In January 2014, the four of us were flying home from a Christmas trip to Australia. We transited in Auckland and I called my mother, who had seen her oncologist while we were in the air. “He said that it is in my stomach, in a knot. He said that this is the end.” Whenever I fly through Auckland now I can feel it, my knees buckling, my 8yo and 11yo trying to hold me up. We flew on to San Francisco where I held my beloved and very elderly cat Bebe while I booked my own flight back to Australia. I left Jeremy to take care of those scared little kids, and I never saw Bebe again.

When I got to Barraba Mum had been set up in the palliative care room at the local hospital, which had its own lounge with foldout sofas. My brothers and her friends would come and go. We played mah jongg for hours. I curled up with Mum on the sofa and we watched the Last of the Summer Wine on my laptop. Her friends had made her a beautiful patchwork quilt and we wrapped ourselves in it. There was so much joy. The nurses said it sounded like we were having a family holiday, and we were. We told a lot of jokes. One morning I asked her what she wanted for breakfast: “Gin and tonic.” “Coming right up!”

I sometimes say that Mum went nova. In four weeks she poured out twenty years of unconditional love. When Bebe died, Mum held me and said, “It’s okay to cry.” I said “Mum, if I start crying, I’ll never stop.” She said, “Yes you will.” I think about that all the time.

When she died, the nurses let me help wash her body, and I cried, and I kissed her cooling flesh. It was the honor of my life to attend at my mother’s death. I think of the radiance of her love, and I think of my clarity in the moment. Let me carry that grace in my heart and hands all the days of my life.

I tested positive for Covid on Sunday, my first time. The last of my family to get it, nearly five years into this global panny-D in which we find ourselves, I thought I was doing the tests wrong.

I’d been run-down since Thursday. Cortland Street was closed to traffic for the first time but I missed Halloween. On Saturday afternoon I could only ride my bike as far as Potrero del Sol, to look at the Day of the Dead altars and the squares of the AIDS quilt in the crisp autumn sun. Marigolds and grief. I cried for the lost boys who should have been my queer elders.

By Saturday night my temperature was 100.6 and it took some effort to breathe. When I finally called my doctors on Sunday, wheezing, they sent me to the emergency room. In the friendly robot taxi I wept for the people who went to the ER with Covid in 2020, and who said goodbye to their families through iPads, and who died. Me, I had x-rays which ruled out pneumonia, was given paxlovid and all the steroids and came home to quarantine in the attic.

Election day is a more reliable trauma trigger even than the week in which both my parents died. I spent the morning text banking in Michigan, then I howled all through therapy, deep, racking sobs for all that we have lost. Afterwards the cats insisted on taking me out into the garden, where the linnets and phoebes and hummingbirds and crows had various constructive things to say.

I took portraits of the sticky monkeyflower and hummingbird sage and Douglas iris. I chatted to my sister in outback NSW. I scrubbed out the bird-feeder with hot water and soap. That’s about all I had in me, and now I’m back in my college kid’s bed, looking over Excelsior and San Bruno Mountain as the sun sets into the Pacific. May all beings know peace.

Just after I got home from Tokyo the seasonal switch got flipped. (Oh, yeah, I had a work trip to Japan. I had a wood-paneled hotel room like a cabin with tiny lounge chairs around a tiny table and a delicious bakery downstairs, and I did my work things and then walked for miles and miles through the city like a character from a William Gibson novel or Hayao Miyazaki film. I was very lonely but it was excellent. Maybe that version of me is real and she is imagining my family and my garden and my menagerie in California. Anyway.) I rode Lenny in the late summer heat wave and stopped at Canyon Market on the way home, after dark. People were buying firewood and persimmons had come into season and there was a chill in the air. Fall.

We moved here in April of 98, an unusually wet spring, and it wasn’t until I drove back from the playa that September, crossing the Bay Bridge at 3am, filthy, exhausted and happy, that I saw the lights of San Francisco and my heart said: “home.” Another year I remember unlocking the door to our house on Alabama Street and feeling the twilight chill and thinking of apple pie. The city is at its most beautiful in October, when the drawn-out summer wrestles with the brilliant dark, and loses.

Election years are especially wrenching in this respect, when the encroaching cold threatens to swallow up all the bitterly-fought-for, hard-won concessions to our collective humanity. It sucks to have to beg for our lives every four years. I have to drag myself out of the doomscroll with an act of will. It helps to think about deep time. Turtle Island, I say to myself, and the bay fills in with prairie that stretches out to the Farallones, where smilodon and direwolves hunt camels and rhinos and woolly mammoths. It also helps to be completely in the moment. I turn on the Merlin app and try to see the cedar waxwings singing in the lillipilli tree. I think about Ed Yong’s powerful xoxo talk, and how he counter-balanced his pandemic grief by paying attention to lazuli buntings and the tide.

