Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loathed bugs.

Not too surprising; most people do dislike them to some extent or another. Millions of people detest and run screaming from them. Spiders are an especially earnestly hated organism; although, of course, they aren’t bugs OR insects. They’re arachnids. The fact that scorpions and lobsters are related to them does not endear them to most people – including me, though I am fond of lobsters both culinarily and socially,

Kage would admire butterflies, but didn’t want them walking on her. And she detested caterpillars. She didn’t like pill bugs, especially when she discovered they are actually wood lice. She didn’t even like trilobites, and those are both extinct and the uncontested King of Cute of Paleozoic sea life.

Bugs didn’t frighten Kage, though. She dispatched them with a cold-eyed efficiency, nothing like my gibbering panic – cockroaches, for example, upset me. Non-furry spiders do it, too. Jerusalem crickets, now – those will send me into hysterics. Not Kage. She was the designated bug-killer in our household, a post she filled with Amazonian courage.

(What scared her was big dogs. I always walked on the dog side of a street, closer to the fence lines and driveways – I like dogs and they don’t frighten me. Kage said she had memories of wolves at the genetic level, and simply could not approach a dog until they had known one another at a distance for a while. She also felt that dogs, as a species, were undignified and silly people, anyway; she only really liked a few extremely formal dogs she met over the years.)

However: Kage couldn’t stand ants. I think it is was because she mostly only encountered them swarming over kitchens floors and counters – hers was the ancient antipathy of the housewife, on whose fecal roster ants occupy a very high spot. When we got ants – and even the cleanest kitchen does, on occasion; the little buggers are insidious – she went off the deep end in assault and destruction. Bleach spray, chili oil, hot water, all matter of herbs and spices and tisanes scattered over lintels, usually with muttered wardings and threats …

Borax was a favourite; in fact, she borrowed its pismire-icidal qualities for the story “The Two Old Women”, and declared it a component in keeping ghosts and demi-goddesses away, too. Why not? Salt works on both ants and spirits; for all I know, Borax does too. I can testify that we rarely had either in our kitchen …

What she hated most about ants was their mindless mobs. Ants get everywhere. As I said, you can scour your floors and counter tops, and some morning you’ll come in and there will nonetheless be a wavering line of little crunchy burglars across the floor. When you pick things up to wash them off, they promptly swarm up your arms: Kage really hated that, even when they were not the biting kind.

It’s all those damned little feet! she would cry, and usually leap straight into the shower. Ugh! I can’t stand them!”

I was therefore the Ant Killer. It was only fair, after all, what with the number of beetles Kage had defeated while I stood screaming on the couch …

I dislike ants pretty intensely myself. However, they don’t horrify me, even when they climb all over my hands; I can deal with them. I resent them too much to be afraid of them, because it is always a pitched battle getting rid of the critters.

Naturally, in the warming weather and in the middle of a lush garden, the house I am sitting came down with ants yestreday. The cat came crying to me, running back and forth frantically – had she been a dog, I’d have automatically assumed Timmy was in the well. But no, her tuna had been swarmed with ants! It was not to be borne. I sprayed (Dilute bleach, not insect spray; I’m kind of green.), wiped, mopped, swept and followed the trail back to its entry point: dealing ant death the whole while.

The cat watched with great satisfaction, purring.

This morning, however – the dastards were back. As all too often happens, with ants. I either missed a few or didn’t trail them back far enough. Again, a great rout and destruction of ants and rescue of the cat dishes took place. And this time I followed them out the back door, down the side of the house, out the back gate and into the flower bed at the side. I disrupted the scent trail, killed every scout I could see and anointed the door step with chili oil … only time will tell. The cat food is safe, at least.

This really cuts into one’s writing time, you know? And it’s hell on one’s back, too. Grumble, grumble. Damned ants.

On the other hand, I also found a lot more ripe blackberries. And the kitchen smells ever so clean now.

I’ll take my victories where I can get them.

Kage Baker dearly loved puzzles.

