or a bull, and worry that whatever it is, it may fall down the cliff, but there doesn’t seem a way to save it from my side of the glass.

I’m not quite sure how a sailing ship model got into a mining museum: we are nowhere near the coast. Perhaps this is just to remind us that the gold discovered in Nevada County was transported around the world, often by ship.

Sails furled; a ship at rest. I wish there were little sailors and maybe a ship’s cat in view, but maybe everyone is sleeping or on shore leave at the moment. No crow’s nest either, alas.

Speaking of ships (I digress, as usual), Ellen and I have differing views on which sea-faring novels are best. She loves C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, while I am devoted to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books. Same time period: the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s (50 years before these mines opened). This is one of the few literary points on which we differ.

I was fascinated by this list of Bell Signals, which looks to be from an early precursor of OSHA (note the effective date: May 7, 1946). Also check out the nomenclature “at the collar of the shaft.” I’m going to have to go look that one up.

As anyone can see, this is an Engine Register, but I have no idea what it does. Patented 75 years and 51 weeks before I was born. I love the round shape, like a maritime clock or a porthole isn’t it?

And mirroring perfectly the rather larger circle of the indoor Pelton Wheel — 30 feet in diameter: the largest Pelton Wheel ever made — which this building was created to surround. Pelton Wheels were invented to move water and/or air, by the buckets attached to the rim.

See? Buckets. This is a different wheel, outside. There’s also a big one in Robinson Plaza in Nevada City, right by our old Assay Office building at the bottom of Commercial St.

Moving from big wheels to small clay balls… You may not know that before I was a writer I did a lot of work with small businesses, especially bookkeeping (for restaurants, not mines). So the mine office’s cash register caught my eye.

Full view of the pinball-like cash register set up of the day.

Here’s the full unit and its clay marbles, with details in the next two photos.

Don’t you love it? And who knows where the actual money went, while people were busy sending clay balls down curved tracks…

Some of the best features of this museum were the thick stone walls and the gorgeous light coming through all the windows. Really, you should visit right away, don’t wait for out-of-town guests. Rainy winter days are just as good as overly hot summer ones to take a peek at history, and it’s a great place to bring kids because the docents have tricks involving motion and sound (no spoilers here, you have to come find out). Admission is by donation.

I’m a writer. This is my work.
If you found this post interesting, entertaining,
or otherwise helpful, please consider sharing it
with your people and supporting my writing directly
through Patreon or Paypal (mollyfisk at gmail).
Signing up for the RSS feed is also a dandy idea.
Big love and many thanks!
xo Molly