Tag Archives: childhood memories

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

 

We still love this September poem.

nature, poetry, , , , , , , , ,

(I’m reposting this from five years ago. Every September, many, many people still find the poem below on my blog. This fall, for the first time, I am pleased to say I have acquired a purple aster to enjoy for the next couple of months, and have installed it by the front door.)

Only a few years ago did I discover this poem. Being short and packed with autumnal images, it is perfect for a busy time of year, when you don’t want to let the equinox pass unnoticed, but you are canning tomatoes or drying figs or just taking all the walks you can in the crisp air. If you don’t pay attention to the calendar or the TV, you might miss the day.

For months and years I’ve been trying off and on to confirm that its author is Edwina Hume Fallis. New things show up on Internet searches all the time, and today I have seen enough sites that are confident about attributing it to her that I will accept it. Two months ago I couldn’t find two postings of the poem where her name was even spelled right. Most places it is shared as by “Anonymous.”

In the city of Denver, Colorado, Edwina Hume Fallis is especially famous, for her teaching and writing, a toy shop she owned, and her book When Denver and I Were Young. (I did recently contact the Denver public library to see if they had a copy of the poem below in their collection about her; they did not.) She and her sister made toys to use as props in telling stories to kindergarten students, and she did write over 100 poems; maybe this one was in an anthology that is now out of print. Many women bloggers seem to have memorized it in elementary school.

I wonder if any of my readers in the Southern Hemisphere knows of a similar poem that applies to the opposite seasons down there?

SEPTEMBER

A road like brown ribbon,
A sky that is blue
A forest of green with that sky peeping through.
Asters deep purple,
A grasshopper’s call –
Today, it is Summer
Tomorrow is Fall!

-Edwina Hume Fallis

At Pippin’s in 2017, waiting for the aspens to turn.

My Father’s Hat

nature, poetry, , ,

MY FATHER’S HAT

Sunday mornings I would reach
high into his dark closet while standing
on a chair and tiptoeing reach
higher, touching, sometimes fumbling
the soft crowns and imagine
I was in a forest, wind hymning
through pines, where the musky scent
of rain clinging to damp earth was
his scent I loved, lingering on
bands, leather, and on the inner silk
crowns where I would smell his
hair and almost think I was being
held, or climbing a tree, touching
the yellow fruit, leaves whose scent
was that of a clove in the godsome
air, as now, thinking of his fabulous
sleep, I stand on this canyon floor
and watch light slowly close
on water I’m not sure is there.

-Mark Irwin

Mark Irwin

 

Revisiting my Valley Oak.

family, history, trees, ,

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.