The trouble with California is that it's so beautiful, it's hard to hold global warming and ecological devastation in mind as we hike through redwood forests with the perfect temperature of air and sunlight and fresh cool breeze filtering through to our skin, talking and laughing and teasing each other.

It has been a time of so much beauty I am hard-pressed to take it all in. Simple easy things like reading the Times in bed together on Sunday morning, passing the sections back and forth and getting up to make more coffee. Long walks in the parks around here.

Talking to my Dad (my stepsister has a new beau, he's a subsistance fisherman and forager in Alaska,) and my sister, and going to Rosh Hashana services with Beth and then Tashlich with Beth and Ellen at Lake Chabot, where we saw groups of other Jews (the men wore yarmulkes) doing the same thing. Tashlich is a Jewish ceremony you do on the new year--casting bread crumbs which represent your sins into a body of moving water. We don't say sins exactly--Reconstructionists don't say sins--but things you want to shed. I said mess and clutter and numbness and distraction. Plop, plop. I want to be worthy of the beauty in my life.

Later I talked to my sister and she said she did Tashlich with her kids and Eli, age 7, cast away whining. Which struck me as very sweet and poignant. And C and I agreed we will buy a mezzuzah and hang it up and have a little ritual to signify our living together. There hasn't been one on the doorposts since Alina moved out, in 2001, since it was hers and she took it.