Physical ones, anyway – not so much word puzzles, which she said all reminded her of the dreaded word problems in IOWA tests (which is what we had in the benighted 60’s). You know – if Billy leaves on a west-bound train from Chicago at 53 MPH, and 3 sousaphone players leave on a north-bound train from Philadelphia at 60 miles an hour – how long until you disembowel yourself with your No. 2 pencil?

Man, she hated those things. And crossword puzzles, she said, were nothing by solo Scrabble. What Kage liked were puzzles you could handle: jigsaw puzzles, most of all, but also all sorts of knot and metal doohickey puzzles. Pub puzzles or blacksmith puzzles, they call them now in fancy catalogs – Moebius strips of steel festooned with eyebolts and C-clamps and chatelaine rings. They drive me insane. But Kage could happily sit for hours unhooking them in all sorts of impossible-looking ways and then putting them back together again.

There was a huge jigsaw puzzle on a table in the waiting room where she went for her radiation therapy. No matter how weak she was, she worked that out a few pieces at a time whenever we went. Made great strides at the end, when we were going every day … she said it made her rather sad she’d never finish it, but she supposed most people didn’t. She liked that she was leaving a better start for the next person.

In my slight insanity right after Kage died, I seriously considered going in to the office and stealing it; I imagined completing it in her honour, and then fixing it in a frame for display. This idea was discarded by two important considerations: 1) there was no way I was going to be able to finish any jigsaw puzzle that had amused Kage. I am more the “3 Sad Kitten In 30 Pieces” kind of person. And 2) Kage had already left me with an enormous jigsaw puzzle in at least 3 dimensions – our house. Man, that was the hardest puzzle I ever worked.

So, did I come away from all that with a new-found love of physical puzzles? No, I hate ’em more than ever. Crosswords and knitting charts, that’s as far as I go in that direction. Kage was fascinated when she found out I could work knitting charts in my head; that struck her as such an outre skill that she gave it to Lady Beatrice in Nell Gwynne. This, from someone who would turn a jigsaw puzzle over and work it with only the back showing when she was bored and didn’t have a new puzzle to play with  …

What this mostly proves, of course, is that we do not understand what mystery looks like to another person. Maybe it proves that the better the brain, the more it needs to play. Some such lofty moral, I am sure.

Maps, too, are a puzzle I struggle with even yet. I know how to read them, theoretically. I can tell Google the right parameters and get a printed map that actually shows me how to get where I want to go – and most of the time I can follow it. I even have a nifty map app on my phone, but, being a law-abiding person, I don’t use when I am driving – which is when I need it. And even with a clear map and a safe place to examine it, I remain compass point-impaired.

Getting around Berkeley and Oakland has been an adventure this week. I’ve mostly not gone out, since I have been writing furiously- but from time to time, one must venture out in search of provender. Milk, plums and bread are all necessities that are best when fresh. Occasionally one desires a bowl of  chowder or a hamburger or a chocolate eclair … one of the endless joys of adulthood (and to be honest, there are NOT a lot of them) is the ability to sometimes eat precisely what you want, no matter how little sense it makes.

You gotta get to where they are, though, to indulge this right. Which means I have been amiably lost at least once every day since I got here. I study the maps on my Buke, and the traffic patterns on my phone – and then I venture out and discover the City authorities have moved a vital street. That’s especially common in the Bay Area, too, where roads sometimes fall down or are swallowed by the earth and never replaced.

Luckily, the Bay Area has some edge pieces that are always in place: the Bay itself. The Richmond, Bay and Golden Gate Bridges. Mount Tamalpais, whether all one can see is her toes or her stately crown, is a firm landmark. The Transamerica Building, on the other hand, is no use at all – it moves around on thousands of tiny wheels, I am quite sure, and can be anywhere along the Embarcadero. I mean, you can tell from it that you are looking at San Francisco – but there are lots of clues that tell you that.

Kage was my paramount puzzle-solver for the mysteries of roads and cities. I am lost all the time, without her. But she left me instructions, a compass that really works, and sacred disciplines of direction-finding. Oranges by the side of the road are lucky, she said. Hummingbirds promise a safe journey. The top of a map is North. I never stay lost long, especially up here by the Bay of Shifting Cities.

