I have never called the fire department, but when I saw flames up my chimney and my rock wall in front of the fireplace started crackling and popping, I was afraid I’d burn the house down on the coldest day of the year.  They pulled up in a few minutes, 3 trucks and men streaming out in all directions, checking out the problem and calming me down.  It all turned out fine and gave me a real appreciation for where our tax dollars go.

Sunny day with a bright blue sky against the white snow on the trees.  Chickens still hate the snow.  Their water was frozen this morning inside the coop, so I’m grateful they weren’t frozen too.  Guess those downy feathers do a lot of good keeping them cozy. They won’t budge out of the coop and their small run and I now have a new sense of what the term ‘cooped up’ means and where it came from.  They also don’t like to lay eggs when it is too cold–only 3 today.

Three fireman make sure my chimney fire wasn't going to burn down the house

a few apples left on the tree, in the snow

Sunset over the snowy orchard

I grew up in Southern California and in the 19 years I’ve lived here in the foothills, I never get over the marvel of the changing seasons.  We just finished harvesting, sharing and selling apples and figs and putting the garden to rest for the long winter.  Now the trees are covered in white cloaks, their trunks stark gray and bare in contrast.  It looks like Christmas and I’m amazed and grateful.  Now if the pipes can just not freeze tonight when it’s supposed to get down to 19 degrees…

The chickens are not sure what to make of the fluffy white stuff...

the apple orchard wearing her white winter cloak

winter has arrived

perfect!

The crisp days and nights made for bright fall leaves. Color at every turn on the farm.

I never get over the wonder of the seasons, reminding me to slow down and notice the subtle changes day by day.

My daughter Heather and Grandson Hunter discover the chickens

My grand nephew Dylan (age 3) thinks apple picking is fun!

apples ready to be picked

This was my first try at raising chickens, so I learned a lot.  First of all, there really is such a thing as a ‘pecking order’ and the chickens, even when they are tiny, seem to know if they are different breeds.  So the other chicks had each other and Stella was a loner.  But she hung in there and stood up for herself.  We named her simply because she was so easy to tell apart from the others.  She was our favorite.

Her eggs were light green with little speckles on them.

But she tended to hang out alone, rather than in the pack with the others.  This may have made her vulnerable.  Even though they were supposedly safe within the garden fence, something got in and took Stella, leaving only a patch of golden feathers and her lovely memory.

So here is a photo of her in the garden near the flowers.

We’ll miss you dear Stella. May you rest in peace in hen heaven with lots of worms and grains and soft nests to sit on to lay your green speckled eggs…

They seem very ordinary.  Those moments that change our lives forever.  Really, it’s that just before them was ordinary.  And then something happened and everything stopped or glowed or vibrated and stood out somehow from the moment before.

And looking back, it is all clear, how life changed in an instant.

Albert Camus said: “A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images, in the presence of which, his heart first opened.”

For me, it wasn’t an image.  It was a sound.  Or rather, sounds.

It was a hot September day, and my sister Sharon and her best friend Holly were huddled close together on Sharon’s bed discussing their first day of high school.  I was still in the 8^th grade, anxious to hear about their new world–of cute senior boys, (I learned the term ‘upper classmen’) upcoming football games and something called ‘pep rallies’.

Then there were all their new classes—biology, chemistry, and for Holly, French I.  My sister, Sharon, had to take Latin.  My mother insisted that it was the ‘mother of all languages’ and that we all had to take two years.  Mass was still said in Latin, so that was something, too.  Sharon read from her Latin I Book:  ‘amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis amant’.  ‘I love you’ in Latin.  I was unmoved.

Then Holly began reading from her French I book, words and phrases like ‘chambre meuble’—furnished room.  She tilted her head and made her lips into a kissing shape—‘oui, oui, chamber meuble’.  She and Sharon giggled, seeing some meaning there that I missed, but I was transfixed.

The sounds—it sounded exciting, hypnotic and worldly to be able to make those French sounds.  Holly kept saying words:  ‘Je t’aime’.  ‘I love you’.  How romantic.  I kept listening, my attention riveted on her words and on the sense of excitement I felt hearing them.

I’d heard French words before.  My dad had spent four months in France during the Normandy Invasion of World War II.  He loved to tell stories about his time there, about the warmth and gratitude of the French people at the arrival of the Americans.  And about his efforts to speak French.  Dad learned his French in a country high school in South Dakota, where the teacher, who had never heard French, was reading a lesson ahead to teach it.  We’d giggle when Dad told how ‘s’il vous plait’ came out sounding like ‘silver plate’.  I adored my dad, but his French sounded Midwestern, American, boring.

But this French sounded luscious, sensual, inviting.

That day, that moment, those sounds, may not be something that Sharon or Holly would even remember.  But as I sat there with them, on the pink chenille bedspreads, in the bedroom of my childhood, something changed inside of me, woke up and paid attention.  On that hot September afternoon, my life turned in a new direction and vistas opened up beyond the life I’d known.

I could learn those sounds and words and be a part of that place in the French I textbook, with the side walk cafes where starving artist types sipped strong coffee out of tiny cups.

