From the back garden, a California poppy. I planted a single pot of a red variety in the front yard, and the standard blaze orange in the back a hundred feet away. The bees got to work. Some of the orange poppies in the back now bear thin red stripes, the genes of a few stray pollen grains bleeding into their petals.
Since I walked among the tule elk in April I have watched ridgelines, waiting for the shapes of animals to appear atop them. This week crossing the Golden Gate I headed into the Waldo Tunnel, the long grassy slope of the headlands above angling down toward Sausalito. I scanned the silhouette of the hill. I told myself I’d see nothing. It was as if I had thought I’d bring an animal to that brow of earth just by looking for it.
And then she was there, a pair of ears flicking a hundred feet above me, cool coyote eyes watching the traffic below her on 101.