The Bay is the way in, she told me. The gold hills to the East are the way out. Never forget that, and you can find the way to anywhere.

And so far – so good.

Kage Baker loved the marine layer.

May Grey, it’s called in Southern California. June Gloom. Some years, it stretches into July Why God Why?, but that’s rare; though we do have years when the summer sun is basically not seen from May Day to Labour Day – except for the 4th of July, when it usually clears up and gets blazing hot for 2 days.

But the norm is grey mornings and evenings, and a general mistiness throughout the rest of the day. Sometimes it never clears at all by daylight. It’s part fog, part cloud, part the fever sweat of summer starting in the gold hills; it rolls in from the Pacific Ocean, and swamps the narrow strip of California anywhere within 50 miles of the coast.

Technically, this soft miasma is called “the marine layer”, and it’s a phenomenon of the enormous quantities of cool water playing temperature games off the coast of a near-perpetual drought. What it really is, more or less, is the top layer of the ocean: bubbles,mist and water vapour, 3 miles deep and coming in as inexorably as the lesser tide that keeps to the beaches. Kage loved the idea of walking through it, breathing in it.

It rarely gets low enough to provide any decent moisture – many’s the May Day dawn I have bathed in the scant dew scraped from leaves.While it seldom dips usefully near the panting earth, however, it tends to be fathoms deep: enough to keep entire days in a hot twilight, without even a phantom white sun disk to mark the passing hours.

Shadows don’t happen under the marine layer. Seen from the air, it’s an opaque silver sea where scant blue and golden islands break the surface and turn out to be the Santa Monica Mountains.

But Kage loved it. The warm grey days were one of her favourite seasons. Maybe because Time doesn’t happen reliably under the mist, either; she loved to spend these days just wandering around with no schedule whatsoever. When we were teenagers and school was out, we’d wander down to Hollywood Boulevard – if we couldn’t beg a ride from a job-bound parent – and break our fast on the first pizza of the day. It was 25 cents a slice at Two Guys, with another quarter for Coke (Kage) or a coffee (me). The sparkling pink sidewalk would be slick and wet from the hoses of conscientious shop owners hosing off the night’s accumulation of gum, bottles and tourists, and you could go an entire block on a skateboard with one kick.

We’d wander through the Supply Sergeant, eyeing military surplus with wild plans for gearing up and taking to the road. Or through the Hollywood Toy Store, when Kage had decided on a magic trick she had to have – she loved sleight of hand, and bought all the plastic props from there. Every import shop carried cheap incense, through which one could graze absolutely free, and avert the eventual wrath of the teenager-wary shop keepers by finally buying ONE (1) German chocolate bar to share out between you. There were closed restaurants with interesting menus posted outside; they all had legends attached, some dating back to the days of elegantly criminal movie stars in fancy cars. There were tourists and interesting insane people and hippies and Scientologists and Hare Krishnas – it was 1967 and Hollywood had reached some sort of bright, tacky zenith of display.

Faux movie characters wouldn’t show up for another 25 or 30 years. The weird people were real, back in the day …

In the afternoon, we’d get more Coke and coffee and Italian cookies and wander up into the Hollywood Bowl. Before the evening concerts began to set up, the whole place would be empty, with the grey mist hanging in the great Bowl like curtains. We’d sit on the silvered wood benches in the cheap seats, even though we could have sat in the boxes with no one there … Kage would tell her stories, arguing out the details and plots with me as we sprawled on the warm wooden seats.

Eventually, we’d call home with the last dime we had – that long ago, Dear Readers! – and beg Momma to come and get us …

Today, I’m far from the misty Hollywood Hills; which, I am told, have burned off what little marine layer they have this year anyway. It looks to be another scorching summer down there. But here in the rising hills of Berkeley, I am in sight of the San Francisco Bay, and that top layer of foam has spread all the way up from the Bay Bridge. The sky is doves’ breasts and ashes of roses; the air smells of the sea. The cat is out in the garden chasing white butterflies. The bees can see the sun, I know, but it’s only a rumour to the rest of us here down under the marine layer and the buckeye trees …

Kage would love it.