I didn’t know what starving artists were and I had never tasted coffee, but I knew if I went to this place, where they said ‘chambre meuble’ like that, I could be happy.

I could also be far away from the small town in rural southern California where I’d lived my whole life.  Far away from my mother’s coldness and sometimes cruelty.  It was even a place where my father had already been.  That was important too.

The next year, when I began high school, I suffered through the dreaded Latin I class—‘amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant’.  I was unmoved.

So I begged, pleaded and cajoled my mother into letting me out after only one year.

I could take French, I argued, a language that people still speak.  Didn’t that make more sense?  In one of the rare moments that I can recall when my mother actually listened to me and seemed to care about what I wanted, I prevailed.

The next year, Sharon and I began French I together.  I was a sophomore, she was a junior.  It was a first for us to share a class, since we were in different grades.  We were excited to sit next to each other, and chat before and after class.

But once the bell rang, I was riveted on the French.  That first year, our teacher was an egotistical bore who seemed to enjoy hearing himself speak French (in a pompous voice) more than he cared whether we learned any.  I studied hard anyway. He gave an easy A or B if you were a girl and smiled at him. I did that, but also earned my A+.

The second year, French II, Sharon and I moved into Mr. Maiwald’s class.  He was a short German man with a pointed head and one eye that didn’t move.  He had the reputation of being the hardest teacher in the school, who flunked students regularly.  He was also the German teacher and had taught our brother German.  Next to my dad, he was the smartest person I’d ever come across.

He made it very clear on the first day that he would give hard tests, be a tough grader, but that we would learn French.  I was thrilled.

I became obsessed.  I made flash cards by writing French vocabulary words onto 3×5” index cards and carried them with me wherever I went.  I’d study them on the ½ hour ride to and from school on the school bus.

I’d have them on the ironing board so I could be learning new words when I ironed my starched white gym shirt and dark blue gym shorts each week or the blouses with the big ruffles down the front that were in style in the mid sixties.

I’d stay up late studying and figure out all the tiny nuances of how the verb endings had to agree when you conjugated them, all the different tenses, all the accents and irregular verbs.

I knew he’d ask those things on the exams.  But it wasn’t that.  I had to learn it all.

French and my dream of going to France became the center of my own private universe.  I was safe from my real life as a teenager, from family problems, from boyfriend woes, from worrying if I was fat.  When I said those sounds, I felt free and alive in a way I couldn’t in my normal life.

I got 100% on all the tests.  It became a sort of silent battle between us, this short stocky German man with one funny eye and this tall, shy, high school junior.   He wanted to see if he could make me stumble.  He never did.

It was exhilarating for me to excel in his class.  But each word I learned, each rule I mastered, each accent egu or accent grave that I correctly placed on a French word became a small victory.

It was another step closer to the day that I would fly across the Atlantic Ocean to France, sit at one of those sidewalk cafes and move my lips like a kiss to speak French.

© Diane Covington 2009

Right now, there are grapes, plums, peaches, pears, apples, tomatoes, corn, melons, cucumbers, zucchini, figs, carrots, beans and chard.  It’s amazing to witness Mother Nature’s abundance first hand.

I love the miracle of watching a patch of rich dirt turn into all this food. Of course there’s a lot of sweat and effort that goes into it.

In the end, it’s magic, pure magic.

Some recent pickings...

I’m currently working on a memoir that begins when my father was in France in World War II, before I was born. The book has been percolating in my brain and heart for about ten years now.  I had a few days after my time with the veterans to write and think about my life and the memoir.  Here are some of those thoughts…

My life and writing are intertwined.

The memoir that I’m writing is about fate, destiny and soul.  The mysterious map we follow through life that has been laid out for us ahead of time.   Why we go right instead of left in the twists and turns of our own personal labyrinth and how we learn to know which way to turn.

No one ever taught me this in school.  These are answers I’ve had to search out on my own. I’m talking about life as a vision quest, not a career path.  Some of my teachers have been pure and good, others evil and dark.  I’ve made mistakes, some big mistakes.

But I’ve also had the unmistakable fortune of being in exactly the right place at the exact right moment and the satisfaction of knowing that certain risks and lots of trust have gotten me there.

‘Croyez-en-soi’.   In French, that means:  ‘Believe in yourself’.  It means listening to the inner voice that takes something to hear and that is only available from making choices that don’t always turn out clean, pretty and safe.  But choices that take you to where you know you have something.

I’ve sometimes imagined that I have two guardian angels.  Those two plump cherubs you see on cards and posters, happy, smiling, agreeable little cherubs. But sometimes, as my angels, in my life, from my choices, they’re covering their eyes, gasping in horror.  ‘Oh No!  She’s going the wrong way’.  Other times, they’re shrieking in delight.  ‘She did it, bravo, hooray!’  A kind of ‘Mr. Toad’s wild ride’ through life that has as many near misses and crashes as straight-ahead easy roads.

But this book, ultimately, is about how to discern a life out of the chaos and confusion of choices presented to us each day.  How to have the strength to trust a choice when there is no ‘logical’ reason to trust it except your own inner knowing that you should.

