Tag Archives: fog

August is foggy a lot.

food and cooking, my garden, ocean, , , , , ,

So many mornings the sun does not come out until late. But I picked the last of my Elephant Heart plums this week, and the first two figs of the season the week before. Just now I wandered around the garden (noon and sunny) and cut three zucchini.

I’m trying to get back to my habit of going to the beach once a week. It’s been foggy on the coast, too, but pleasant enough that I can wear just a thin linen shirt. Last time I saw an unfamiliar bird, a little smaller than the usual sea gulls. There were many parties of a dozen or so, mostly sitting together and looking out to sea. When I got home and researched, I discovered that they are Heermann’s Gulls.

There were also lots of the charming Godwits out there fishing.

Sea Palm

Every person in a large family at church was sick recently, which gave me the opportunity to have fun in the kitchen, making dinner for them one day. Most of the time I am trying, usually in vain, to cook for one, and eat for one. It seems impossible to learn, and not that enjoyable. So I made the most of this occasion to cook big batches of lots of dishes, enough for leftovers. It was the perfect day to make lemon curd, and I roasted both onions and Brussels sprouts, keeping back half for myself.

The giant sunflower plants in front are dangerously close to breaking their branches and/or falling over, so I pruned them and cut some of the blooms to add to the dinner box.

This is the first year I’ve ever grown a tomatillo. My neighbor gave me a seedling that he had started. It is branching out everywhere with yard-long stems, and the husks that will house the fruit, as yet unformed, are tender lime-green lanterns. In this next picture it’s climbing over a tomato vine so there is a confusion of types of leaves.

Wikipedia says, “The wild tomatillo and related plants are found everywhere in the Americas except in the far north, with the highest diversity in Mexico. In 2017, scientists reported on their discovery and analysis of a fossil tomatillo found in the Patagonian region of Argentina, dated to 52 million years BP. The finding has pushed back the earliest appearance of the Solanaceae plant family of which the tomatillo is one genus.”

I asked a man from Oaxaca, Mexico what his family does with tomatillos, and he didn’t know of any use but salsa, which is also the only thing I had ever heard. Does any of you have a good recipe for tomatillos, or another use? They don’t look like they’ll be ripe anytime soon, but I should be ready with a plan!

Hot sand, then fog.

books, nature, wildflowers, , , ,

Today’s beach trip kept getting put off, until by the time I got out to the coast it was already afternoon. These flowers had opened sometime in the last week; I don’t remember ever seeing them on the California coast before. The daisy flower looks like something that might have escaped a back yard, but the plant as a whole definitely does not.

However, the Seek app tells me it is redpurple ragwort, Sinecio elegans, which is in the aster family: “Native to southern Africa, it is cultivated as an ornamental plant… It has been known to escape cultivation and become naturalized in areas of appropriate climate.” I guess that’s why it doesn’t look like a typical Pacific coastal plant.

The sand was surprisingly hot on my bare feet at first, a new thing after many months of fall and winter. But then the fog, which had been thin and drifting away, changed its mind, thickened up, and cooled everything off. I didn’t walk fast today, and I didn’t walk in the ruffles at the edge. I sat on a stump to read, behind the labyrinth, with this view:

Then I walked on up the beach a ways and sat to read a little more.

I saw this new sign, “Sensitive Wildlife Area: Do Not Enter,” one of many posted along the rope that surrounds an area not twice as large as what you can see in this picture. The dunes are of course always in flux from the changing winds. It seems odd to guard a relatively tiny spot, and also not to say what agency is forbidding the children to play there. [See more about this in the comments.]

In the car today I finished listening to The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, which I also read last year sometime. It is one of my favorite books. When I got home I read a lot of The Eucharist, and created a recipe for vegan tapioca pudding using leftover ginger pulp, agave nectar, two sizes of tapioca pearls and mostly almond milk, with a bit of coconut milk, too. It was good!

Mondays seem to be a good day to go somewhere to be alone and quiet, and not try to accomplish too much. The high school class that I teach on Sunday afternoons will end soon and maybe my Sundays won’t be so brain-deadening, but for now, I’m glad for these Mondays and for the beach that is always there, and willing for me to participate in whatever it’s doing, if only by breathing.

a breathing

nature, poetry, , , ,

The End of Sleep

The eyes are about to open.
Through fog, Sleep crosses the great water—
See how it sails in the little boat?
Slowly, such a long journey,
Bits of light
Catch colors in the mirrored hull.
Beneath the glassy surface, a glimpse
Of your dreams: the lake, the boat, with you
In it. Now a shadow
Falls over you: above the surface,
The figure of Sleep
Has leaned over its boat.
Hear Sleep’s feet plop in the shallows—
It pulls the boat to shore.

— Elizabeth Twiddy

This morning as I neared the shore of full consciousness, what I saw through the fog was myself, getting dressed and going to church for a Presanctified Liturgy. I was full of happy anticipation. Then I pulled the blinds open and was surprised to see, not the sunny and warm skies of the last few days, but thick and cold white fog.

I’ve read many people who say they love the fog, and I thought of them right away, wondering why I couldn’t be like them. Then I remembered the foggy days of my childhood when in the winter the damp cold would settle over California’s Central Valley like a perverse blanket. Not your normal blanket that makes you cozy, but something more like a conduit of chill. My fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Wicks, who came from South Dakota, said she was never so miserable in the dry winters of her youth as she was in our “temperate” weather that froze her to the bone.

The natural and normal tule fog that emerges from the ground after the first winter rains became a dangerous foe once I learned to drive and became aware of all the car crashes on the highways that are a frequent accompaniment to the season. I became familiar with the stiff neck you get peering intently through the wall of white trying not to run into something.

But this morning in March, all of that is far behind me, and for the Valley-dwellers it is likely passed as well by this time of year. So I thought I would look for a poem by one of those fog-lovers. The fog that’s outside my window is still a little too cold for my old bones to thoroughly enjoy, but I’m working on it. After all, it’s another part of our earthly home that is filled with the breath of God.

The Breathing

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

~ Denise Levertov