Category Archives: family

Pacific in Pacific Grove

family, nature, travel, wildflowers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Seaside paintbrush

Counting my dear sons’ wives, which I very thankfully do, I now have five daughters. It’s sad to think how I spent several years complaining that I didn’t birth more children; during that time I never anticipated the familial wealth that in-laws can bring.

Point Lobos

In an effort to enjoy our family friendships we women spent a few months planning our first mother-daughter holiday. When continents stretch between, the grandchildren have pressing needs, and the young women pressing schedules, so it’s a tribute to our devotion that we even tried. In the end, only half of us, two daughters and I, were able to get together recently, on California’s Central Coast.

Seaside daisy

Pacific Grove was our home base. Every morning I woke with the feel of long-ago visits to my Aunt Margaret, whom I knew mostly in my teens. She lived in Carmel in a cream-colored house with white carpets, under a sky that was often white with fog or overcast, and the mood was so quiet. The sort of quiet that is filled with the sound of surf and the cry of sea gulls.

Our gathering of last week was a quiet group, too, in spite of our much talking, which I imagine was still on the low end of charts that might be made of all-women excursions, as we often stood in silent wonderment over our surroundings.

In our Keen boots — really, no one one had coordinated our foot attire, contrary to all appearances — we walked a lot, up and down the hills of Pacific Grove and Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea. And we looked at flowers and trees and birds and tried to identify them all.

Flower is California hedge nettle
ceanothus in Pacific Grove

On Point Lobos especially the sweet smell of ceanothus blooms was filling the air, along with the buzzing of bees who were crazy over it. We liked the challenge of photographing busy bees. They liked how the pollen was offering itself to them on vast fields of stamens.

Carrying great loads of pollen
Protea behind Cannery Row
Lucky for us that Mrs. Bread showed us a Protea in her garden our first afternoon, so that we could guess their identities when we kept seeing them everywhere from then on. The genus includes a huge variety of forms that are really striking. I came home to find that our bottlebrush tree is not a Protea, however. Proteas seem to have come originally from the southern hemisphere, but they definitely like growing on this patch of the globe.

Behind Cannery Row murals have been painted along the bike path, evoking the culture and history that John Steinbeck depicted in his books. I liked browsing this lane better than the touristy shops which carry, as Joy pointed out, all the same stuff from China that touristy shops all over the nation carry.

Oh, except maybe the otter dolls. I was expending so much mental energy drumming up buyer’s resistance that I didn’t even think about how I could have taken a picture of one. There were three stuffed toy versions of the captivating creatures that we watched lolling and playing in Monterey Bay, and I can’t find one online that is as cute, to post here.

fava plant in bloom
While in Monterey it was quite fun to revisit the Cooper-Molera House so soon after our last visit, but long enough that the plants were further along in spring, as this fava bean plant with its black-and-white blossoms. There were even little bean pods forming lower on the plant.
Another Protea
cistus
Pacific Grove is called Butterfly Town, because of the Monarch butterflies that migrate there every year. I’ve long had a vicarious and romantic attachment to the place thanks to the book by Leo Politi, and now it has become a direct relationship with the same feelings.
Updated adobe cottage in Pacific Grove

The weather we experienced was surprisingly mild in spite of frequent short showers of drizzle or light rain — but I might find it difficult to stay long where the sun doesn’t show itself often enough to keep the spirits up.

Flowers seem to glow more vividly under grey skies, though, and that makes up for the drear a little bit. People paint their houses in cheerful colors. And peace and quiet count for a lot.

The Pacific Ocean is not always peaceful, but it was fairly calm this week. The tsunami from Japan didn’t make a big wave here. You can’t see them, but two otters are playing in this picture. And peace and serenity and love were all playing some quiet music in our hearts.

Scouting Around

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It was great fun to follow little Scout around the yard for an hour while he explored his world. I took a slew of pictures trying to catch something of the Serious Scientist and Joyful Naturalist I was observing.

He is so good at walking on icy snow…I wonder how it feels to be so close to the surface and have a short toddly stride. Evidently pretty secure. Walking on snow was part of the adventure he was enjoying, and he never once slipped.

 

Scout is also an expert at recognizing a crabapple, even if it has lain under the snow for a few months and doesn’t look like its former self. He can get one into his mouth, avoiding the large piece of gravel that is also in his fist, and calmly remove the pit, enjoying what little “fruit” was left. I was a bit concerned when he picked up a specimen that had decomposed to an ugly state, but after squeezing it through his fingers for half a minute he rejected that one.

