Spring came last week to Upper Ojai, with Santa Ana winds and a wildfire in not-far-off Orange County. It’s early this year; in fact, when I talked to our local fire station, they couldn’t ever recall a Santa Ana wind in February…which in theory, of course, is winter.
Every year since l991 I have walked to the top of our local ridge (the Topa Topas, at 6600 feet) to see snow in the winter. Some years we’ve had substantial snows; a couple of times, I couldn’t even make it to the top. But last year we had just the barest dusting of snow on the ridge, and so far this year, nothing.
But it’s beautiful. I only regret that I didn’t get the camera out in time to get the apple blossoms at their first emergence. Their loveliness works on me. I find myself yearning–seriously–for thirty-seven hours in a day. I simply can’t keep up with my life, far less my garden.
It’s strange to whine about not having time to garden–or whatever–while keeping up a blog, isn’t it?
Yet I feel in my gut that in fact the blog is the only way to keep up. I can’t take the monkish route and turn away from the world; or the libertine route and devote myself to my pleasures, or the wage slave route, and devote myself to my day job; or the literary world, and devote myself to my book.
At times I can do all these things, but the old line–the world is too much with us–sounds to me not as a warning, but as an imperative. We cannot take this world for granted; to record some measure of its passing, day by day, word by word, feels necessary.
It’s as if we have increased the pace of life both internally (on what used to be called Internet time) and externally (as the seasons accelerate towards summer…at least in Southern California).
My daughter Emily tells me she can’t wait to get away from here (but then, she’s fifteen). But I too feel a yearning for something else. For time, I guess.
Kit Stolz 