Kage Baker had migraines.

Bad ones, too – nausea, pain, light sensitivity, and a mixed grill of synesthesia to top it off. Kage would see sounds, feel colours, smell textures – and, to her outrage and dismay, they were all nasty. Some people in the literature wax rhapsodic over the altered perceptions native to angels and facet-eyed bees: she got stuck with a smell of antique cabbage every time she saw the colour phthalo blue.

I, too, get migraines. I think mine are unfair because I never had a damned one until menopause hove on my personal horizon – and though menopause has come and gone and I rather appreciate most of its changes, the migraines have stayed. I just get a headache and weird background disturbances. However, Kage was hard put to be really sympathetic when I started to complain – and Kimberly, too, has suffered from them most of her life. But both of them have been kind enough to bring me lavender oil and cups of strong coffee when I am stricken, and not tell me too loudly to suck it up and stop whinging ….

At the moment, though, I am alone. Which is actually all right, as the noise level is pretty low when it’s only me and a cat with a tiny meow and velvet feet. My usual visual disturbance of black and silver thorns twining all over everything looks pretty good on my friends’ oaken furniture and nice drapes, too. The perfumes of the garden are filling the house without weird alterations, thank goodness, and I can just recline in the dimness of my bedroom and suck coffee through a straw.

And that’s about all I am doing this evening. When it gets darker, perhaps I can sit up and enjoy a little more of the twilight here under the sycamores and buckeyes, and breathe in the scent of the datura. That’ll be more than enough excitement for me.

More interesting adventures tomorrow, I hope. For now – off and out and more caffeine, Dear Readers.

Everyone have a nice night.

Kage Baker was a very Queen of search engines.

She was enchanted with the idea at first encounter – which was when I set up our first little computer with our first little ISP server. Long ago and far away, in Pismo Beach, a little start-up company that was ultimately eaten by a larger company somewhere along the line … but for a couple of years, all there was for choice in connections in lovely Pismo was these little guys and AOL.

Even novices like Kage and I had heard of AOL. Besides, we got their damned disks in the mail constantly, like free crack through the fence at a playground. When local geeks opened their own little provider service, we leaped to it. All you had to do was phone them, pay them and get a code – then pick up your program disks (square floppies,in that distinctive greyed-out beige plastic) at one of the local indie book or record stores. Things were simpler long ago … the program disks were rubber-banded together in stacks of 5, in a wicker basket next to the ZZ Top lightning bolt key chains and Dead Head Teddy Bear stickers.

Anyway, the very idea of search engines hit Kage like a jolt of whiskey – her very own djinn of information, all set to swoop out into the aether and bring her back pearls of knowledge! For once, she learned all the tricks before I did, and was soon an addict. She was the person who taught me about following more and more obscure links, and how to circumvent the advertisers who grabbed prime listings on Webcrawler and Alta Vista. And, eventually, about Google Image games.

Included in the searches for people caught on sidewalks in embarrassing poses, though, was valuable information on parameters and phrasing. I’m not as inhumanly good at it as Kage was – she could find anything, no matter how peculiar – but I can certainly fight through most searches.

The last few days, it’s been birds and plants catching my attention. I’m familiar with most of the local birds; I’ve lived in Northern California before, and know its special residents – red and yellow shafted flickers, several varieties of woodpeckers, white pelicans. Rufous-sided towhees. Merganser ducks. Black-crowned night herons – the only heron with short legs. When we first saw one, sitting awkwardly in a tree above the pond beside which we were then living, Kage swore it was a fake duck model left there to fool us. It wasn’t till I found the bugger in the Peterson Guide that she would admit it was a live heron …

Anyway, while puzzling out the secrets of the otherworldly Datura inoxia in the front yard here, I noticed a bird I could not recall seeing before. Just a little brown bird, roughly sparrow-sized, but which a most charming little chime-like chirp, fluttering madly all around a pyracantha bush. The chirp was familiar … so I went searching: starting with “small brown birds” and slowly narrowing my criteria. Another long stare showed me the unripe pyracantha berries were not the bird’s prey; it was scaring bugs out of the bush and snagging them in mid-air. That was the vital clue – it was insectivorous.

