[You folks out west may find many of these images overly disturbingly verdant, sorry if so.]

About all that could be said for the subsequent/previous week was that it rained nightly, the cleanest house ever went to mud immediately as the Inkies brought the outside in and, due to our depleted states, we made excruciatingly slow progress both moving in and acclimatizing.

On the upside two extraordinary books, both tracing journeys but each uniquely distinct, happily illuminated the intervals between slow progress and utter collapse during our waking

hours. Carlo and Renzo Piano’s oceanic peregrinations on an Italian research vessel [“Atlantis”] was one while Nick Neely’s “Alta California”, wherein the author walked from San Diego north to the Bay Area in the footsteps of the 1769 Portola expedition camping in the weeds and dry riverbeds in 2016, was the other.  Fortuitous, both…and both highly recommended.

Grasses grew or had grown lavishly and

though initially we failed to venture far from the house [in the beginning a trip from there to

the toolbox and back was more than enough to put me down for an hour’s nap]

by Saturday L. at least was sufficiently recovered to attempt the Gardner Farmer’s Market

and Post Office under the anxious gaze of the Inkies, bringing back

copious farm-to-table greens, duck eggs…and mail. For dinner that night we treated ourselves

to ground grass-fed beef imported from Alturas on the Farmer’s fresh-made bread.

A week on I was making it up to the studio regularly if tentatively, drawing a tiny little bit as

the rains continued, the meadow grew lusher and greener than ever seen and though the

ongoing BLM-JBLM flu or cold or covid made getting out in it exhausting subsequent attempts met increasingly with success; by the Wednesday ten days after arrival we’d both managed

to attain the top of Fossil Hill, L. doing better than I though her affliction had been considerably more serious early on….

Anyway…onwards into the greenness, for as long as it lasts.