Living in the thick of chronology

Arriving at the Party, originally uploaded by Pat Ulrich.

Article in the New York Times, By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Published: March 28, 2009

The last time I stayed at the house up the hill and around the corner from Point Reyes Station, Calif., there were Holsteins grazing on the tidal flats below. Now the tidal flats have been restored, the cows are gone, and all day long the equilibrium shifts before my eyes. On one tide Tomales Bay runs up into Lagunitas Creek. On the next tide, Lagunitas Creek runs out into Tomales Bay. No matter what time of day it is, the wind tends to confuse the appearance of the tides, depending on how it’s blowing.

I suppose those old Holsteins were tidal creatures in some sense — eating salt grass, their udders filling and emptying like the flats themselves. But now the creek channel spills out across the mud and the grass twice a day, and birds rise and settle without ceasing. Now, it’s possible to feel the bay respiring. The water is constantly catching me by surprise. I look, and there’s a bright, wind-tugged sheet of it from here to Inverness. I look again, and the light adheres strictly to the creek channel, eeling its way across the darkness.

Vultures flare just above my head, and quail start across the lawn. An osprey dangles in the stiff wind, then folds and drops on its prey. Great egrets practice their stillness, and above them, looking out across the flats, I find myself thinking of all the chronologies in which I live, all the ways a life gets measured out. The least familiar of them is the one right before me — the coming and going of the tides. I find a suspense in it, a constant sense of expectation. I consult a tide chart and note that the tide is ebbing, but I’m not experienced enough to feel it. The best I can do is see where the water is now, and then where it is an hour from now. It’s like having to look repeatedly at the sun to guess its direction across the sky.

I always tell my writing students to avoid chronology, because we live utterly in the thick of it. We need no reminding how it works. But that’s what I love about watching these flats. They undermine my landlocked sense of chronology. The day comes to an end, but the tide may be ebbing or flooding. Morning breaks, but the tide may be ebbing or flooding. The perfectly cyclical nature of the tides feels, somehow, counter-cyclical to my understanding of the flow of time. If time were like the tides, we would surge into the future and rush back to the past, twice daily, while the narrow balance point we call the present worked its way steadily forward.

Surely the egrets and the ospreys and the plovers understand all of this intuitively. So do the flocks of waterfowl that beat their way out over the bay. I suspect those long-gone Holsteins also would think of the tides as a wonderment in this otherwise sensible world. VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Dream Interiors

I want to live here. I love Design*Sponge. They recently did a spread on this house, decorated by Jessica Helgerson Interior Design. I keep going back and looking at all the details in every room. I love the kitchen. I love the sink IN the kitchen.


I love the details of the crisp white walls, and the clean crisp dark trim. In the hallway, I love the way the light fixture creates a pattern along the walls.
It's perfect.

Green halls and memories, encased in glass

I read somewhere recently, that Domino is going to start slowly killing off images and whatnot from their website. Which makes sense, it's just sad.

of course, so now I am seeing people right and left, collecting those images. And I kind of love that.

I like this one. I like the green and the matching simple black frames with matching white mats, and just the idea of it. I would love to do something like this in my hallway.

image via Domino Archives, via Automatism

The Perfect Bath

I keep a scrapbook of pictures of my ideal dream house. I've been doing this for as long as I can remember.

When I was little, I told myself that they were backgrounds for my paper dolls (which they were).

When I got older and put away such childish things, I missed these imaginary trips into pictures of beautiful places.

And then I was old enough to get magazine subscriptions of my own. Then, I justified my clippings by telling myself that I was developing my taste, I was preparing the groundwork for the day I would own a home of my own.

And that might even be partially true. But mostly, I am still looking at the pictures and playing pretend.

In my perfect house, there is a small cabin in the back yard. A one room shack really. It is surrounded on at least three sides by sliding rice paper screens (or possibly something more substantial... ) It is surrounded by Japanese style gardens. Sometimes it is my art studio. Sometimes it is a separate meditation retreat. Sometimes, I imagine it looks just like this picture, and I go there sometimes, when it's raining, and sit in the warm and steamy water and watch the water trickle through the leaves.

Image from Apartment Therapy

Of course, for pure beauty of the bath, this outdoor bathroom, looking out over the ocean, would also suffice.

Image also from Apartment Therapy

Queen of the South

Quotes from Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte

“Books are doors that lead out onto the street,” Patricia would tell her.

“You learn from them, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives, multiply your own life a thousand times. Where can you get more for your money, Mexicanita? And they also keep all sorts of bad things at bay: ghosts, loneliness, shit like that. Sometimes I wonder how you people that don’t read figure out how to live your lives.”

Reading, she’d learned in prison, especially novels, allowed her to inhabit her mind in a new way- as though blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, she might witness her own life as if it were happening to somebody else. Besides teaching her things, reading helped her think differently, or think better, because on the page, others did it for her.

“I want you real awake for what I’m going to tell you,” said Patty, recognizable again.

“I am very fucking awake,” said Teresa. And she was prepared to listen.

She had emptied another glass of tequila as they walked, and then had set the glass down at some point on the path. And being awake- she thought, without knowing what made her think it- was very much like being all right again. Like finding yourself unexpectedly at home in your own skin. Without thoughts, without memories. Just the immense night and the familiar voice speaking in a secretive whisper, as if someone might be crouching in the shadows, spying on them in that strange light silvering the broad vineyards. And she could also hear the chirping of crickets, the sound of her friend’s footsteps, and she swishing of her own bare feet- she had left her heels on the terrace- on the loose soil of the path.

It occurred to Teresa that every human being has a hidden story, and that if you were quiet enough and patient enough you could finally hear it. And that that was good, a lesson that was important to learn. A lesson that was, above all, useful.

The advantage of books, she discovered, was that you could appropriate the lives, stories, and thoughts they contained, and you were never the same person when you closed them as when you had opened them for the first time. Very intelligent people had written some of those pages, and if you were able to read with humility, patience, and the desire to learn, they never disappointed you. Even the things you didn’t understand stuck there, in a corner of your head, ready for the future to give them meaning, to turn them into beautiful or useful lessons. Fascinated, shivering with pleasure and fear, she had discovered that all the books in the world were somehow about her.