I was watching a Black Phoebe -but it was either a female or a juvenile, and thus it was all in shades of brown. The adult male is a very conspicuous little fellow, velvet black all over except for a silvery-white waistcoat, and the hint of a crest on his head. The one I was watching was a rich chestnut, but had the same distinctive pointy head, white tummy and crazy-flutter method of catching insects on the wing. So – not a new bird, but one I had never seen before! And for me, rusty as I am at birdwatching, a triumph of online research.

However – that was secondary to figuring out what the other mystery plant int he garden was: the one with enormous saber-shaped leaves, and ebony flowers stalks 2 stories tall. All I had for a clue was that my hostess thought they were “some kind of flax” …

Now. Once again, flax is a plant I know; I’ve grown it, I’ve even broken and spun it by hand (a hideous process, though I’m proud to have done it. Once.) Obviously, this thing that looked like a Martian Man-eater vine was not the flax I knew. But equally obviously, I don’t know enough – look at the datura.

So, employing Kage’s meticulous methods, I resumed the hunt. And lo! Via references to flax analogs, flax alternatives, and the tendency of the Victorian British to label every new thing they saw with the name of some old thing they already knew: I identified it. The enormous, ebony and scarlet, leaves-like-sword-blades plant outside the window here is – New Zealand Flax!

It’s not flax, of course. It’s not even related to flax. It’s actually some kind of lily. However, it does yield an excellent fiber when broken, retted and spun; and the Maori used it as their most common plant fiber and cloth. The British kind of acknowledged its origins by also dubbing it “flax lily”, but really: it’s not a flax, and it’s scarcely a lily.

Lots of plants DO yield spinnable, weavable, feltable fibers. Cotton, of course – but nettles give a similar, lovely fabric, commercially known as “rennie”; many of you Dear Readers probably have garments of it in your closet – I do. Papyrus will give cloth as well as paper. Birch bark has recently become popular as cloth, as it is especially soft, cool and silky; you can find bed clothes made of it at Bed, Bath & Beyond! Bamboo makes a very superior thread, especially for knitting.

So the New Zealand Flax should not have been a surprise. It probably wouldn’t have been, except that it looks so much like a carnivorous alien plant. But it’s also fierce and beautiful, like the sinuous lines of Maori tattoos. Someday I may give it a try as a fiber project …

In the meantime, I am en joying the discovery. And the fact that it was Kage’s lessons on research – how to do it, its primacy as a teaching method, the determination one must bring to the hunt – that led me on to all these recent treasures. It feels like we’re completing another project together.

And that feels … very fine.

New Zealand flax – flax lily. Not flax at all, but produces a linen-like cloth; not very closely related to a lily, either, but closer than to flax. The bird is a tia, whose beak is curved precisely to fit those war-canoe flowers.

Kage Baker always felt rather cheated by the implications of Midsummer’s Day. It very much is NOT in the middle of summer; in fact, it’s technically the first day of the season. It’s the summer solstice, which is wonderful – but it’s been spring up until that point, and summer itself therefore appears to begin in its own middle.

Of course, that’s a rather appealing vision in its own right: the summer beginning in the center of its own burning gyre, a kaleidoscope of hot coloured glass opening out like a rose. Kage liked the picture – but she was still annoyed with a season that began with false advertising as to its own metaphysical duration.

She settled her discomfiture with it all by just deciding to treat as if it were always in the middle. It was an eternal perfect golden day, no beginning acknowledged and no ending to fear. She was a lot happier with that idea anyway; she hated containing things within the strictures of time or space. A season that not only wouldn’t stay in one time but didn’t even admit to having one – that was fine with Kage.

