Tag Archives: Central Valley

We and the trees change over time.

family, history, home, travel, , ,

I’ve returned from my short road trip, to the land of my childhood. I stayed with my sister two nights, and then switched to my brother’s place for two nights, which is the very house we all lived in for years, years that went by in a flash. I went away to college when I was eighteen and never lived at home again. Even though my brother has changed a lot of things, the “envelope” of the house our father built remains the same, and the giant oak tree still towers over the back yard.

It also has been pruned recently, its canopy made much more compact, and it looks great. I wandered around the property taking in everything, but I forgot to go back with my phone later to take pictures. I was too busy focusing on the people, my people, so I have found some older images of the countryside and people that I visited, to illustrate my musings.

Wall art that has seen better days, and that we “let go.”

The day before I started out on this journey, I was glad to feel the leavinghomesickness depart and be replaced with happy anticipation at the meetings I would soon have. Just being with these dear ones and also talking about the experiences we’ve shared over the decades has filled me to the brim with thoughts and feelings I don’t think I will be able to sort out. 

Nostalgia is a “sentimental longing for the past,” so it’s not that I’m feeling, but just plain wonderment at all the days and years of my life so far. I would not go back in time, and I know those times were not ideal, but looking back I am amazed at how wholesome they were. I was blessed to live through them with several people who remain, and still care about me, which is all a great gift.

The picture and the memory are blurry, but solid.

Over the course of four days, I had long visits and conversations with twenty people, counting the six little children who are my nieces and nephews; four of those children I hadn’t met before. I saw both of my sisters and my brother, and their spouses, and children’s families. Various of us told stories that others of us had never heard, from the distant past or from relatively recently.

I had lunches with three friends, one of whom I’ve known since first grade, and two since about eighth grade; between bites we fell into telling anecdotes about each other’s mothers, may God bless their memory!

The linoleum floor of our childhood has since been replaced.
cousins
We were small Brownies, and the orange trees and rosebushes were small, too.

As I drove back and forth through the orange groves between town and country, I restrained myself from stopping as often as I’d have liked to, to take pictures of the hills and the orange trees. It had just rained, and the mountain peaks were dusted with snow, but the hills are still showing golden and not green. The picture below was taken by my sister Nancy some years ago, later in the season.

When rain clouds are gathering and precipitating and rearranging themselves all over again, it is like watching a huge theater screen from my private box (my car), as I’m driving down the interstate.

This is exactly what was happening on Tuesday, and I did take pictures of that show.

I was thrilled to see cotton on the plants in the wide fields, and I pulled over to look more closely. But I couldn’t get a good view, because mud:

So I went along and along, and saw a rainbow pancake of light on the northern horizon, a very slim break in the clouds way beyond a field of melons.

By the time I got to Nancy’s, the storm was abating,
and the dust had been washed off of all the trees.

So there, I’ve put the beginning at the end of my tale. But don’t you think it’s hard, not to get the times mixed up when one makes a trip to the past? In many ways it is still present –definitely all these people I saw still are present — and may even be future. I feel the need of a pertinent quote… and the one that pops into my mind is:

The past is not what it was.
-G.K. Chesterton

 

The smell of dust.

agriculture, family, other gardens, , , , , ,

About five this morning three things happened. I woke up in my sister’s house, which lies in the neighborhood of my childhood, along one of the thousand plain, unlined roads that make rectangular grid lines of themselves through the orange groves.

A mockingbird began to run through his upbeat repertoire outside my window. I was surprised at this, because I never heard them as a child. I wondered which local species he was imitating at the coolest moment of the day, 73 degrees. He didn’t sing for long.

About the same time that I saw on the forecast the prediction of 108 degrees today, I heard the whole house fan come on and start blowing all the previous day’s residual hot air out of the attic and all the rooms. In the summer my brother-in-law turns it on as soon as the outdoor temperature becomes cooler than that under the roof. It really lessens the need to use the air conditioner.

But tomorrow morning there will not be enough cooling off to work this system. While I was driving away in my air conditioned Subaru and toward a more coastal destination, the Central Valley was turning into a furnace. Most of the next ten days over 100 and four of them above 110. 

As I lingered with my brother’s family over dinner last night, we talked about various people we knew who were leaving California for one reason or another. Somebody’s mother had moved here years before from Missouri but had to go back, because she was always sickly in California. Was it the dust? Everyone around the table agreed that the dust can be oppressive.

After dinner we went outside where the children ran on the lawn, and I admired the way the succulents thrive at my brother’s place, in the heat, yes, but under the shade and frost protection of the patio roof. Certain plants love the climate, and of course that dust blows off the fields that are in between plantings such as I saw on my drive in: cantaloupes, tomatoes, corn, alfalfa, cotton…. That Valley dust feeds the nation!

It’s also a component of the air of which I breathe deeply when I visit in the warmer seasons, the scent of my childhood. That air is like a caress, and a tonic, an atmosphere to sink into. The late evenings are the loveliest time to sit out, after the sun has gone down and air has lost its oven-like personality. One wants to stay up for hours recovering from the day’s fierceness, and not go inside where the air may be cool, but it’s artificially so.

