April and a few things I love about spring

Our pullets are laying their first small brown eggs.
The yolks are deep golden and delicious.


The wild plums in the hills have burst into blossom.


And girls go walking in the lightest of rains.

Why people moved to the city

I'm a city dweller, with all the amenities of modern life. We also have a cabin deep in the California redwoods, a mile up a dirt road. Quiet. Peaceful. No city services. So on several of the hottest days of July, we were out gathering firewood for next winter, loading up for the wood burning stove. Even with Tom on a modern, gas powered splitter (and Felix with a sledgehammer and a maul), it took all three generations of us. Sasha and my 93 year old dad pitched wood from the loose pile to the stack, Felix and I made a tidy, geometric pile to over-winter. Penny supervised. Think that looks hard? Here's my father's father, 90 years old, on the woodpile he just split and stacked on his farm in Graton, about 50 miles from our cabin.

Road Tripping with my dad: Santa Barbara or bust

It's always an adventure hitting the road with my dad.
There are coffee and tea stops. Old friends to visit. Interesting things to photograph. "You see all these plastic bags blowing around? It makes a statement. You gotta have two things to make a good photograph. A field, and garbage. That's it." My cousni, Reeve Woolpert (on left) and his photo opening. "Best show I've ever seen." Great Mexican food, a crappy hotel, and home at the end of two long, wonderful days.

Braiding the garlic

Here's the big mound of garlic plants we brought in from the garden. First we cleaned them all... getting dirt out of the roots, cutting off excess roots, stripping off the dead leaves. Then on to the braiding....
I've always loved people's hands. Writing, hammering, cooking, wrapped around a small child... just love watching people use their hands. Both Dorothea Lange and my dad photographed people's hands, so I guess I learned early to notice them. Felix started off the braids by picking three garlic plants and tying them together, then he would add new garlics as Sasha braided. He held tight to the heads so they would make a firm braid.

Flipped over to tie off.... and success! Now on to the next couple dozen. Sasha and Felix stayed up long after I'd gone to bed, braiding and tying.

Malcolm Gladwell, weekends in the apple orchard

I just watched an incredible interview with Malcolm Gladwell at the Guardian, UK. He's someone I admire tremendously for his ability to stand back and analyze the way things work. [The Tipping Point, and Outliers are two of his books.] He ends his interview talking about journalism and journalists: "The human need to be told stories is universal. We're like people growing food. What we do, there is always going to be this fantastic market for it."

Watch the interview with Gladwell by Sarfraz Manzoor here.

We've spent the last few weekends working in our garden/orchard. We put beet seeds in for a second time (it was too cold this spring for them to germinate), harvested fava beans, and dug up half the garlic, cleaned it up, and Sasha and Felix made garlic braids. Takes teamwork. We got the orchard mowed (again, all that rain made for lush grass and weeds) and thinned off many of the tiny apples on our young and tender trees so they will keep growing and not stop to put all their energy into fruit. Tom wheeling some of the garlic up to the house. Picking fava beans in my favorite new T-shirt. My dad getting the low hanging beans, with a little help from our dog.
Taking a break. And yes, my dad really does dress like this. Those are his old sixties ties he uses for suspenders.

My latest manuscript has been edited, re-edited, copy-edited and rewritten every one of those times by me. I love this stage of a book. It's this consuming sprint to the finish, lungs bursting, as every little bit is done just-one-more-time.

I'm also totally wrung out. I just can't seem to get my mind to think one more thought. I'd rather be outside watering, or watching the bees fly from flower to flower. When I'm inside, I do crazy tasks like clean out the pantry. Do the wash. Fold. Put away. Wash the dog. Sit on the back porch with the dog to both dry off. I've been wondering lately why I don't have a lounge chair in the back yard like other poeple do, so I could just lie down and do nothing. Read maybe, that would be the max.

Garlic braiding pictures tk.

Just how do writers avoid writing?

We all have our little ways. When we're up in our cabin a mile up a dirt road, and the rain is coming down and coming down and coming down, and a tree has fallen on the power line and knocked it down, sparking and fizzling onto the road, and we can't get out anyway....

There is always water trying to go where we don't want it to go. Hence: Tom and I suit up, grab shovels and rakes, and head out. Penny-the-dog comes with us, blinking and shaking madly.

Lightning and lightning bug

As I've just rediscovered for the zillionth time, Mark Twain was right: there's a big difference between lightning and a lightning bug.  There is also a big difference between "almost finished with my novel" and "turned in my manuscript to the editor." Big. But I did it. Late, late, late at night I attached it to an email and pushed send.

I took a day off (okay, I was exhausted) and then wrote up the titles for the three lectures I'll be giving at Kindling Words in a few weeks. For the last month or so I've been chucking ideas into a folder. I've got a nice, fat folder. Now, time to organize my thoughts.

Here are my three titles:

1) Steal from the best: strengthen your characters using narrative non-fiction techniques, Chinese medicine, and a few other tricks.

