Category Archives: nature

To the creek and back home.

Four days in a row I’ve taken a walk along the creek path. During the two or three months previous, while I was working hard in the garden, traveling, or concentrating on other various things, I could not seem to do this most leisurely and beneficial thing for  myself. Well, I’m starting again. Autumn seems to be good for new beginnings, in my case.

The top photo shows you how green and grassy and leafy much of the creekside scenery is, but leaves are turning in a few places, such as on this grapevine coming through the fence from someone’s backyard:

And a few trees with yellow leaves are letting them fall now, too. Some are silver maples, I found that out from my Seek app.

When I get back to my place at the end of these walks, I now have several new plantings to look over as I go up the front walk, like the Swiss chard and other greens, which I’ve gotten smart and planted in the front yard, because that’s where all the sun is:

In the back garden I did get the new manzanita planted, and the succulents replaced around it. I cleaned up the pine needles that had been making a thicker and thicker blanket on the plants in that area, and finished just before dark, when it was not good lighting for a picture. The wind came that night and brought down more pine needles, which I have yet to clean up. So I’ll show you McMinn (my name for the new bush, a “Howard McMinn” subspecies) another time. Here is one of the darling new succulents that I added there. I did pull the needles off of that one.

The weather has been unusually warm even for California. It was 80 degrees yesterday. But rain is coming again and will cool things off. It remains to be seen whether I will venture forth in the rain the way I did last year. Every day’s a new day… Will I find new ways to keep good habits? Maybe, with God’s help.

Another tree I have known.

November 2015

This morning I got out into the fresh fresh, rain washed air, still damp and loaded with nourishment from a mysterious and secret recipe, and I walked to and along the creek, and heard an unfamiliar and curious bird song. I wasn’t prepared for that, not having my phone and its Merlin bird app with me — I was trying to be a little bit un-modern.

I heard several bird songs, as it turned out, and saw a flurry of tiny birds on the paved path, scurrying under the privets. There was to be no sunshine today, but I still felt the pull of the reality, “Light of Light, True God of True God,” my own Source of Life.

I looked forward to a lunch date in a short while, so I couldn’t explore as long as I’d have liked; I turned back, along my usual route, past the pineapple guava that I have known and noticed for as long as I can remember. Many huge fruits were on the ground, much larger than anything mine ever produces… probably because it gets full sun all day long. I bent over to pick up one that hadn’t been bruised, but it was hard. Odd, that it hadn’t ripened….  and then I saw, a few feet away, the horror: the whole tree had been hacked to the ground, and I became aware of a large empty space above me.

Construction workers — or was it a demolition crew? — were in the driveway of the property on which the tree had lived, modestly, on the very corner of the lot, where it was not in the way of anything. Maybe a new owner was starting Something New. There the Modern attitude hit me where it had hit the feijoa, the idea we have of thinking that the best way is, Cut it all down and start over.

I looked through my old posts just now for a picture of that tall bush. I had mentioned it several times, but never took its picture. The owner of the property did not live in the house on that property, I learned that much some years ago. I also know that he never appreciated the guava for what it was; he always pruned it at exactly the wrong time, so that it rarely had a chance to show how many fruits all that sunshine could have sweetened to lusciousness.

I did love that tree. A few times I gathered a few of its fruits off the ground, and once my grandson and I picked its blooms to take home and add to our breakfast. I wonder if anyone else in the neighborhood will notice its absence?

Come again shining glance.

THE LOVE OF OCTOBER

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
… walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
the day is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun.

–W.S. Merwin

Anna Althea Hills, Autumn Fallbrook