Amber Memory

I had some honey today, right out of the jar, and I thought of summer in Carmel Valley where I was a child.  The honey was the same color as the dried grass and foxtails that I would pick my way through with bare feet. Silty brown dry dirt, hot but soft on my skin.

There is an intoxicating herbal-floral aroma, a heady fragrance that California shrublands exude.  Sage, bay laurel, coyote brush, grasses, oak, redwood, and the dirt itself are oily and the oils evaporate in hot air, perfuming it and penetrating into the deepest core of the people and animals who live in it, residing in their hearts and souls.  It is a fragrance that asks allegiance and devotion, acknowledgment of its ancient and abiding qualities.  I remember it lingering like the fading sounds of laughter past dark and then finally subsiding entirely in full darkness.  It was the very breath of the summer day, pleasant and sweet.

Brittle amber-colored wild grass crackled and stood like small tipis of dry stalks by August, with a litter of crushed and desiccated leaves and seeds lying about the bases on dry cocoa-brown silt.  Mica flecks twinkled like starry sparks in the dust kicked up with our bare toes.  We'd pick our way across lots and exposed small meadows and fields, using tufts of dry grass to rest on when the skin of our feet felt scorched by the dark earth.  We were explorers, wild Indians, children of imagination looking for and finding small mysteries and clues to worlds unknown to adults and their civilization.  All of nature in the region of our home was textured, fragrant, a beckoning world we needed and wanted to be part of.

A child who has lived in a California coastal valley knows the time of day by the amount of moisture in the air and the strength of the breeze.  Morning air is fresh, dewey and cool, wetted by the lifting fog.  Deer out grazing after dawn pick their way back to thickets and shaded glens to sleep until evening.  Then, midday is still and hot; nothing breathes or sings or chirps; only the bees hum in the sagebrush.  Then, at one o'clock the air lifts and stirs, the wind shifts to the distant reaches of more inland valleys and hills, drawn there by the heat.  The grasses and oaks, hot in the flat light of early afternoon, toss and sway in the push of the wind until just before dusk when everything pauses again.  Then, light seems to settle down into the ground, fading very slowly and fragrantly to its resting place.

Day after day, all summer long, some days cloaked in fog at the coast and some more intensely hot than others, the ocean inhales and exhales its wind over the coastal valleys.  Its gusting, rushing sound is a constant presence in the trees and across hillsides, a hushing sound of respiration that rises and falls, swelling and then dying away, only to rise and fall again.

After being outdoors in the morning before the day was hot, the afternoon wind in the treetops was lulling, soothing us to an enervating torpor.  Lost to daydreaming and reading, we dozed and rested.  Then, as we felt cooler and sensed the dampness of the chill evening coming on, and the fog in the distance, we'd begin a game of hide-and-seek, playing on and on to the dimmest light at dusk and beyond.

Playing, running and calling in the twilight on summer days, inhaling the intoxicating promise of amber light and honey gathered from the sage on the hills and willows by the river, we lived and breathed in the same rhythm set by the wind itself.

At the end of the day, our eyes grew accustomed to the gradual dimness of the evening until after dusk we'd run indoors, pushing and laughing, feeling like wild animals coming home again.  Then we peered goggle-eyed back at the dark from the doors and windows, and then listen for the wakening deer and rustle of their movements in the dry oak leaves.