She lives with her husband in Paradise, California, and teaches at California State University, Chico. We have Sunday, all of us, the first Sunday of a whole week off. We drive an hour up the dirt road to Table Mountain, to see wildflowers together, and the wild sky all around, the crazy colliding clouds. We pass trailers of old couples who've staked out their days on five acres of hillside, the whole Butte County Historical Society Annual Barbecue and plant sale, and two women by a Buick in their Sunday clothes, having a serious argument. We walk out on Table Mountain as if onto tundra, mosses, chunks of volcanic rock, flowers like constellations.
Whole families spread out picnics and try to get kites in the air.
Every grownup on this cold lava flow looks tired and alert for trouble. We grit our teeth, grin, try not to think about prices or Congress or freeways or Monday, or what we hate or fear about the jobs we have or don't. We look up at the sky, down at the flowers, the kids this very minute. In pinafore and hightops you squat and croon to the yellow stars about you, get both hands into the soaked black earth. My blossom, you are not a bit like a flower.