Acorns and Insect Traps

It was 85 today and yet it is indeed fall. The weather is cooling slowly, pumpkins are everywere, the oak trees are throwing acorns around like confetti and I hallucinate thunder lately. We have a bowl of acorns mixed with buckeyes on our table and a today the boys and I picked a bowl of olives to go with them. Must cure some. Sometime this week I am also bound and determined to take the boys and head for the mountains to pick apples for pie and sauce and have a donut or two. Its time.

The neighbors two houses down have a pair of sweet gum trees that were just beginning to blush yellow (the closest to maples on our block) and then we had a wild, windy day and in the night the tops snapped off. Strangest thing ever. There they were all over the sidewalk. Have to walk a little further for our fall leaves.

Today I chatted with a super friendly man who works with the city, hanging traps for invasive insects in many of the neighbor trees including our orange tree. I saw him install it, reaching up over the fence on the neighbor's drive and there it hung all week, this strange glass jar with fluid inside on a wire hanger. He was a super friendly guy who must have been at least 6 feet tall, tall, strong boned features and a great smile, he had a Hispanic accent and I was almost brave enough to try Spanish with him. His name tag said Mohammed. Such a fabulously interesting world we live in now. Mo will be back to check out the tree again with his traps and has taken the results back to his lab for research. 80 some species are being watched for and hunted down. Hope our tree is clear!

Tomorrow is Park Day with our new homeschool group, time to keep digging that social connection framework in a little firmer. Tomorrow I also workout. For serious.

Poetry Friday: A Pruning Poem

Image via Wikipedia

Happy Poetry Friday to you! A pruning poem for you all today. It is pruning season, or at least the tale end thereof. (We must celebrate something in the bleak end of winter after all)  Time for all overgrown trees to get haircuts and all shrubs to get trim jobs that will have them prancing around in high-style once the warm weather has them leafing and blossoming all over the place.

I have been working, little by little on pruning our very large and very neglected apple tree and hoping on one hand that spring comes soon to rescue me but on the other hand that it holds off long enough to let me finish all the snipping and clipping this old tree needs. If a tree is clipped once the sap has really begun to flow hard it can "bleed out" and pour sap from all its wounds and end up dying in the warming, early spring. As I work, racing spring I have been thinking out a poem about the whole thing. This morning I took a little stab at putting down the bits that have been rattling around in my mind as I traded clippers for saw and then saw again for clippers in the chill wind.

Pruning The Apple Tree
I am pruning the dear, ancient apple tree
That leans, reclining over the back hedge
Behind our new home: a tall, old colonial.
It might turn out to bear nothing at all but
Small, hard crab apples like bitter marbles
(For some reason the neighbor can't remember)
Then, I know, my husband will see no point
And archly suggest a chainsaw at the trunk.
I finger all the thickly twisted branchings
And tilt my head as I envision each of the
Diagnostic choices: this branch or that gone.
My glittering saw makes fragrant, smooth
Work of the chosen amputation and the wound
Yawns open, fresh and yellow in the cold.
I am glad the ice-wind is blowing stiffly,
From the north, the better to anesthetize
The patient who sits numbly through my surgery.   
I see signs of other years here on the boughs:
Roughly hacked, black stubs of once-limbs,
Places where the tree has grown a living mace
And one limb that has gone thickly into
The very flesh of its widely forked neighbor
I drop branch bits on the snow and wonder as I
Climb a broad trunk, my palms splayed open,
Against the icy bark if the tree will
Shake its head pinkly, rouse as fragrant cloud
And bear me saving fruit for pies or if it
Sleeps deeply, sunk into a peaceful reverie
Tiny, unborn marble-fruit held tight in every bud,
Knowing this is the last cold, drowsy winter
It will arch sagely over my back hedge.

Image via Wikipedia

I really do hope it turns out to be a grand, old standard apple of some kind, don't you? Even if it is a crab, I have half a mind to try to convince A to save it just so I can make glittering apple jelly every year. I do hate to lose a wise old tree like this. I wonder who planted it and when. Guessing the age of trees is a very tricky game although even I can tell ours is quite old. I'd have taken a picture for you but it's doing a cold drizzle outside and there's no real love for a camera in that kind of weather.

You can find more Poetry Friday entries at our host Sara's blog, Read Write Believe.

Stopping in Santa Barbara to Catch Our Breath....

One of our three guide books we thumb through daily on this trip says something to the effect of: "Santa Barbara--- A town blessed with astonishingly perfect weather, a gorgeous setting and the most beautiful local government building in the country!"

And then we got here and it was blowing, and grey and extremely chill...(maybe 40's or low 50's?)...with the whipping itself into a bitter froth. We hiked from our hotel through the downtown and found the courthouse closed (albeit very pretty on the outside) and did a little high wind browsing of the central shopping area and promenades. But, who cared that we hit our first chilly weather on the trip here in SB and who really had their happiness hung on the interior of the local courthouse anyhow? We were there to eat and see my cousin, the fabulous and incredibly wonderful chef at The Hungry Cat. Wow. We just asked him to throw us his favorites off of the menu and we were seriously blown out of the water. I know that my sentimental clannish feelings color things a tiny bit but, truly people, this will go down as one of the legendary meals of my life in my memories. He sent us wheeling through fresh oysters, chilled prawns, battered artichoke hearts, some of the sweetest crab I've ever tasted, elegant and tender halibut, oyster mushrooms, asparagus and among many others a cheese plate of ultra-stunning quality and a luscious bread pudding/creme brulee. So delicious. And people, truly, words fail me...I am so extremely proud of my clever, knife wielding cousin that I could just burst. He is the American Dream. Reaching for, succeeding, and soaring higher on the wings of his own raw ambition. I aspire, people, I aspire.

