1) Rumors to the contrary, I am also experiencing the flora and fauna of Palm Springs. The dominant feature of my hosts’ home is a type of oak tree I’ve never heard of before, a silk oak or silky oak. There are actually two here, but the one closest to the house is less than half the size of the other.
2) Ravens are the dominant bird life, swooping about and cawing and making me hope there’s no male child in the neighborhood named Damien. Yesterday morning I saw a smaller and sleeker bird with a hooked beak perch in the silky oak, which was identified to me as a Cooper’s hawk. Quite a beautiful bird in silhouette. When it moved into the tree foliage, three lesser goldfinches popped out of the top of the tree, flying away with alarmed twitters.
3) Eggs Benedict is one of my favorite “special breakfast” dishes, and my host’s homemade eggs Benedict pole vaults to the top of the list.
4) One of my hosts gave me a choice of activity for the midday: estate sales, or a light hike through the Andreas Canyon. I chose the latter — estate sales are everywhere, but there’s only one Andreas Canyon — but first, drive-bys of beautiful mid-century homes in the Deepwell neighborhood. Everything so white or natural stone, with a brightly-painted door and house numbers in a Neutraface font. Driving through one veddy veddy exclusive subdivision we saw two white French Provincial chairs near a front door, and I heard myself say, “Finalmente, curves!”
4a) In all this beautiful town, only one house made me raise my eyebrows, surrounded by brick walls of battleship gray and with a bright blue door. The wrong sort of blue. It looked so marine for a desert town.
5) Driving and hiking through Andreas Canyon brought the kinds of new sights and sounds I have been craving during the pandemic. Barren landscapes of green tumbleweed and heat, narrow river oases of gigantic palms, cliffs that look like medieval parapets made of faces. And many opportunities to twist an ankle on this one-mile circular trail, but we emerged unscathed.
5a) Note: Fine dirt on rocks makes them slippery.
5b) We also noticed one little cairn of four or five flat stones that a hiker had constructed. Noticing a sign at the end that hikers were warned not to do this made me glad we saw only one.
6) The afternoon brought my first Palm Springs pool party, a unique local form of hospitality that is basically a waterborne cocktail party. Because shade is an ever-present consideration, we were fortunate that the pool was in shade during that period of the afternoon. There was a great deal of tossing the ball for Gizmo, who took great joy in fetching it and returning to drop it into the pool. Sometimes he would manage to get it back, otherwise he’d make a bit of noise for attention.
6a) They say no one in Palm Springs drinks gin, but I must say I enjoyed my gin and tonic. Also the magnificent homemade guacamole.
7) Pizza at home for dinner, and by 9 PM I had fallen into bed sawing gourds.
