the rain like silver in my ear...

(that's a David Gray quote)


Going on a bike ride (before Good Friday, when it rained oddly) I noticed doll house sized crevasses, microscopic canyons, elegent folds, ripples, in the hardened mud. No rain for two months, and yet it’s memory, it’s evidence is everywhere. My favorite is where there are deep tire tracks, and there is clover (mostly dead) in it. The plants are another reminder of where water was, lonely(wish this were an adverb, but the computer doesn’t accept loneily) surrounded by other dusty furrows not quite deep enough for something to take seed in.

People take trips to the river, but only in the winter/early spring because the farmers siphon it off for their crops with big pvc pipe deep in the mountains. The pipes are supported by makeshift piles of bricks and rough hewn wood perilously nailed together. The deep parts of the river in the mountains come up to your waist. There are well worn dirt bike hills in the dry river beds closer to town and the ocean. My favorite view on the way to the border is a gigantic river bed south of Santo Tomas(I think?) that has houses and corrals built IN it.

You may not be able to tell, but this pipe is resting on stacks of concrete blocks.


Here is a pipe taking away the river water!


My bug problem is much improved, I’m only killing one or two a day. My children told me that the Earwigs/pincher bug (I think they are eating the beetles) hurt you. I told them they were definitely crazy and shouldn’t make up stories. The other night I went to the bathroom and when I stood to wash my hands I stepped on something that poked me! I looked down expecting a bobby pin, or earring, but no, I had stepped on an Earwig/pincher bug! That’ll teach me.