It was high tide at Heron’s Head this weekend, the path stretching out into the bay like a road to the land of the dead. I walked along the path furious. Why does it feel like I was put on this earth to love things, only to have them ripped from my hands? Why do I get a ringside seat to the sixth extinction, and why do I have to feel it so deeply? A sardonic voice in my head, maybe my mother’s, said, “Because you’re good at it.” I thought of that edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with the Roman column crumbling to ruins. (1946, oof.) I thought (again) of the lyric from The Mountain Goats song Fresh Tattoo: “all of this will disappear in the twinkling of an eye.” I’m sentient stardust witnessing the heat death of the universe, and I’m grateful, so grateful, for every bit of beauty and grace.

Me, in possession of new riding gloves: We can prance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind, cause your friends don’t prance and if they don’t prance well they’re no friends of mine. It’s safe to prance

Jeremy, very seriously: It is NOT safe to prance. Not without hats!

It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.

Last night the Saturn V looked very graceful, suspended by a cross fire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky. Today it is a machine again

He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.

We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.

I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

“The problem with Challenger wasn’t the machine. The machine was trying to talk to us, but we didn’t listen.”

It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here how much we start to miss nature. In the future there will be a word for the specific kind of nostalgia we feel for living things.

Human intelligence is not a gift. It’s an occasionally useful plague.

We wouldn’t exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock that plowed itself into the ancient Yucatán. Both stories are present in that moment. The rise and the fall are inextricable.

Jeremy flew to Oslo on the solstice and we are all trying to be very brave about it. He sent a picture of a gorgeous 1am twilight. But this morning I got two more Heath Ceramics salad plates in another suburban parking lot transaction, so who is the real adventurer here, hm?

The last couple of rides on Lenny I have been struggling to level up, to lighten my contact, to make my signals imperceptible, so it was pretty nice today to be able to cue the trot invisibly, by flexing my inside hip. The hard part – one of the hard parts – about riding is getting the timing right. (Other hard parts include Paying For It and Not Falling Off.) I know the theory but theory gets you almost nowhere. Lenny is alive and sparkly and opinionated and I need to be able to react to him in near-real time, and it’s only after four years of very patient and consistent training that I can be strong and quiet enough in the saddle for him to hear me. I adore him. What a pony.

I drive back from the summery oak-savannah hills to into a curtain of grey fog. The garden is too windy to sit in most afternoons, but even here the green grass has turned pale gold. Mountain garland and wine cups and farewell-to-spring have taken over from the globe gilia and tidy tips. Their gaudy colors mean it’s almost time for Pride, and then Jeremy will be home, and then maybe Karl the Fog will ease off a little and let us have some summer evenings on the deck, with a little Hendricks and tonic.

We have the contractors back in to rip out the Mamie Eisenhower pink bathroom (I know, what barbarians, but it was leaking) and replace it with Fireclay tile and a shower under the skylight. Opening the walls revealed, as expected, eldritch horrors, most notably that the upper staircase was supported by an angled 2×6 resting on its narrowest edge.

I’m no expert but that ain’t right. While the house undergoes what’s essentially a heart transplant, the main level is a carnival maze of plastic walls with zippered doors. We’re still working from home, camping in the kitchen, on the deck and in the garden.

Luckily it’s spring and the garden is a little ridiculous, unphotographable. The box elders and grapevine are back with a vengeance, velvet green leaves casting dappled shade. The sticky monkey flower, purple and hummingbird sages are in full bloom and the meadow is a riot of poppy, tidy tips, Chinese houses, flax, globe gilia, bird’s eye gilia, the last of the five spot and baby blue eyes, Douglas iris and mountain garland. Fluffy black bees as big as your thumb buzz from poppy to poppy with panniers full of emergency-orange pollen. It’s gaudy, excessive.

Because we’re further up the hill than the Mission, closer to the edge of the fog-tide, it’s often windy back here, and I’m aware of the atmosphere as a restless, oceanic thing, always in motion. The bathroom will be tiled in celadon and silver-blue, with a terracotta sink. Earth, meadow and air. Opening the walls of my own heart reveals, as expected, eldritch horrors, but what a privilege it is to rebuild this lovely old home, make it sound and safe for the next fifty years.

I know what it feels like to fear that there might not be many meaningful strategies left.

We act like our preferences matter, because that is the job late capitalism has given us.

Hyacinth recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that civilization has a price, and a high one.

In such hours the great roaring, indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organization for mocking at his poverty

Everything you hold onto too tightly will die in your hands.