Caspar 5 August 2018

We Already Be Trippin’

The week or so before a trip always puts us in mind of our place on the planet as a primo destination, where we're travelers who have elected to stay awhile.

Let's start with the rock, wood, and foliage that support us. We are always aware of the skeleton of the land beneath us: subduction and upheaval, the patient working of wind, waves, and water, the fragility of the flora that covers it and holds it against the weather.

Next up, the vividly living Nature that shares the land with us, and reminds us that Wildness is our heritage as well as their necessity.

Among our recent Greatest Joys has been the joy of a year-round Farmers Market – TWO in the summer! Here's a sampling of one July Mendocino Market. THANK YOU! Sakina and farmers, for delicious eats.

And then there's an ever-changing parade of culture – a Circus Camp show in Mendocino, a fashion show at Rachel's gallery, and our dear Blushin' Roulettes, Angie and Cass, in town from Black Mountain, North Carolina in concert with their new partners in the Appalucians at the Community Center.

And where would we be without food?

That's Queenie of Queenie's in Elk, and her inimitable Smoked Salmon over a potato pancake Eggs Benedict; the Cafe Beaujolais Brickery's (outdoor) lunch pizza; those shrimp are part of an everyday home lunch; the questions at the bottom are the typical tourist queries (emphasis on the "queer") we endure here on the Mendocino Coast, as recorded on the back of Frankie's menu board.

It will not have eluded the notice of the attentive reader that this date is Michael's real birthday. The government thinks he was born on August 6th, but that was a fiction created to let his mother rest an extra day in a wartime hospital. His family indulges him by celebrating on the 5th ... and today, it was the first day of his 75th year that was being celebrated.

The celebration included phone calls from distant daughter Damiana and stepson Chad and his girls, and a delicious dinner including Sienna's fabulous gazpacho and lemon meringue tartlets by Rochelle. And below will be found Rochelle's beautiful birthday card; note the interesting correspondences with years.