But I don’t mind the progress of summer. I rather like the way it runs from cherries, through peaches and plums  and nectarines, to watermelons, grapes and early apples: it’s all a calendar of fruit, for me, and I am a happy fructivore for 4 months or so. Barbecue is nice but is only a side dish for a good icy wedge of watermelon. For Kage, the soul of summer was fireworks and Italian ices – which occupied sort of mirror images of sensations in her mind. For me, it was living in a literal cornucopia.

Midsummer’s Day itself, this year, was a festival of classic food, entertainment, and peculiarities. I meant to write about it, but was constantly interrupted by things I did not expect; or, having expected, had not planned for adequately.Sorry, Dear Readers, but Midsummer’s brought me all sorts of alarums and excursions.

Aside from the blackberries in the back yard (which are admittedly divine), I was very short of fruit – had to have it, too, so I ventured out into the streets of Berkeley to find some. I love Berkeley, but have never gotten on well with the points of the compass within its boundaries. I promptly got lost, and was actually lucky to find my way back to my guesting cottage.

There I settled down to eat plums and rewrite a story Linn didn’t like before she moved back to upper New York State last week. While engrossed in that, I was unexpectedly visited by some old friends of both my hosts and me, who were wandering about the place and sought out the comforts of a friend’s house (Tea. Garden. Bathroom.) before resuming their trip … I managed to yank my head out of the scene where my heroine was dealing with an alien proponent of religious paternalism, and make an effort towards their comfort for a few hours. But the writing was delayed.

Then I had to find and secure the cat, locate my shoes (the cat hid them) and get changed into something respectable before heading North to another friend’s barbecue and choral recital. The barbecue was delicious and the recital was beautiful – Song of Sonoma, a chorus 70 ladies strong with a gorgeous sound, and a perfect past-time for a Midsummer afternoon and evening. I started home just as the fading light let the first stars come burning through in a western sky the colours of orchids …

It was a beautiful drive home. Along the way I stopped in Novato – because I love Novato at Midsummer, where for 40-odd years the Renaissance Faire was the summer home of the faerie Courts both Seelie and Unseelie … there’s a grocery store there, a mundane-looking Safeway; but also the place where Kage and I shopped at night after Faire days, because it was a veritable Goblin’s Market.

Bread, fruit, cheese and beer: classic viands we got there, of unearthly quality, staggering in hilarious fatigue and partial costumes down the clean, shining aisles. The staff never turned a hair – partly because half of them worked Faire, too, and partly because at 9 PM on a summer’s night, most of the customers were at least as odd as Kage and I. I used to cry from exhaustion in the Produce Section, and Kage would entice me to the checkout with fresh cherries …

Anyway, I pulled into the lot once more last night, looking for cream and black plums. And when I got out of the car … I could smell the Faire.

Hot earth, wild oats baked in the summer sun until they gave off a scent of spiced bread. Damp dust, damp wood chips, damp hay – a hint of forges, smelling like foreworks; a memory of horses. Dusty velvet, wine and beer and mead; a thousand dancers in a ring, frying their brains under the noon sun, kicking up the dust that smelled of peat and incense. I breathed it all in through one long astonished breath. Then I burst into tears in the parking lot.

So I was sniffling and red-eyed when I made my way through that Produce section, where I have cried over the strawberries a thousand times just because I was too tired to think straight. But I wasn’t sad! I wasn’t missing Kage, I didn’t feel the vacuum where she and so many others of my loved ones once walked and do so no more.

There were black plums waiting for me. And milk and bread and cheese. And who could be sad, anyway, on Midsummer’s Night when it comes back to the very middle of your own bliss on Earth, when the breath of your own personal Paradise can  rise up in a hot dark parking lot, and carry you back 30 years to your youth? Who could be sad when ghosts come out to dance with you between the cold ale and the punts of cherries ripe, ripe ripe?

What else is Midsummer Night for, if not for that?

