Tag Archives: California

California Hills in August

nature, poetry, ,

I’m almost too late to post a poem with this title in a timely manner, not that the hills won’t look pretty much the same for another month or more. This year the grass is especially brown and parched, and we have lots of fires making the sky brown, too.

Over three years ago I posted this poem by Dana Gioia, which was the first time I wrote about him. Just now by putting his name in the search box at the bottom of this blog I discovered that it’s come up repeatedly.

I understand that Gioia has returned to our fair and thirsty state after serving as president of the National Endowment for the Arts for a few years. I wonder if he gets out of town far enough these days to feel the summer as he so aptly conveys it in this poem.


California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

-Dana Gioia

Lost in a very good dream…

friends, nature, quotes, travel, , , , , , , , , ,
gooseberries

Coming home from the mountains last week, I didn’t have the usual thoughts of “That was lovely, but I have lots of things to do at home now and I can’t wait to get started.” No, this time I was mostly sad to say good-bye, and also couldn’t find good words to go with my pictures.

But one of our guests up there managed in her thank-you note yesterday to take away my sadness with her response to the few higher-elevation days we shared. I’m making her my guest blogger today. (Her thoughts in brown.)

Mountain time is a time-out from time, 
like the timelessness of being 
lost in a very good dream.
little lupine plants

When we came down from Gumdrop Dome the ground under the forest was scattered everywhere with tiny lupine plants. I wonder what month I would need to be there to see the slopes covered with tiny purple spikes?

… the dilated twinkle of 100 billion stars in the night sky (which reductionistically would take 3,000 yrs. to count.)

Of our three nights at over 8,000 feet elevation, we had only one night’s opening in the clouds to see the star glory. We missed most of the meteor shower — still, we saw a few shooting stars. And we gawked at the Milky Way, and were happy that the air was unbelievably warm all during our stay, day and night, so that we could gawk longer.

overlooking a canyon
All the sweet consolations of fragrant fresh mountain air, delicious soft water, 
warm sleepy nights… 

…laughter, storytelling, hiking and/or trying to chase Mr. Glad up Gumdrop Dome (in a loony-tune cartoon, some of us could take a running start up a sheer vertical rock face, hauling a low center of big gravity, our momentum so great that we actually overshoot the summit –beating him to the base – but unfortunately, not in one piece).

swooping in to join the fray
…the terrible joy 
of ecstatic hummingbirds 
a-feeding.

Limón in the Cazuela

art, books, children's books, food and cooking, , , ,

The Cazuela That the Farm Maiden Stirred by Samantha R. Vamos is a delightful Hispanic incarnation of The House that Jack Built. It tells the story of a rice pudding from the farm to the table. The reader is introduced to two new words, first in English, every time he turns the page. From then on, those key words are only written in Spanish.

Before I opened the book, Mr. Glad was enjoying it and noticed that the word for lime was much like our lemon. That made me wonder what the word for lemon is.

New World Spanish-English Dictionary sits on the reference shelf here as a leftover from the days when four of our children in turn studied Spanish. Even though their father and I never did study that language that is so useful, almost essential, in California, we’ve lived here our whole lives and have picked up some vocabulary, sometimes by consulting this word book, as I did on this occasion.

The hen helps by grating the limón

I don’t know why, but my dictionary is wrong about limón. It says that it means lemon, and that if you want to talk about a lime you say lima. I found it hard to believe that this book written by a woman with a Hispanic name, illustrated by a man with a Hispanic name, with the intent of teaching 21 words, would get any wrong.

But I have a friend who is married to a Mexican man and teaches at a bilingual school, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask my local expert. She wrote, “Okay babe. Limón means lime and limón agria or limón Amarillo can mean lemon. There is a lemon-like fruit called Lima limón. There are not lemons like we have here in the U.S. in Mexico.” That seemed a pretty authoritative word on the subject.

This is a picture book, an Easy Reader, so I must not forget to mention the illustrations, which as you can see from these sample pages I photographed are party-bright, full of the joy and fun of cooking together.

At the back you will find a glossary with pronunciations, in case your Spanish is rusty, and best of all, a recipe for rice pudding. What I would love to do with a young child is read the book, make the pudding together while using the English and Spanish words to talk about the ingredients, and then read the book again while the cazuela simmers.

I would rather one of my grandchildren helped me in the kitchen, while we keep the animals outdoors or in the pages of the book. But an arroz con leche pudding with plenty of crema and some zest of limón would suit me just fine.

Big Sur

nature, travel, , , , , ,

 

Mouth of Big Sur R. – Andrew Molera Park

Many years ago at the spot in this first photo, Mr. Glad and I watched a group of waterbirds playing. We were having a weekend at Big Sur to celebrate a wedding anniversary.

Here the Big Sur River flows into the Pacific Ocean on California’s central coast. On that day in March way back then, the birds would float down the riffles of the river, then fly back up to the jumping-in place and wait in line behind their fellows until their turn came; jump in, float down, fly back up, over and over. We watched them a long time, and they were still at it when we left.

This week we had made the trip to see family and friends. It was a very short visit, but we managed to take in aspects of both Andrew Molera State Park and Soberanes Canyon.

The Big Sur area features such a profusion of plant forms, not to mention the animal life that I mostly ignore, that it is easy to understand why so many people want to live there where the ocean and trees and flowers make a dramatic but not agitating backdrop for solitude.

Everywhere we went for three days, the air was thick with the aromas of a casserole of natural ingredients, seaweed and sagebrush, redwoods and damp soil, a thousand essential oils in microscopic droplets bombarding my senses and reminding me that I should get out into the woods and the fields more often just to inhale this kind of nourishment.

If I did live near Big Sur, I’d want to go regularly to Soberanes Canyon, where the plant forms overlap in an unlikely and seemingly chaotic way.

Old cactus with baby on Soberanes Canyon Trail

I’ve never before seen redwood sorrel and poison oak growing together, or ferns next to cactus. Those are the most surprising things that jumped out at me, but if I went every month or so along the same canyon trail, other wildflowers or shrubs might eventually get my attention with the changing seasons and blooms. Whether I saw a scene or a tiny part of it in mist or sunshine would also make a difference.

Redwood sorrel with poison oak and nettles

This is a coastal steppe zone, my guide and son told me. The cactus were old and weather-beaten, some of their trunks resembling thick board platforms, but still producing new and fresh green sprouts.

one of the smaller lupines

Venerable lupine “trees” five feet across stood alongside the trail, with trunks four inches in diameter, still blooming mid-October.

Only a couple of minutes up from Highway 1, the trail takes you through dry hills with spreads of cactus all around. We got hot and sweaty pretty quickly, as it was mid-afternoon on what was probably the hottest fall day, but we didn’t grumble, being quite glad that the usual fog wasn’t dampening our spirits.

Soberanes Creek

Before we knew it, we were descending to the creek, stands of tall, thick redwoods and carpets of sorrel, and after twenty paces the temperature had dropped ten degrees.

At the base of one of those huge specimens of Sequoia sempervirens, Mr. G pointed out to us the sponginess of the ground. It was not dirt, but many inches – or feet? – of redwood needles, making a duff that we all took turns bouncing on before we went on down the grade and back to our car.

I just love the way the Father creates these playgrounds for the delight of His children.