2) Kick ‘em when they’re down: complicate your characters relationships with each other and their environment.

3) Consolidate your gains: get Mean Barbara off your back and fly in new directions.

I'm really looking forward to the retreat.

And while I was busy finishing the novel, we managed to have a birthday party for Tom. Kind of an exuberant guy, as you can see by the photo. This party wouldn't have happened had it been left to me, but our son Will made Vietnamese pho, we invited over a few dozen of Tom's closest friends (like I said, exuberant) and we had a feast.

The boys decided to play a little music to wind down the party, and Sophie who is three-about-to-turn-four shut down the place by dancing all night.

She has now dubbed our place "the house with the band." I think she's under the impression there is always live music here....

King of Mushrooms

Felix and Sasha after two glorious days hunting Boletus, affectionately called Porcini ("little pig") in Italy. We pigged out ourselves on what we could, gave away lots, then dried the rest.

end of summer and M. T. Anderson

Thunder and lightening, with heavy, short rains washed away the summer dust clinging to the porch. Like an exhalation, summer is finished.

We got the barn almost all the way painted -- still have some very-high-up trim to complete. In fact, we have a lot of high up trim to paint still. This is not a fun job to do -- the satisfaction comes in getting it finished before the rains. That's Tom at the top in a white protective suit because he's using a paint sprayer, Felix on the lower ladder, handing up and down rollers, paint brushes, and doing follow up with the paint roller. Sasha is getting all the low trim masked and painted.

Tiring? Yes, very. Sasha and Felix crashed out for the night on the porch, until woken by our eager dog Penny, who finally couldn't wait one more minute, and bounded out, wriggling and wagging.

Back to my city life, where we ate bounty from the garden, and Tobin Anderson eased my transition. He was out here in the bay area with his new book, Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware. Besides being a genius, he's got a lovely, dark, irreverent sense of humor, and a big heart. There's a terrific book trailer here: http://www.simonandschuster.com/multimedia?video=36437626001. Very fun. Here he is with several middle schoolers who wanted to tap into his brain and figure out for themselves how he does it.

Summer Project

It's been a busy summer in the garden. We decided to double the size of the orchard that is fenced in to keep the deer out. It's a project that requires many hands and strong backs, so we gathered up a bunch of our kids' friends. This is a group of hard-working young women and men who love to be outdoors, and who are interested in growing and eating real food. Most of them garden, and two of the women are heading to Vermont in a few months to start their own organic farm.

Several of our crew worked on the first fence a few years ago, and they feel a wonderful sense of ownership of their orchard.

With enough luck, manure, and TLC, there should be enough apples and pears and peaches and raspberries and garlic and onions for all of us. (Probably there is some equivalent here to "never count your chickens before they hatch," like "never count your garlic heads before they harden off.")

Tom did a bunch of layout prep work the weekend before, and then when the gang arrived the fence posts had to be set, the wire stretched and nailed down, and the gates built and installed. It sounds fairly simple, but it's hard work.

After the fence was up, we even got a few rows dug. I took a turn on the machine....also hard work. The machine wants to run and it's a job to keep up with it and stop it at the end of the row so it doesn't chew up the new fence. After a couple rows I headed back to the kitchen for my usual job: farm wife. After all, a crew like this has to be well-fed.

Last photo: the tired, victorious crew.

I love my life, especially the orchard, especially right now

This is what I was doing instead of writing: playing hooky in the orchard. It's almost physically impossible to stay at my desk in this weather. I swear there is some way the sap rises in us, telling us to get outside and get the garden going, and go through the house and do a spring cleaning. The nest needs to be tidied up after the long winder indoors, and the garden tended so there'll be a harvest in the fall.

Here's a shot of Tom fertilizing the garlic, planted last fall. He dug a loooong trench for water pipes, got the pipes in, and the dirt back over them, all in two days. I weeded, fertilized and tended the grapes, and we set up a couple over-ground water systems on some apple trees we planted by the barn.

Felix and Sasha came by for dinner bringing salad, with spicy nasturtium blossoms and fat, homegrown carrots. What colors.

California Historical Society and my chicken-y weekend

Got up early, early Sunday morning to take my dad over to Channel 4 to be on the morning news with Henry Tannenbaum. Henry has all kinds of interesting people on his show that he spotlights for 4 or 5 minutes who are doing art and culture things in the bay area. As you can see, Henry and Ron had a great time talking with each other. Wondering what that is on my dad's head? He fashioned homemade leather straps for all his glasses, so when he isn't wearing them on his face, he can push them up on top of his head. And all that hair? It's a beautiful soft golden red. And at 91 years old, as he says, if you've got it, flaunt it. He cuts it himself, btw, in the bathroom mirror with a pair of huge old steel scissors.

Ron has several photos up in a show at the California Historical Society, Hobos to Street People: Artists' Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present, runs through August 15. There's a panel this Thursday he'll be participating in from 6-8 pm: Photographers Documenting Homelessness from the New Deal to Today with Philip Adam, and Robert Terrell, moderated by Melanie Light. Come by if you can! It's going to be a really interesting evening.

