morning walks

It's taken all this time before I could do my morning walk/run again in a half-way normal fashion. Before I got ill, I used to do a very modest, 2-mile loop around the base of the canyon up the street from us every day. I never pushed it very hard; you can't when you're running along unstable and narrow canyon trails. My mantra was always, "walk the uphill parts, run the downhill parts." I still called it "my morning run," of course. But the running was not the point so much as simply getting out there, getting a little exercise, and adding a dash of natural perspective to my day.

We live in an ecosystem called "the coastal chaparral," and right now the flowers are in full bloom. Because of the wet winter we've had this year, the flowers have been outrageous. They're akin to the infamous desert wildflowers, popping up almost overnight and lasting only a week or two before disappearing again. So these past few days I've been trudging around in the mud with my California Wildflowers book identifying them (for what it's worth--with my short-term memory issues I retain the names for maybe a day before forgetting them all over again). But I've also been photographing and documenting as best I can. I don't remember seeing such a spectacular season before, and it's probably only going to last a few more days.

This is a photo I took this morning of a Chaparral Yucca; you see these in the super-expensive floral arrangements of 5-star hotel lobbies. They are incredibly dramatic, growing some 6-7 feet high seemingly overnight and producing clusters of vibrant cream colored-flowers streaked with delicate pink lines. Our canyon is dotted all over with them right now. They bloom only once during their lifetimes; after the bloom withers, the whole plant dies. By the end of this month, they'll all be gone except for their dried-up stalks, which will mark the hills like walking staffs planted in the ground.

I remember seeing these dried-up stalks even from when I was a little girl. I just never knew what they were before now. I thought a fire had swept through the region and just left these burnt-out sticks behind, because that's exactly what these skinny dried-out forests of stalks look like--burnt-out forests. But of course that didn't make any sense. Even I, oblivious as I am as to my ordinary surroundings, would have noticed a huge wildfire if it had occurred right down the block from me.

Now I know where these odd stick forests come from.