Celia’s Rainbow Gardens

A story is told in Quartzsite, Arizona, of a little girl named Celia Anne Winer.  This community holds the story of her short life close to their hearts – memorialized in a town park named Celia’s Rainbow Gardens. 

Joanne and Paul Winer never expected to have a child.  In fact Joanne had been told she never would have one.  Then at the age of 36, Joanne heard the miracle words, “You are pregnant!”  But her miracle baby would come into the world prematurely at 23 weeks gestation, weighing only 1¼ pounds with a tiny head the size of a lemon.  Never had a baby this size survived here.  But Celia fooled everyone.  She survived, thrived and grew into a very intelligent little girl.

Celia memorized books that were read to her by the age of 2½.  When she learned to read, her quest for knowledge was insatiable.  She loved the world, animals and other children – taking concern for all of these upon her little shoulders. 

Then at the mere age of 8½, Celia fell ill – the victim of a viral infection that ultimately infected her heart.  Her concerned parents took her to the hospital where she soon lost her battle against the infection in 1994. 

Joanne and Paul longed to create a memorial for their little daughter.  Joanne had a vision she wished to create.  First she had all of Celia’s classmates make individual handprints in clay tiles.  Then she commissioned the building of a circular wall where the tiles were mounted in a portion of a town park.  Here also a smaller wall was built naming the spot “Celia’s Rainbow Gardens” bearing the last photo of Celia taken at her school a few days before she fell ill. 

The community has embraced the park, creating a memorial garden for its residents.  No one is buried here.  But in this place anyone may create a remembrance of someone they love, even a beloved pet.  Chimes sing in the wind swinging from tree branches.  Figurines grace cleared patches of desert.  Native plants are planted, nurtured, and watered here.  Whatever creative expression seems fitting to an individual may be designed within the section of this park designated as Celia’s Rainbow Gardens.  It is charming.

Only the sounds of the wind crossing the desert, or tinkling chimes, break the silence.  One can imagine Celia wandering from one bench to another in the light of the moon, or when the park is empty, admiring what has been done in her memory.

The park is a nice place to visit while in Quartzsite.  Next time I will bring a cup of coffee and sit with her awhile.

Ghost of Hotel Del

Built around a central courtyard garden of tropical palms, shrubs, and flowers, west of San Diego Bay on Coronado Island, the Hotel Del Coronado is one of the few remaining wooden, Victorian style hotels to be found in North America.  The hotel is the second largest built in this style still in existence today.

When construction began in March, 1887, all of the essential building elements and utilities had to be imported, or were constructed on the strand.  Prior to this point in time, the strand had been occupied solely by coyotes and rabbits.  Fresh water was piped in from San Diego, lumber was imported from Eureka, California while an electrical plant was constructed on-site.  The electrical plant would eventually supply all of Coronado Island.  People and supplies were ferried across San Diego Bay once a wharf and dock were completed.

I stand at the western side of the huge complex.  The hotel is situated directly on the beach with unobstructed views across the Pacific.  Crashing waves creep up the hotel’s sandy beach, as a breathtaking, crimson sunset favors the hotel’s west facing windows.  Through windows along circular shaped walls, a grand ballroom gazes out to the sea above me.  A veranda before me, furnished with intimate clusters of seating around cocktail tables positioned beneath propane heaters  to ward off the chill, beckons to those returning from the water’s edge.  Laughter rises from the lounge behind me with the scent of a cigar drifting on the evening air.  I see patrons sipping a cocktail and overhear discussions of dinner plans or accounts of adventures of the day.  Hotel Del Coronado is preparing for evening.

“Have you heard the ghost?” asks one of my companions.

“No,” I respond skeptically.

“Oh it is true.  I heard her last night.  First a thumping, then a sound like shuffling cards.  Absolutely startling!  And I guarantee no one else was in the room with me!”

I smile.  The ghost supposedly lives on the third floor.  A jilted woman who came to the Del to meet a lover who never arrived.  She committed suicide over being abandoned and proponents claim she haunts the hotel to this day, waiting for him to return.