Besides our stellar dinner tonight, we've also driven past acres of farm country, carpets of strawberry plants as far as the eye could see and artichokes, lettuce, broccoli to boot. Produce, as far as you can squint. That was Salinas and a few other scattered, dirt black river valleys that we soared through. Lovely places to drive and drive. So green and lush and full of production in the the botanical sense. We toured the Steinbeck museum in Salinas (recommended!) and we both remembered how much we loved his books and how much more there still is to read that he wrote! More tomes for our couple reading list. Steinbeck is wonderful roadtrip reading. Somehow cozy to stand there amongst his personal effects and quotes and think fondly of the man. Note to self: Must make sure A reads Grapes of Wrath. I do like Ma Joad.

We've also been through Big Sur now, that inner artist contemplating, hippy magnet zone of lush redwoods, dripping forest and winding snaky highway, ribboning along the coast. (Not what I was expecting, I thought it'd be much drier and more rolling plains kind of stuff) I did like Big Sur.

We also wandered through our first mission in a lovely little burst of sunshine and warm weather. My idea of what a mission is will probly always reference my experience at Carmel-By-The-Sea. Mmm...wonderful. Missions (or at least this one) are these glorious little cloistered, holy places, with fig trees, rose vines, tumbling nasturtiums, quiet gravel paths and stunning gold leafed silent chapels where candles flicker and you can smell incense from the not so distant past. A and I both wish we could re-create a piece of that in our backyard if/when we get that tudor we're still mulling over.

So, that's the latest...California is still beautiful, still surprising us and our idea of the state is broadening by the moment. Tomorrow we will be hugging my cousins in person and starting our good times with much shoulder rubbing and progeny introducing fun. Am really looking forward to that! Now, I'm off to wake up A and figure out if there's a way to turn on the heat in this hotel room so I can quit sneezing and start snoozing. Sweet dreams all!!!

Snapshots of The Big Storm 2010

Big local road....kinda occupied.

View of the average road shoulder at the moment.

 

Road itself....not a dilapidated bike path.

 

Our small local stream...well flooded beyond it's banks.

But on the upside...all this spring rain means the 

miniature daffodils by the front door are blooming!

50-60's all the rest of the week! Wooohoo!!!

Closed Off To The World

Saturday night we went to dinner at my aunt's house, driving across the state in pelting rain and lashing wind...watching the trees bending and the sea frothing as we drove along. We cozied down in the den together when we arrived and had a snug evening chatting, eating and watching the small ones push plastic dinosaurs and hot wheels along the rug under our feet.

And then, after all that nestled down warmth in various forms we arrived back at our own little condo unit to find the whole complex dark and our next-door neighbor packing his wife, baby and dogs up to take them off to someplace with electricity. We've been without power now for well over 24 hours and it looks like it will be a couple more days. The most generous estimates are saying Wednesday evening we might have our lights back on but, we are expecting a more gradual return than that.

It was quite impressive on Sunday morning when we got up and tried to drive to church to actually survey the damage from the storm. Trees are down everywhere...powerlines strung like spaghetti, tree to fallen tree and splintered limbs and bark littering most roads in the area. We saw many trees that were far to large to wrap arms around that had fallen across roads into yards and even one that had gone through the roof of a local town. We never did make it to church...every road we tried was closed off by downed trees and broken utility poles and sloppy loops of electric wires flung this way and that. And then this morning when I tried to take A to work, we gave up when we ran into multi-tiered stripes of yellow caution tape, and whorls of orange traffic cones cluttering all the roads in to the main drive. I parked the car and waited with hazard lights blinking as close as we could manage to drive in and A hiked the rest of the way in, just for extra merit badge points and then hiked back out in the spitting rain. One more day together after all.

I have never seen a storm like this in my life, honestly. The mayor of a local town sent every resident an automated telephone call the let them know that help was coming to aid in power return, road clearing and the like as quickly as possible but that the residents should know the work would be significant...this has been, he said, the worst storm in 50 years, no small potatoes to remedy. A nearby family lost their home when the fire department couldn't reach their address because of too many of the roads were impassible. Rivers are all flooded beyond their banks, fences have blown away like so many kites and lawn furniture is drifted in piles where the wind left it. Its not the right time of year for this to technically be called a hurricane but, it sure seems to fit the text-book definition.

So, we have no light or power or heat...this afternoon we're here, at the library to charge up our phones, communicate with the outside world a bit and make sure that we're snowed under by email however long this power out keeps up. Handily, the outages aren't everywhere and the library is still lighted and warm. Its awfully nice to have laundromats, hard working power company employees and friends who are willing to lend a little fridge space for our orphaned food (shout out to Nutmeg!).  This afternoon we picked up another bundle of wood for the fireplace kielbasa and a wedge of Gruyere to have for dinner, toasted over the coals and then eaten on A's good homemade bread. Should be a cozy end to the day.

Just a little trip back in time for a few days, a slower pace of life. I don't much mind. As long there's a laundromat around the corner.