The main project of the hour was picking up stones, acorns, pine cones and sticks. He’s not yet at the age when sticks are preeminent, but he did carry a few for a while, which meant that his capacity for rocks was less.



But when he found the field of acorns, the sticks were dropped.The question is, how many acorns can fit in one little fist?

In spite of the sun, I’m sure his hands felt pretty cold after splashing in little puddles and patting ice, but he was oblivious to anything that would distract him from his Purpose.

However, Grandma did feel the chill, so we went inside and took a few acorns with us.

 

My Valley Oak

family, history, trees,

My father bought 30 acres of land with oranges and lemons growing on it, and no house. There was a large oak tree looming above a spot where a house might have stood in the past. And he thought that the tree was pretty much grown up, so he planted a house nearby.

This is the oak under which I lived after we moved in, until I went away to college about twelve years later. Only twelve years? Those formative years have an impact far beyond their numerical value, and that tree has to be my favorite tree, because there hasn’t been a particular beloved tree between then and now that I can bring to mind.  I realized that this week when Elizabeth was telling about her favorite trees and I wondered if I had one.

In these first pictures, taken decades after I had married, the tree had recently been trimmed with great care and patience by a tree man who was in love with it. I was amazed at its beauty and took a lot of pictures.

At that point the oak had grown mightier than my father ever expected, and its limbs were leaning dangerously over the house. My father said that if he had known how big it would get, he wouldn’t have built the house so close to it. At least one large limb had to be cut off to protect the house, and the whole tree was refreshed and lightened by being pruned all over.

When I was growing up I only knew that it was an oak tree. If someone told me it was a Valley Oak I didn’t remember. People in our family rarely talked about the birds and trees in those days. I didn’t know those were mourning doves I used to hear every evening as I was lying in my bunk. But one year a flock of bright orioles lived in our tree for a few weeks and we heard some talk then.

When I used to play under the tree, this is the way I mostly saw it, as a thick trunk. There was no reason to look up into the branches, excepting the times when orioles visited, and it was usually so messy up there that some twigs or dirt or even tree frogs might fall in your face.

oak galls/balls in winter

Yes, more than once we had veritable plagues of tiny tree frogs swarming in the branches, on the trunk, hopping all over the ground under the leaves. When we walked under the tree they jumped onto our legs as though they were little trunks.

And our tree suffered many times from all varieties of galls, the most common of which we just called “oak balls.”

Always Daddy had stacks of firewood under the canopy of branches, usually fruit wood that he’d gleaned from neighboring orchards that were being replaced. But here we see it is logs cut from our tree’s own pruned limbs.

One year my grandma gave me a little tent for my birthday and I set it up under the tree to lie in the summer long, reading comics and books and sucking on cubical cinnamon suckers.

Doghouses were common at the base of the trunk, and one year we had a banty chicken coop there. The basketball hoop that my father built for me was shaded by this tree friend. And as I think more about the shade it provided, I wonder how much money was saved on cooling bills because we had a partial shield from the burning Central Valley sun.

In his last years my father would walk out under the tree to the edge of the orange grove and scatter grain for a family of wild pheasants that visited. You can tell that this picture was taken pre-trim. One pheasant can barely be seen between the rows of trees.

One view of our tree that we didn’t have as children was from above. But some time after we were all grown up an aerial photographer took the photo below and came to the door after the fact to present his wares. Of course Daddy couldn’t say no. As he studied the picture he could see his spray rig in the driveway and him bending over it. And soon each of us kids received a gift of a framed picture of our childhood home — and my favorite tree.

Clean Money

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My grandmother had grown up on a farm where she was probably comfortable with animals and “good clean dirt.” But when we knew her she had lived in the city for a long time (not The City of San Francisco, though) and was comfortable with us washing our hands quite frequently, especially if we had handled “dirty money,” i.e., all money. She wore gloves quite a bit, for different purposes. It’s very easy for me to pull up the image of her holding her soft leather driving gloves that she had just removed, which kept the fragrance of her warm and soft hands.

When my sisters and I visited her from our farm in the Central Valley she would take us across The Bay Bridge to The City. We dressed up in our finest and made a day of it, though I have no memory of just what we did there. Today I was made to wonder if she took us to the Saint Francis Hotel for lunch, because she would have liked the fact that they keep their money clean.

As a proper housewife I appreciate the use of soap and water and the impulse to keep things fresh and sanitary for the health of my family. Probably even the saint for whom the hotel is named wouldn’t have turned down a gift of soap. Or money, whether clean or dirty.