Kage Baker loved Shakespeare – all of his work. She was particularly fond of the plays, because ol’ Willy was such a superb dialogue writer – under the Elizabethan parlance and grammar (which Kage learned incredibly well) is an outstanding human immediacy and passion unrivalled by most modern authors.

Maybe by all of ’em; it’s really hard to find passages from plays that speak as intimately to the audience as portions of Henry 5th, Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet still do. Unless you can sing it, or the dialogue was written by T.S. Elliott, you won’t usually find people reciting portions of Broadway plays.

Kage’s utter favourite, though, was not one the great romances or historical dramas. It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s tinsel-and-fairies special effects extravaganza. It’s lyrical, hilarious, and yet commands  serious drama that sneaks up on you amid the gauzy wings and outrageous yokels. She had every filmed version of that play – she even invented new ones to illustrate Mendoza’s love life. She visited it again in the novella “Rude Mechanicals”, arguing that – deep inside – all of us want to find a way into that enchanted Wood Outside Athens …

Occasionally, one can find a way. Following Kage’s inspiration, asking myself “What would Kage do?”, I have come this very Midsummer Night’s Eve as is into a particularly enchanted garden. Who could say No to an invitation to guest amid a garden in the hills on this of all nights?

Not me, man.

It really is Midsummer Night’s Eve, Dear Readers. Tomorrow is the Summer Solstice, when the longest day and briefest night contest in glory. Outside, the shadows are grown blocks long on the narrow streets leading up from the edge of Oakland; every separate pebble has its own silhouette shivering on the worn stones of the sidewalk as the light comes rushing in like a horizontal wave from the West. And the air at the open windows here where I write is straight out of Faerie.

There are roses, tiger lilies, rosemary and sage and diverse mints and other holy aromatics. Penstemon; some moss with tiny pink blossoms and a scent like incense; tomatoes and geraniums smelling of musk. There’s some kind of lily, I think – no idea what it is, but it has sword-shaped leaves taller than I am and long rows of scarlet blooms on black stalks 8 feet tall,  that make the bees and hummingbirds insane with delight.

Directly under the living room window is, I am told, a datura plant. I know datura – it’s a low viney shrub that grows wild all over the waste ground of Los Angeles, putting out pretty little white flowers like albino morning glories. They bloom for a day and then wither, looking like discarded condoms all over the empty lots. Not romantic. All through southern California desperate and/or moronic stoners constantly try smoking it – and under its commoner names of Jimson weed, loco weed and Devil’s Apple, it’s a powerful hallucinogen. It’s also deadly poison, and the line between safely delirious and dissolving your liver is about a hair wide. I have always virtuously avoided it, like the pretty flowers of the equally poisonous rose bay – otherwise known as oleander.

However, what is growing in this garden is not a stringy little weed. It is a tree, 2 stories tall and with branches curved like a dancer’s limbs. It’s covered with enormous trumpets of fluted ivory and tourmaline, a foot long, clustered in hundreds; and perfume is – astonishing. A little lemon, a little tea rose, a little musk, a little of the  scent of cool water over stone. A heavy, sensual, carnal scent, that has only begun to rise up as the light has begun to fade away.

Kage would have known what it was. Lacking her years of knowledge, I’ve gone researching here as the room dims and the perfume grows stronger … and it appears that I certainly did not know much about datura. What I’m smelling is Datura inoxia: thorn apple, angel trumpet, love ache, moon flower. Sacred datura,  Night’s Fragrance, that the Aztecs planted in temple gardens.

Oh, it’s still  as poisonous as all get out – but luckily, not the exquisite perfume. If I can restrain myself from wandering out and nibbling on those enormous white flowers, I’ll be fine.

Or as fine as anyone can be, I suppose, sitting in the twilight in a garden on Midsummer Night’s Eve, encountering a strange new sweet scent for the first time on the night wind …

Well met by moonlight, indeed.

Kage Baker was adamant that every writer needed access to an utterly inviolable space.