The chicks are growing. They aren't just little fuzz balls anymore. They're getting real feathers. They are pretty mellow birds, luckily. i carry them around as much as possible on the theory that if they get used to human hands and smells, they'll be tamer adult chickens.

Tom and our son Felix spent a day working on the deluxe chicken palace. I'll post pictures soon. It even has a glass skylight! It is going up right next to the two huge greenhouses Felix and Sasha built. The chickens are going to live at Felix and Sasha's -- which is also my parents. My parents live in a huge old Berkeley house, with one of my sisters and her husband, and Felix and Sasha, who have a whole floor to themselves. And an enormous garden, surrounded by oak and redwood trees, where the chickens will be able to go out every day and scratch around.

Just how long does it take from idea to picture book?

The inspiration for Big Cat Pepper was my then-seven year old son, Willie, grabbing handfuls of rose petals and scattering them into the open grave on top of his favorite pet, Ratty Three.

Now a grad student in Evolutionary Ecology, Will has just co-published a paper in the ISME Journal: "Rhizobitoxine producers gain more poly-3-hydroxybutyrate in symbiosis than do competing rhizobia, but reduce plant growth

William C Ratcliff and R Ford Denison
Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Legume sanctions against rhizobia that fix less nitrogen should exert a strong selection for more beneficial genotypes of rhizobia, but strains providing little host benefit are common.... ISME Journal advance online publication, 9 April 2009; doi:10.1038/ismej.2009.38."

That's how long.

Big Cat Pepper, wonderful reviews, and my beloved cat Coyote

The package hit the front porch with a thud. Penny barked. And here it was: Big Cat Pepper, the real book. Warm apricot-yellow endpapers, beautiful, heart-warming illustrations by Lauren Castillo, so gorgeous on their final paper, soft and creamy and inviting, desolation of olive green nights lightening to spring-green grass under a lemon-yellow sunrise.

Two great reviews have already come in. One from Kirkus: "...Castillo’s mixed-media illustrations of a rural, single-parent family are smudgily warm and comforting. The entirely secular explanation of death and the fact that there is no substitution pet added to the family in the end make this a very worthwhile addition to bibliotheraputic literature for the young."

I love "...smudgily warm..." Yum!

And from Booklist: "Because of their loyalty and innocence, the death of a pet is especially poignant, and Partridge gets it just right with this tale of a boy and his beloved cat, Pepper...."

The next day, our beloved cat Coyote died. As a hungry barn kitten, she'd somehow pulled her trapped leg out of the metal teeth of a coyote trap set by a sheep farmer. She arrived at my sister's house in the country, one back leg partly degloved of skin and fur. We nurtured her back to a healthy, sweet cat and had her for 17 years.


Tom dug her a grave in the backyard by the fence, right near her favorite mousing grounds (still a barn cat at heart, she was a great mouser). We covered her with dirt and sprinkled on rose petals, carefully watched by Penny.

Penny put her head deep in the grave, sniffed and sniffed, then settled back and pushed crumbling dirt into the grave with her nose, over and over again. I've never seen her bury anything -- no bone, no treasure, nothing.

Sleep well, Coyote.

Obama Inauguration Day at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza

In 1962 my mother kept us all out of school and we walked up to the UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium to hear President Kennedy speak. I was ten, and we sat on the wooden benches under the open sky with his voice ricocheting from the loudspeakers. I don't remember what he said, but I remember he was laid on my heart like a patch that day, a man who made people laugh and cheer when he spoke. A man important enough that my shy and reclusive mother would brave crowds to make sure we saw him.

Since then, my heart has been patched and repatched, in love and in anger and sorrow, often within sight of the campus, inside the surging sounds from the carillon bells. I went to school at UC Berkeley, was tear-gassed in Sproul Plaza, graduated as the first student with a degree in Women's Studies. My husband Tom and I had our night-before wedding party at the Faculty Club, with our family gathered to celebrate us. I still frequently walk to campus, my library card in hand, loving the smell of the halls, the echoing sound of chairs scraping back from study tables, the quiet rustling of paper as people turn pages and scribble and type and sigh.

This morning Tom and I headed for Sproul Plaza to watch Obama's inauguration under a wide open sky. The lovely circle of completion: another president who can inspire us like we haven't had since JFK, another president already laid on my heart, just like on so many other American hearts. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of us gathered together to cheer and weep and dare to hope he can guide our weary, crashing world to a better place.

Oh Lord, What a Morning. The sun clears the building as Michelle walks out.

Obama speaks.


Everyone listens, and this man stands and sings the Star Spangled Banner, start to finish.

As things wound down and the crowd began to drift away, this woman, Lady Liberty, remained perfectly still and watched until Bush took off in the helicopter. Then she turned quietly and walked away, witness to the moment.