At the end of today’s drive, I arrived  in the southern reaches of the state in a place where the ocean influence is felt morning and evening. Windows and doors are open so that soft breezes can blow through my hosts’ house. I picked up granddaughter Annie at the airport, and this weekend we’ll go to her cousin Pat’s wedding in San Diego. 

Today’s photos are all from my brother’s place, which is the house I grew up in. He has made a lot of changes, but it’s all good, and more pleasing every time I visit. Tomorrow, more family to visit, more gardens! Stay tuned…

The seeds dropped out.

my garden, wildflowers, , ,

When my Landscape Lady suggested Delta Sunflowers for my front garden, she said they would reseed themselves year after year. Those in her own garden have done that, and she gave me my original plants from her excess of volunteers when they came up in May of 2017. My plants did make their own starts in succeeding springtimes, but not very many, which I think has something to do with the thick bark mulch. The seedlings that did emerge were not in the right places, so I had to transplant them.

Here I will insert three pictures I took on the dry east side of California’s Central Valley before I ever knew what these sunflowers were, or dreamed that this species would end up in my own garden. These shots show how well they do with no water at all, in temperatures often well above 100°, all summer long. They just keep going.

Last fall and this, I saved some flower heads from my plants, but I could not see any seeds in them. They are very stiff and prickly by the time they are dry enough to be certain the seeds will have matured. This year my second picking of them I set on the workbench as I was going into the house, and there they sat for a couple of weeks, where I walked past many times a day.

One day I noticed seeds under them – the hidden seeds had simply fallen out. I knocked each bristle brush flower hard against the wood and more seeds came out, so now I have a good collection. I can start them myself in the greenhouse and have some sturdy seedlings to plant in exactly the right spots next spring. 🙂

 

The orange blossoms called me…

agriculture, family, friends, , , , ,

The orange blossoms beckoned, from my youth, from the Central Valley, from the treasury of olfactory memories in my mind, and from the image imprinted there the last time I visited my childhood home at this time of year. I didn’t remember the scent itself, but I remembered the ecstasy of inhaling it.

In response I made a little road trip last week, and spent time in Tulare, Kern and Fresno Counties, smelling citrus blooms and visiting with family and friends. I stayed with my sister Nancy, the farmer, who lives in the middle of the groves of trees that she and her husband care for. The Sumo mandarins that directly surround them were just about to bloom, so they had recently been covered with bee netting.

What? you ask. Yes, they are protecting the trees from the bees, because if the Sumos get cross-pollinated with other citrus such as lemons they may make seeds, and that is a no-no for seedless mandarins. It’s just one of the many sorts of special treatment that the trees and the harvest get, and an example of the extra work involved to grow this fruit that was developed in Japan. If you haven’t eaten a Sumo it may be because the costs add up quickly to make them expensive in the stores.

Nancy found a few Sumos remaining from this year’s harvest to give me. They are large for a mandarin orange, seedless, very tasty, and their loose rind makes them super easy to peel.

I came home with oranges from my father’s navel orange trees, too, which I didn’t expect. That fruit would normally be all picked and gone to market long before now, but this year the trees in the Valley are loaded with fruit, and it’s very small. That is a recipe for not being able to sell it, so the oranges fall on the ground eventually and the farmers take a loss. Farming is hard in many ways, and it’s not getting easier.

The next few photos below are from years past, taken at various times of year, of these country roads and places where I spent my childhood.

The view below of the Sierras with the sun rising behind reveals the profile of a formation that looks from there like a man lying on his back. We call it Homer’s Nose (though I didn’t remember “meeting” Homer until recently, and only heard about him from afar):

Since I was “so close,” one day I drove farther south an hour and a half to visit another Farm Girl, Kim of My Field of Dreams. After reading blog posts about each other’s gardens and families for many years, we enjoyed our first face-to-face meeting. We were like old friends or long-lost sisters (well, we are sisters in Christ, after all) and talked and talked, while I ate her delicious flourless muffins and got my wish of a spell of porch-sitting with Kim, looking out at the gardens that she was anticipating planting this week.

lemon flower

I didn’t want to leave, but I must. I got back on the two-lane highway with crazy tailgaters, and survived the ordeal again in reverse. When I arrived safe and sound back at Nancy’s it was the most relaxing thing to be able to sit outdoors before dinner and chat. Here we get chased indoors by fog or cold breezes very early, but there we were warmed by the rays of the sun on our backs and the air was still, and laden with orange scents. 🙂

I spent three days with my family. The last night we four siblings all were together, with some spouses and a few members of the younger generations, at the house where we grew up together, where my brother now lives. There again we ate our barbecue on the patio, and never went in, and it was the sweetest thing just to be together with those persons so fundamental to our psyches. My brother helped me pick a couple of bags of oranges from the same trees that have fed us for decades — they weren’t too tiny — and I’m confident that the eating of them will help me to prolong the savor of my brother and sisters and the whole family that I love.