“Go this way.  Yes, that’s right.   Good.  Now you’re on track…”

I imagine what it would have been like to grow up with adults encouraging me to listen to myself, trust myself.  In my fantasy of a perfect childhood, doting parents and teachers would always be there asking:  “What do you think?  What feels right to you?  Trust yourself, listen to yourself, follow your dreams, hunches and ideas.”  The way Joseph Campbell told us all to follow our bliss.

But I didn’t have a childhood like that and most others, I suppose, didn’t either.  I had a fairly typical, I imagine, childhood in the 1950’s in a small rural town.  The plusses were lots of freedom, fresh air and running around outside.  Time in nature, riding my bike.

Our family didn’t own a TV till I was seven or eight years old.  We spent two months in the summer in a trailer at the beach where my sister Sharon and I spent all day in the ocean.  I learned to feel how the swell of a wave could pick you up and carry you to the shore as a ride.

In the center of my childhood, I had a loving presence—my father.

Looking back, he was like a beacon for me, kind, open hearted and good.  I had a mother who was suspicious and jealous of me and of my relationship with Dad.  I had an older sister who not only tolerated me, she liked me and played with me.  We loved each other unashamedly.  In photos, we’re entangled with each other, arms around each other’s necks, smiling and squinting into the camera, a momentary still shot of the endless play we shared all our waking hours.

One of the advantages of growing older in our youth crazed American society is some well-earned wisdom that comes from perspective.  Looking back, the way seems straighter, the twists and turns less jagged.

I’ve heard that if you look down on a sailboat from above, the back and forth tacking looks like a straight line, even though it really takes many turns.

Stephen King, in his book “On Writing” says:  “Be brave.  Tell us all you know.”  This book is my attempt to do that.  It is the result of a lifetime of distillation of the everyday events and moments that add up to a meaningful life.  Or at least to some sense of a meaningful life, some sense of meaning.

This book is about:  How to have the courage to follow the inner voice that only you can hear.

How to have the courage to turn off the TV and to listen to your own life, not someone else’s made up life spiced with tricks to make you want to buy things.

How to turn right when everyone else is turning left and to know that you have to turn right, no matter what, you just do.  And even if it is lonely at times, that right hand path is the one you’re meant to be on.

How to have the courage to watch for the clues, the hints and signs that tell you ‘yes, that’s good, you’re on track’.

Because it is all written in a secret code and you have to really pay attention or you’ll miss it, you won’t be able to decipher it.

And in the end, or maybe not the end, in the middle somewhere as I hope I am with my life, there is a satisfaction that comes from living your own unique life.  And that is worth it all.

This book is about how to have the courage to stick to your own path even when it looks to others as though you’re walking captain Hook’s plank straight into oblivion.

My dad lived from the center of his power and the goodness of his heart.  He showed me that.  He was an extraordinary man living an ordinary life.

My memoir begins, on the Normandy Coast of France, above Omaha Beach, in World War II.  Somehow I got caught up in the war, through my father’s stories and his life there, before I was born.  I’ve learned a lot about the war since I first wrote about D-Day in Dad’s honor, in 1994.  I now can hold my own with any World War II buff, mostly men; I know what a Rhino Ferry is, the names of all the invasion beaches and the number of ships and airplanes that were part of the invasion.  (Over 5,000 ships and 11,000 planes.)

But what’s amazing about my father’s stories about France is that they weren’t about war, but about relationships.  How the French people were kind to him when he practiced his high school French.  Their gratitude when he shared the left over food from the Navy camp.  And most of all, about his relationship with a 7-year-old French orphan named Gilbert who Dad tried to adopt and bring home to America.

Those stories shaped my life and influenced me in ways I’m still discovering.  But most of all, when I was able to find Gilbert 50 years after the war, I experienced a deeper sense of the role of destiny.

I believe that our lives are affected by the interplay of our environments, relationships, what seem like chance events, and our own inner drives and longings.

This is one woman’s story of that rich weaving that became a life and I hope, is still becoming a life.

© Diane Covington 2009

White peaches 8/27/09, sun ripened...

ready to eat

Today I picked some of the white peaches that have been gorgeous looking for weeks, but hard as stones.  I covered them with bird netting and have been checking them every day and TA DA!  Today was the day.  The first ones gently placed into a basket with a cloth in it to protect them.  Juicy and delicious, so worth the wait…

Commentary: Remembering a Father on D-Day — 6/4/09.

Remembering Yosemite

Click here to access audio file for “Remembering Yosemite”: California Report , 2/06

Award Winning NPR Series “D-Day Anniversary”

Click here to access award winning NPR Series “D-Day Anniversary” – May-June, 2004:

Day 1 (iTunes File) || Day 1 (Windows Media File)

Day 2 (iTunes File) || Day 2 (Windows Media File)

Day 3 (iTunes File) || Day 3 (Windows Media File)

Day 4 (iTunes File) || Day 4 (Windows Media File)

Day 5 (iTunes File) || Day 5 (Windows Media File)

Women Vote 2004:

KPBS 11/04