Sunshine Days

Today was a beautiful day, among the rarest I have seen in awhile, and certainly the most magnificent since I moved here. The air was still, full of fond fragrances–cedar wood, daffodils, the sweet scent of newly-cut grasses. The sun, gleaming generously from its high perch after months of rain and cold.

The wonderful thing about having a little house on the corner of 8th and F is that it is a 20 minute walk from campus–thirty if I’m feeling extra pensive. The City of Davis is unlike any other city I have lived. It has an atmosphere of neighborly safety that perhaps is matched only by the protection I felt growing up on a military base; it is a social town, and artsy, at that. Of course, there are negatives, but perhaps I will save that for another article some day. Davis is, single-handedly, among the more beautiful places I have lived in my vast recollection of cities and states, towns and places (and yes, there’s been a lot). But it’s a different beauty than one might suspect; it’s not the serendipitous antiquity that I felt in Tuscany, nor is it a breath-taking aroma of a silent landscape unmarred by man, such as the wildernesses of Alaska and even the mountain refuges of Arkansas. Indeed it is something more hushed and unnoticed. Beyond the sirens that resound periodically (as in any other place; I’m convinced there isn’t a landscape now without them with the “progression of man”), there is a silent cry of nature wanting to be seen. And the people here are desperate for her, too. The beauty of nature, that is.

I love my walks to and from campus and home. I purposely try and take a different route each time, walking through the streets that seem unlike the cursed Vacaville-suburbia that I have come to despise in my absence of it. It moves like something other, it feels and has the appearance of something more rustic. The houses are all dislike from one another; there are no track houses. The houses here are old and tell silent stories while they shift in their foundation. Occasionally, if one looks for them, there are dirt-paved alleys that cut through the backyards below a canopy of draping elms, removing the need for rounding a full street-corner. These passages are like mini-journeys into the cradle of the day’s beauty; for they are always silent and bedecked with floral jewels.

When I walk through these rustic alleyways I am reminded of my father who has been gone for quite some time, though it feels like so recent a loss. When I was a little girl I remember my father had an uncanny fondness for gardening. I say uncanny not because of skill but of heart. It wasn’t something that he focalized in a small garden behind the house, for in those days, our house was but a revolving icon, not of a home. Instead my father found a seceret garden on base in which a handful of men would come and tend their own patch of earth, tucked away behind a flock of dense trees like a green cape, found only through the passage of a gravel road which hopped under the tires, popping the bottom of the car as we road over it. I remember the sound of the tiny rocks as they skipped below us in our old, rickety 70’s van which smelled like mold on the hot days. But those things were trivial then, they didn’t matter. That journey superseded all things superficial. It was like a sweeping, secret passage outside the population of people who swirled magnanimously at all times–it was our secret place where, at times, only my brother, father, and I would be.

My dad would pack some drinks and snacks on the fortunate days–or perhaps it was my mother working diligently and faithfully behind the scenes as always. My father, a true artist in his mind, would often grow unassuming and forget the plain things. In the vastness of his thoughts, the ordinary found no place. This mold I would come to understand only in my later years, most intimately after his death, for it is a legacy that he has gifted me. What would agitate me in those days about my father’s character I look back and see were of characteristic gold–a man such as he is duplicated rarely, and is of great fortune in a literary sense, for he is so enigmatic that his pure creativity was often overshadowed by the confusion cast by others around him.

The heat in those days was, at times, unbearable, forcing even reptilian-me to seek shade in the moldy van’s refuge. My father would take off his shirt and toil in the dirt bare-chested, the sun beginning to bring about the redness in his Italian skin. His black hairs became drenched in his own sweat, causing the surface of his skin to glisten like sculpture made of ice.

We had the last plot. The very end. It was the best in my opinion, but I think it allowed my father a vantage point which burdened him, for now he could look with one single glance down the plots adjacent, lined up in their magnitude, urging him to do the same if not better. We would have to drive past the tall vines of tomatoes each time we came. To what I felt maybe encouraged my father to keep going really, I think, saddened him. His quest was endless in life–that of finding significance and worth within himself. It plagued him.

On the radio were always the sounds of Dion and the Beach Boys. He would sing the songs he knew by heart with a gusto that outmatched the original artists themselves, his harmonies resounding through the garden’s valley in a purely melodic ring. My father was a wonderful singer. I loved to hear him sing.

“What are you planting?” I would ask, offering little support (for I was a hibernating girl who did not like to be out in nature all the time; the bugs in the soil terrified me).
“Carrots,” he would say with a beaming smile, gesturing in a way that showed his urging hunger. “And tomatoes.”
“Gross,” I would respond, to which he would either dismiss entirely or tease, depending on the joviality and determination in his mood. He knew all too well that his daughter had a dreadful disdain of vegetables of nearly every sort.
“They’re good for ya,” he would undoubtedly say, to which I would take my turn either dismissing or teasing depending on the shade of my mood.
But usually I just watched him, sorting the mounds of dirt and placing seeds so fragilely within. At times he would ask me to help, to which I would agree but feel overwhelmed by the rules of soil-to-seed ratio, fearing that in my hands lied the ability to abort growth and bring about a sort of impotence of new life. Yet he would encourage me and continue to teach with a gentle hand and a soft voice.

My father.

At times our little tucked away garden would bear us vegetables, but mostly, the southern July heat would be too much. Some times many days and even weeks would pass before going back to our garden… in our negligence, or perhaps defeat, it all eventually died. It’s not that we wanted it to–even in my dislikes did I wish for that.

It makes me think, initially, of the things which we plant in life coming to an end, such as lives of loved ones–but then it also makes me think of the wonderful experience of the act of planting, for the memories in that hot musical garden come rushing over me like a sentimental flood, and it is not remorse of tragedy I feel, but of joy and rebirth. It is among the very favorite of my childhood memories. The seeds which were planted in those days of my youth have not all died. They have flourished in unique ways to become trees cemented firmly in the ground. What my father, the heart-full gardener, always ascribed to in effort, has not been in vain. Indeed it has all been of unmatched and highly-significant worth.

And hey, I even eat my vegetables now.