Beautiful Mornings

I'm lucky. I know it. There are many beautiful places in the world, many different kinds of beautiful places, and I happen to live in one of them. People come from everywhere to visit Sonoma County and the Napa Valley, and I get to live here.

Is it perfect? No, far from. We have traffic. We have malls and crowds and all the things any suburb anywhere has. We do, however, have little back roads, narrow and winding, quiet and not much more than a single lane where two cars have to inhale and tense inward in order to squeeze by without trading paint.

The other morning I was driving to work, off the freeway and on the two-lane highway that heads up over the hill to Calistoga where I work.  There was an accident. It was raining lightly, the road was slick, and someone had crashed into something. I found the tail end of the cars heading up into the upper canyon. They were stopped as far as I could see and I'm impatient.

I hate traffic. I will cheerfully drive an hour out of my way if I can avoid twenty minutes of traffic, sitting and looking at the bumper in front and lights ahead. Being impatient, I turned around and went back to the little side road on which you clench your backside cheeks around every blind curve and tight and narrow bend because if you meet an oncoming car at anything more than twenty miles per hour, it's a crap shoot which will win. And no one around here drives twenty miles an hour if there's an open stretch of pavement in front of them.

I made it safely and was rewarded. Down the other side, turning onto the still narrower road that would take me to my destination, I breathed a little easier. It's narrower, true, but not as steep and marginally straighter, without the blind curves, cliffs and drop-offs that make the first stretch so hairy.

Driving along I passed through archways of trees, deep green and matte-glossed in mist under the fog. Leaving them I reached a more open stretch and found banks of golden flowers, head-heavy and glorious in the mist.

I didn't have time to stop, but I promised I would yesterday, and I did.

We have broom. Scotch Broom and French Broom. They are non-native and a problem because their oil content makes them very dangerous during our hot summers. If they catch fire, it takes a lot of water to stop them burning. I don't care, though, because in spring they are glorious.



Along the road are bush after bush after bush of broom - nature's serendipitous hedgerow of gold interspersed with the white of blackberry, the pink of sweet peas and purple of morning glory. All the gold is waiting to explode into seeds once the pods are dry and split, as soon as the weather is hot enough.


In a break between them, while I was out of my car and walking, savoring that little bit of time before a day at work, I heard laughter, softened by distance, coming from some house down the valley.


I had been intent on the flowers, on getting my pictures so I could get to work on time, but that little echoing laugh made me look up and out.

Sometimes it's the pause, the moment of looking away from what we're doing, where we're going, that makes a day special.

I hope yours is, today and tomorrow and the next. Take a break, take a pause. Look up and out and savor a brief time out of time. It makes the rest of the day easier.

Best~
Philippa

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