The elevator operator who has worked in the hotel for thirty-five years swears the story is true.  I never hear her during our stay.  But the floors creak and doors slam sometimes in the middle of the night.

Might we imagine this tale could be true?

Watching Waves

     

     El Niño is pounding the California coast with rain and wind.  During a lull in the weather, we go down to the beach in search of waves.  We are not alone.  Surfers, spectators and sea birds are all out for the show.  We stand on the bank above the rocky beach blinking at the setting sun across a golden beach.  As brave souls paddle out on surf boards to meet the onslaught of water rising before them like walls, we watch as they slip over the top of each wave to momentarily disappear into the trough beyond our vision.  Shortly, they reappear to begin their struggle again.

     Oblivious to the roaring water the surfers are battling, sea birds scuttle along the edge of each sheet of water that rises and recedes along their sandy, buffet table into which they thrust their probing beaks.  Life here unfolds as it has for eons, and with that recognition comes a serene sense of security.

     

     Below me, at the edge of the bank, extending out to the smooth golden sand are round rocks of every size and color making up the gray, rose, cream and black spectrum.  Pounded by the waves, they have been formed into their smooth shapes, and I long to clamber down the bank to collect a few.  Their presence in my possessions would yield a comforting connection to the sea I crave, whenever I find myself separated from it.  But I restrain my gathering urges.  There is no room in my mobile RV home for them.  A picture will have to do.

What The Rain Reveals

How many, if not all, memories are there waiting for the proper stimulus to bring them forth in a virtual step back in time?  The same mind and person lives within this ancient body.  Only the constraints of physical deterioration can claim the joy of being a child again, and my steps seek out puddles and broad yellow leaves in my path.

As rain storms slam into the California coast in a much needed deluge, I choose a break in the downpour to get in a walk.  This is winter in San Diego.  The temperatures are in the fifties and I enjoy being bundled up in a heavier coat.  Strolling along wet streets near a flooding creek racing through the canyon where our RV park is situated, I catch a scent of mud and water that brings me back in time to a creek running behind my childhood home.  Memories of exploring that watery channel flood my mind, and I smile.  Childhood is but a mere whiff away in my mind. 

Tree trunks with a texture like grey velvet or mottled marble intrigue me as I walk past.  Reaching out, I touch the grey strength of a towering monolith of a tree with branches beginning twenty feet above my head.  I marvel at the soft smoothness of its bark.  Wrinkles in its bark make my mind contemplate its likeness to shark skin.  These sentries seem comforting, as I walk by a row of these trees skirting the boundary of our RV Park.

In the middle of an urban world, the RV Park is sandwiched between an Interstate Highway and a railroad track.  The noise from both is endless.  Yet here, hummingbirds treat themselves to the nectar they find in the flowers of a bottle brush tree.  I walk picking out components of nature to nourish my soul, yearning to be surrounded by the quiet of a remote forest.  However there is a lesson nature imparts, if one will listen to its whispers.  Nature will find you anywhere in your world.  But only if you are willing to open your heart, your eyes and your senses.

Paying It Forward

In the RV park where we find ourselves this January, there is a man named Tim.  Friendly and outgoing, his small frame exudes an abundance of happiness in the employment position he has chosen for his later years.  He is the maintenance superintendent of the park.  He takes his job seriously, looking after the park with a passion from early in the morning, when he makes coffee for the park’s patrons, to the trailing moments of a day’s fading light.  As the sun sets over the hills rising to the west of this park, this grey bearded man in a navy blue ball cap wraps up his day with another passion - cultivating succulent plants.

Tim is a teacher, and a caretaker, specializing in the nuances of raising succulent plants.  Working with a local University, he obtains these plants when their usefulness to the students is over.  Graded on what their efforts to raise these plants has produced, the students turn their “offspring” over to Tim to carry on the effort.  This is where the real story begins.