If you were lucky enough to have a spare room, or a livable attic, or a tree house, or a disused camper shell in the backyard – or even just a good lock – then you could isolate yourself at need to write. Most writers work out some arrangement with their compassionate families; that’s why you see so many authors thanking their wives and children in the dedication. Those families were kind enough to neither harass their resident writer, nor murder them for their misanthropic tendencies while involved in world building.

But it’s hard. Especially the access part, which doesn’t rely exclusively on your family’s willingness to let you monopolize the dining room and talk to yourself. It’s especially hard not to murder the obsessed writer who just can’t get alone enough with their own mind: no matter how quietly the children play, or how much cotton you tape to the dog’s paws, or the sign advising the mailman to leave the mail on the curb because the house is under quarantine … all these amiable compromises do no good if the writer can’t settle down in their dearly-bought space and write.

Hence, for Kage, the occasional risible tantrums about turning pages too noisily or the maddening click of my knitting needles. Though, I must admit, endless riffs on Rule, Britannia or “Hello” in a dozen different pitches for a half hour at a time could drive anyone insane … a good rule for the sanctum-seeking writer is not to have a parrot in the place. Hence, also, her invention of writing weekends, wherein we would hole up somewhere and devote all our waking hours to Kage’s Muse. Writing weekend venues have ranged from tents in meadows above the Big Sur cliffs to posh B&Bs; but they’ve all revolved around the possibility of solitude. And they’ve all worked.

I have some wonderful friends who are taking a week off to go to music camp. (This is not the band camp to which your parents might have sent you – this is mature musicians off in the woods making magic.) They very kindly offered me the delightful position of house-and-cat sitter for the next week – which I leaped at, because they live in the Bay Area in a 1906 cottage which I think is at least half in another, gentler dimension. The cat is a regal beauty, a seal point Rag Doll with eyes like beryls. And I get to hole up in solitary comfort and try to kick start my lazy brain back into writing.

I’ve been recuperating, Dear Readers, from accumulated oxygen starvation and sleep deprivation.  And I am recuperating well, but I had no real comprehension of how muddled I had gotten over the last few months. The CPAP is every bit the miracle you all assured me it could  be: I am sleeping soundly, waking up while it is still  discernibly morning, not fading away into narcolepsy between paragraphs. I have energy! I can think! And I am so behind on everything!

Which is why I’m up here. I left L.A. in mid-morning and had a wonderful drive up I-5: the highway of the weird in early summer is a wonder and delight. Especially if your car has air conditioning, because it’s 100 degrees out there … but the scents of fresh-ploughed earth and ripening crops are a delirium that rushes into the car every time you crack the windows or stop the car. Melons, tomatoes, peppers, onions, apricots and peaches and lemons. Timothy and other cattle-favoured silage baking in the heat.

Sometimes the vegetables pass in trucks, leaving a cornucopia perfume in their wake. Even potatoes somehow smell interesting passing you at 65 miles an hour, a quick hit of fresh dirt and wholesomeness on the wind. Of course, a lot of the veggies do seem to commit suicide along the way – there are always abandoned dunes of tomatoes and lettuce, in particular, lining miles of asphalt. Those don’t smell as charming after a few hours on the grill; but sometimes you get lucky and the vaporous relicts are cantaloupe or oranges. Those are paradisiacal.

This trip it was something new. For about 50 miles between Buttonwillow and Kettleman City, there were little drifts and lost herds of kohlrabi. Kohlrabi, as you Dear Readers may recall, is a weird member of the Brassica family. And to be considered a weird member of the Brassica, you have to be pretty peculiar indeed. The particular qualifications of kohlrabi are that it is either green or purple, and it has above-ground roots: which means, when it is planted in the ground, it looks as though it is struggling to tear itself free of the confining earth on far too many tentacular limbs.

When it has leaped from a truck and been left on the side of the I-5, it looks as though it has succeeded. And is coming to annihilate  humanity with its implacable Brassica wrath.

So it was an interesting drive North. And an interesting evening here with my lovely hosts, who don’t leave until tomorrow; tonight, they took me out for Thai food and are now playing dulcimers as I sit writing …

Solitude can indulge itself tomorrow. Tonight, this is just what I need.