Category Archives: family

Fairytales and Fireflies

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Today the boys rode their coaster bikes in the alley behind the house. No cars came while they cruised up and down. Kate brought out a plate of apple slices, and I showed her the rhododendrons that are starting to bloom and peek through the thick jungle of other flowers. It was getting hot, and soon we were back indoors.

Raj and I got to the end of Stuart Little, and the same day both boys cozied up to me after their baths while I read the last of the seven stories in Fairy Tales for Brave Children. That book contains works from the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, and other folk tale collections. Tonight we read “Vasillisa,” from Russia, which is a Cinderella sort of story, but with a doll who helps the disdained sister to do mountains of work.

I like the illustrations by Scott Plumbe. The one below is of The Selfish Giant, after he repents of his unkindness to children, and is lying in the snow covered in honor with out of season flowers. That tale is by Oscar Wilde.

It’s time for me to leave my dear family and return to California. I was really happy that a thunderstorm descended  this evening about dinnertime. Within a few minutes of the loud thunder and lightning flashes, the street out front was a river. A few of us stood on the porch to take in the show; I was amazed at how warm the air was.

But then the rain starting blowing sideways at us, and we went in again. It wasn’t long before the clouds had cleared and the “river” ran into the drains, taking the heat of the earth with it. By 9:00 we were sitting on the porch in 20-degree cooler air, and watching fireflies. What a lovely ending to my East Coast sojourn.

 

From dogwoods to biscuitroot.

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I’ve been with the family of my daughter “Pippin” for a few days, several hours farther north in California from my home; they live in the forest in the mountains, where the air right now is infused with the scent of pines and manzanitas and all the other woodland plants warming up and drying out after a wet and late winter. Every time I leave the house or get out of the car and smell it afresh, I take several breaths as deep as I can make them, trying to get the forest into my body.

There have been many opportunities to whiff aromatics in the forest and out of it, as we’ve visited higher mountain meadows and streams (Tamarack Flat), the botanical garden in Dunsmuir, the McCloud River and waterfalls, and a hilly spot from which to watch how the setting sun colored the sky above a volcanic mountain (Mt. Shasta).

I’ve gushed over the dogwoods and peonies, and marveled at the names of plants new to me, such as scorpionweed (Phacelia) and biscuitroot. We saw swaths of the carnivorous California Pitcherplant, wild onions, and the wildflower called Pretty Face.

It’s been too much for me to process, truly! Especially when every morning brings new experiences — and I haven’t even mentioned the bird songs everywhere. Pippin introduced me to a new app called Merlin, that listens to your space and tells you what birds are talking or singing nearby. And the children are older, and staying up later now in the summer, so I am spending more time with them, and not on my computer. One book we read together was Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat.

So I won’t be identifying these photos right now, but if you have any questions about them I’ll be happy to answer in the comments or in updates once I get home again. For now, I just wanted to share a little “whiff” of my adventure with you, and I’m sorry I can’t send you the birdsong and the scents. But I hope you are discovering some of those wherever you are. Enjoy!

Revisiting my Valley Oak.

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Last week I took a little hike with my friend Lucy in a nearby park, up and down the green hills among the oaks and wildflowers, and past the sheep who were grazing one area of the park. Lucy and I talked about how we don’t know the names of very many oaks. I told her about the great oak of my childhood, and I will tell about it here again, too, because it’s been about twelve years since I did:

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.

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 if it helped out the swamp cooler by giving us 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.

Her love grew strong as an oak.

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Just before I was to attend a recent baby shower, I found an article by Frederica Mathewes-Green, a sort of meditation on the power of a mother’s influence. It’s  primarily about Father George Calciu, who was “one of the great confessors of Christianity in the twentieth century. Having survived the diabolic prison experiments of Communist Romania, Fr. George went on to become an apostle to spiritual seekers in Romania and, eventually, throughout the world.”

Fr. George spent a total of more than 20 years in prison. When later he was a pastor in the United States, he became Frederica’s spiritual father and confessor.

Her thoughts about his relationship to his mother seemed perfect to share at a baby shower, so I read the whole article before gifts were opened. Putting together what she knew personally of Fr. George, and what he told her about his mother, Frederica concluded:

“I think that Fr. George’s mother planted something joyous in him, when he was still a baby in the cradle. Her love and her delight in him took root, and grew as strong as an oak tree.”

I have read many stories about people who, when as adults they found themselves in deep trouble and disorder from whatever source, for whatever reason, were sustained and preserved — and sometimes brought to repentance — by simple childhood memories of what was normal and good. Sometimes it was the thought of one sweet person, or one beautiful day, long ago embedded in their soul, like an ember still glowing. From this one bit of warmth and light they found the strength to pray and the courage to do whatever was necessary.

“We do not know where our children’s lives will lead them; they may have to undergo suffering that we will be unable to prevent. They may be somewhere far beyond our ability to help them. But in the loving care we give each day, we plant something for a lifetime. Each small thing we do can be preparing them to meet challenges that we cannot yet see.” 

Read the whole (short) article: “Father George Calciu, My Spiritual Father.”