Pretty sure it was the quickest trip by plane I’ve ever made, my flight to San Diego and back, all in less than 60 hours. I went for my granddaughter Maggie’s graduation from Point Loma Nazarene University, which offers the guests at the ceremony an expansive view of the Pacific Ocean and the sky above. The weather cooperated; the day before, our view would likely have been obscured by fog and clouds.

But the brightest sun beat down on us that day, and having forgotten my hat, I shaded my face with a program throughout the ceremony. Before the ceremony, for which we arrived very early as to get the best amphitheater seats, I found myself holding a venerable copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that possibly Maggie was planning to return to the school library. I made the most of my opportunity and read “The Water of Life,” which is a story I’d been wanting to read for some time.

Maggie had most of her immediate family and many favorite people around her on her happy day, and we were and are terribly proud of her. It was a reunion as well as a celebration, as everyone in our group came in from somewhere else, three states represented, and we stayed in a house together across from the beach.

Before and after the main event, we enjoyed the ocean and the beautiful campus, wonderful conversations, and lots of snuggling focused on my great-granddaughter Lora. She is of course the fourth generation from me, and all of those in her line were gathered, which was sweet!

Everywhere I looked I noticed many and various plants that mostly don’t grow where I live, or don’t get as huge. I learned just now that the White Bird of Paradise, Strelitzia nicolai, is a different variety from the colorful ones, and that’s why the many such plants around our Airbnb house were taller than the two-story buildings. The lantana in the back yard grew higher than my head.

Early on the morning of Mother’s Day, we were clearing out and leaving to catch our planes, etc., but the day before, the two women who aren’t yet mothers gave the mothers among us roses. I carried mine home in my backpack, their stems gathered in wet paper towels tied up in a plastic bag.

Pearl, Maggie and friend arrived at my house soon after I got home, by a complex turn of events, so our happiness continued for two more days in a different climate. Yesterday we four took an evening walk in the nearby hills where I continued to find plants  I didn’t know, or rather, as is often the case, that I didn’t know that I knew.

My Seek app tells me that I identified the Yellow Glandweed, Bellardia viscosa, a year ago this month, but I’m guessing from the location recorded back then that I saw one or a few flowers, and not as we experienced last night, of thousands and thousands of them spread up and down the slopes.

Maggie’s friend had never been in northern California before, and his sincere interest got Pearl and me talking more than we normally would about the natural history of this area especially. About poison oak, and oak trees, the California Bay Laurel, and Lace Lichen, which I had to look up again to remember what it is exactly.

Lace Lichen is truly a lichen, but Spanish Moss is not a moss: it is a bromeliad. As the latter plant is not native here and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it, I won’t confuse myself any further by showing a picture of Spanish Moss. I may have seen it on Maui, where is is also not native but is reportedly “often confused with the native Hawaiian plant called hinahina, which is a silvery-gray native heliotrope used in lei making.” Lace Lichen:

The lichen that hangs from these trees is food for the deer and nesting material for the birds. If you look at it closely you would not confuse it with the bromeliad.

The young people especially thought the golden California hills, the oaks and the bay trees most beautiful. They climbed up on the thick trunks the way our children, and some of us parents, always do. We all strolled through the grass and among the strange yellow flowers. It was a balmy walk in the hills at the end of the day when the air was still warm and our shadows were long.

Now my guests are gone, but my roses remain,
reminding me of my ever-expanding, most blessed motherhood.