This is Delphinium decorum, the coastal blue larkspur. A swath of them bloomed along a seepy slope on our hike today, along with poppies and fiddlenecks, buttercups and lupines and a white papaveraceous plant whose name I’m forgetting (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) and blue-eyed grass and owls’ clover and the blazing epaulettes of the red-winged blackbirds as they bent the tules near double.
Becky and I hiked apart much of the way, she upset over her job, I over mine. Wind cut through our clothes and the occasional long stretch of mud wetted our shins. We would fume, then remember, and look up sheepishly smiling at the other.
Ten miles of walking leaves a lot of room for both sulking and smiling. We chatted about the flowers, about our pets and our damned jobs, and Becky said pointedly twice that we needed to save money so that one of us could quit. (It isn’t going to be me, and if she quit her public school teacher job and went to work sewing t-shirts in a Chinatown sweatshop we’d gross more per annum.) We passed a few miles sketching out plans for a Lifetime TV movie about a teacher who snaps, doing away with her students one by one. Working title: “No Child Left.” ("Class Size Reduction” deemed “too wonky.")
Clouds scutted in from the south, gesticulated and glowered, then moved on; one after another for five hours. After a long time we reached the truck. I put my pack into the bed just as the raindrops started at last to fall. A quarter mile down the road and the skies burst open.
