Mary P Williams

Sierra Triptych by Mary P Williams

“Midnight at the Oasis” was a love ballad sung by Maria Muldaur extolling the virtues of love. It is now midnight in the Sierras and nothing could be more the reverse.  Here, no warm breeze to tease and tickle the bare skin but a chilly wind out of the North as my “sheik” slumbers wrapped in a down comforter.

There are “traces of romance” in the song and in my heart which remembers many years ago the gambols of young human animals experimenting with their bodies. Seventy five years down the road I cannot “slip off to a sand dune…and kick up a little dust” but I can gaze out the window at a full moon glazing the tops of the mountains and the shining billows of cloud and remember.

Four hours away are the warm sand dunes and cactus of Death Valley and fifty years in the past Maria sang with a pure, lustful voice of the pleasures of the body.  The pleasures change with age and the pleasure of lying next to my husband’s warm, sleeping body and slipping a hand onto his fragrant hairy chest brings a smile to my face. His skin is soft from the hot lavender bubble bath he took two hours ago.  What do they say? “Everything is relative.”

Rising to don a bathrobe, I bare-foot it out to the frosty grass where the moonlight is so bright that only three, or four, stars are able to send their long-ago light into my eyes. The rest are obscured by the brilliance of moonbeams.  Going out with a cup of hot tea and a blanket is a shockingly cold wake-up. It is so silent here at the top of the mountain that my ears ring without noise. Then the tiny night noises begin with the low hoot of an owl and the squeak of a mouse. In the meadow a coyote yips his presence to all of his species. We, the owl, the coyote, the mouse and me, are occupying the same moment together and it is a splendid moment, never to recur.

This moment is all the dearer with the assurance of being able to return to the warm man and his pile of covers.