Tim replants flats of the adopted succulents into a plethora of “pots” scoured from local flea markets and garage sales.  These pots can be anything from a coffee cup to a whimsical, ceramic caricatures of varying descriptions, or even a teapot.  Carefully drilling drainage holes into the bottom of these vessels, Tim creates the perfect new home for his succulent transplants.  Then the fun begins.
“I’m going to kidnap you,” he warns me with a mischievous grin.  “It’s okay,” he continues, “I’ve already explained my plot to your husband.”

“Well,” I think, “if my husband knows about this in advance, it must be safe.”  So I climb into Tim’s golf cart and off we drive through the RV park to a site near the park’s office.

“Pick one,” Tim offers, gesturing toward an array of succulent plants adorning the space around his travel trailer.  Potted plants are everywhere.  In the front and along the side of the trailer, plants are already re-established in pots of all descriptions.  In the rear of his RV space, are new arrivals - sitting in black, plastic, farm flats, awaiting their new homes.  “I’ll have to go to the flea market to get containers for these,” Tim explains, telling me the process he follows with the plants.  “Take one that is already transplanted!”

Making the choice is almost impossible.  “Which plant? Which pot?” I think.  They all tease me with their potential.  Finally I choose, and point to a palm tree adorned teapot harboring a succulent bearing variegated leaves in light and dark shades of green.

This will be the first and only plant in my own RV, until I can test my cat’s reaction to having living greenery in his world.  (Happily he cooperates as the days pass.  The plant is not harassed.)
Smiling, Tim lifts the pot from the ground and holds it out to me.  “Here you go.  Enjoy!”

I take it, and carefully hold my prize in my lap on the way home in his golf cart.  Along the way, Tim shares stories of others he’s “kidnapped” for this same experience.

As the days pass in the park, I observe Tim helping others.  He rescues one lady with a flat tire on her car.  He brings mulch to another couple who maintain a pristine lot, landscaped with potted, flowering shrubs near the entrance to the park.  “I’ll do anything to help them,” Tim reports, “because they keep their space so nice.”  Indeed, the entrance is incredibly inviting due to this team’s mutual, and non-required, efforts.

Tim relates how management hired him the minute they found out he was a master certified electrician.  He explains, “The part of my job I enjoy the most is training the young men who come to work with me in the park.  I ensure they progress through each new task carefully, because I want each of them to succeed.  I carefully assign jobs that will give them lifelong skills they can use anywhere.”

Tim is a man who takes what life offers, cultivating it carefully, then freely paying his experience forward to those who follow in his footsteps.  And he shares the fruits of his passion with those of us who pass briefly through his life, having no expectation other than the happiness these offerings afford him at the end of each day.  My hat is off to Tim.  The world needs more people like Tim.

Walk In The Park

    

    Kate Sessions Neighborhood Park on New Year’s Day is alive with an array of people comprising all age groups from young children and couples to retirees.  Romping dogs, of various sizes, chase balls, under barren Chestnut trees that frame a view of downtown San Diego.  From the park’s location high upon a hill in a suburb of La Jolla to the north of the city, the Pacific Ocean is visible, gleaming in the sun beneath a blue sky streaked with wispy, white clouds.

    A man sits on a bench, and quietly strums a guitar, sharing the instrument’s soothing notes with those reclining on the grass nearby.  The sun is warm and the grass is inviting to all who would choose to do nothing on this first day of the year.  This scene defines relaxation, and the park beckons souls, who stand at its edge, to linger.

     A white Labor-doodle bounds up to his owner seeking a yellow tennis ball in his master’s hand.  He wriggles and then sits as commanded, impatiently submitting to the admiring strokes of a woman’s hand on his head.  He knows it is his duty to behave, in order to receive this small token of physical comfort.  Then he is off with his owner to other distractions the tug of his leash now promises.

     A collection of fir trees, that have completed their Christmas rituals, are stacked in a wild array at one end of the parking lot.  All the sparkle and glitter of the season is missing from their boughs returning the trees to their natural state as they await their next fate.  The pending grind of a mulching machine does not break the serenity of their last moments in the sun.  What happiness and dreams did they view on their weeks of holiday glory?