{The 1882 Transit of Venus reanimated. From 140 glass plate negatives* that were made in Mount Hood, California on December 6th, 1882} via
Here goes, I'm giving myself 25 minutes to write this. So if it doesn't make sense, well 25 minutes isn't much.
Back in June, Venus traversed the sun. (Or something like that.) For days I kept hearing about the Transit ofVenus and then I heard you could go and see it through a telescope at a college really far north of the valley. Black Mountain Campus of Paradise Valley College, I think. And so I thought about driving out there.
I was staying the night with my mom at Mayo Hospital, so it wasn't actually that much further up the road, maybe 15 miles. Because of the name, Black Mountain, I pictured classrooms on the side of a mountain, practically in a cave, and telescopes on a landing and professors and students and astronomy geeks all gathered around a telescope laughing and clinking glasses of champagne. And a few candles, just so people could see their way around in the very dark. Very Fin de siècle.
But then I got invited to a birthday. A birthday of a girl I secretly call a cousin-girl. She doesn't know I call her that. A cousin-girl is a girl who is so exciting to be around, that you anticipate hanging out with so much, that you feel like you felt when you were a kid and heard your older girl cousins were coming to visit and you spent all day cleaning your room and putting out your cool stuff and making signs for your bedroom door, because surely they would think that was cool.
So I wore my gold-skirted dress and gold dangly-like-chandeliers earrings and went to her birthday at a tiny little restaurant owned by a family from a far-away land. And since I got there early, I sat at the middle-most seat, because I knew I would be very fascinated to see who my cousin-girl's friends all were. And they started pouring in, this cast of characters, that's what her friends are. And the young girl who works there remembered me. This I could hardly believe. I had been there twice before and I had talked to the girl for a while, but it was back on February 27th (another time my mom was in the hospital), how could she possibly remember me?!! She had told me that her family was selling the restaurant, then they would travel, she would get to go to Bahrain and she would get to go shopping in Dubai! I think we had bonded in our first conversation in talking about wearing boots in the winter and how we were sad that soon it would be too hot to wear our fantastic boots. And about shopping for shoes. In Dubai! (Apparently the family decided not to sell the restaurant.)
So the whole time I was sitting with my cousin-girl and her cast-of-character friends eating the most delicious food on the planet, I was totally aware that out there in the universe the planet of Venus was traversing the sun. I just could picture the huge gold sun and this ultra-pink-violet planet up there, out there. I mean, I know they are always up there, out there moving, doing their thing, but I had such a sense of it. Such a strange sense of being at the center of where I am and all this crazy commotion up above, crazy, but also very all-in-a-direction, a dance of star and planet.... And then my attention would come back to the table and the food and the people at the table .... and then it would drift off again to what I knew was happening up there, out there. I am so daydreamy and oh! sometimes it's a battle to be present.
After dinner, after I drank coke and ate food and ate so much baklava I thought I would die, after I Instagrammed my dinner, I went over to the house where my cousin-girl's's friends were having her birthday cake.
There were two cakes and a pie. Two ridiculously perfect cakes and a fantastically perfect pie, that I could tell came from Lux. And a house full of amazing art and kids and pets and people so happy to celebrate my friend.
Sick on baklava, I still ate a piece of each cake and a slice of pie and took some on a plate that the woman whose house it was made for me.
Finally most of the guests were saying their goodbyes and I was silently congratulating myself that I had not left too quickly, like I so frequently do, that instead I had lingered, and just soaked in the early summer night
And I was driving away, windows down, back to the hospital, and it was hot, but not too bad, because it was still just June, and there didn't seem to be anybody on the roads, and I was driving through a magical neighborhood that I had been to a few times, (but I didn't realize that I would end up in that neighborhood and to end up there again had me all wistful at its magicalness, feeling very Late Night Maudlin Street - which is a Morrisey song and I understand this sentence probably makes almost no sense) and I was just looking at the houses and the lights, and the world was asleep, there was just nobody out and about, save for a few cats.
I drove for a while and then I just had to know if anyone had liked the photo of my food and of the cakes on Instagram, so I parked under a tree on a the side of the road to check my phone . Please tell me you do this sort of thing, too.
And a girl had left a comment on my picture of the cake. This girl I follow on Instagram who grew up on an apple farm, climbs mountains at 4-something in the morning and has a golden doodle and three kids that she calls her littles. She said she had made the cake and she didn't realize that when she was making it, that it was for my cousin-girl and that she loved my cousin-girl. Everybody does!
I left a comment saying how much I loved her cake and the pie, that I was eating some more that very minute in my jeep, that it was the most incredible cake I had ever tasted. You guys, butter cream frosting. Freaking amaaazing. And she wrote back immediately saying thank you, that she was glad I liked them.
So I'm sitting in my car conversing with a girl I had never met, but realizing that since she works at Lux I've eaten the delicious things she has made. And looking at the green-lit numbers on the clock in my jeep and realizing that Venus has completed its transit of the Sun. And loving the connectedness that comes from creating these ephemeral little pictures on Instagram and putting them out into the universe, creating postcards about my life for people I know and people I don't know.
I turn the keys in the ignition, head to the hospital, go through security and up to my mom's hospital room and lie down on my little couch bed and look at my phone and see that a girl I started following named @ofmountains has an Instagram about how the next day on her blog there will be a post about the Transit of Venus. And I can't wait to read it.
You can see her post here. And you can her online store here.
Recently I met Of Mountains. She's a desert girl who writes the prettiest words and creates the kind of images I heart like crazy - moody and science-y and still and vast.
My mom was in the hospital almost all of June and since I was never home, and I was coming and going so much, I never got around to looking at @ofmountain's post, except on my phone. Which, you know, it's kind of hard to look at a blog post on a phone...so then I after I met Of Mountains, I was reminded to look at her post.
Reading it takes me back to that early summer evening.
[This took longer than 25 minutes to write! TO BE CONTINUED!]
