Citrus and Camellias

That's what February is full of.

Pumpkin Moon

This morning as I walked out the door to work I noticed that the front lawn was strewn with little white fleshy orbs - mushrooms had sprouted overnight! They look like common field mushrooms. It made me feel good, knowing that we were in for more wet.

I'm still walking and biking to work 4 days a week. I even walked this morning in the pouring rain. It makes me so happy, walking with the kids to Miller Creek, walking through the shady bay groves, over the bridge on the ever-rising creek, up the hill on Idylberry and in the valley among the oak-rich hills. Sometimes I see people I know like a mom from cub scouts or a mom of a kid in Alfred's grade. It makes me feel good.

The junipers berries are burgeoning now. The berries are becoming riper and riper. I like to pick them along the way and squash them into my wrists and temples. They have a sweet-astringent fragrance that I love.

In a couple of weeks we will have our Halloween party. Pumpkins are in all the storefront windows.

Rosemary in bloom

Juniper berries are coming out and creeping rosemany is in all its bloomy blue. Amanda came over today for lunch and brought some delicious golden green tea and a magazine about some jade sales going on currently. We went out to Bombay Garden for lunch. I told her about the Zoroastrians.

Schnapps

This week I am making schnapps from the remaining apples and pears that grew in the side yard.

Here is a wonderful website about schnapps.

Danish Schnapps

I may try making some herb schnapps too with the rosemary and oregano in the garden. Maybe even add the fruit and some honey. Experiment. There will be a lot to taste in a year or so. :)

Fireberry

It's October now. I started bicycling to and from work on the first of the month. The first day Alfred, who was off from school, accompanied me. It was his idea and it was an act of kindness. Sadly, during the trip he became distracted when another kid from his school biked by with his younger brother. Alfred tripped over a newspaper bag in the street and fell off the bike and on his face. He was in shock, was embarrassed in front of his schoolmate, and had to be taken home by a good Samaritan with a minivan. He fractured his elbow and now cannot play the trumpet or participate in gym. I feel very badly for him, but he gave me the courage to bike to work and now that is what I'm doing.

Art and I had a very absurd fight last night. He was telling me about how one of his theories about the Big Bang was recently vindicated. We discussed it and it absurdly led to a rampaging shouting match with wounded egos and general bad behavior on both our parts. We made up, but sheeesh..

The weather has been gorgeous. The quails visit our back yard each day in the late afternoon and they are fatter than ever. The fireberry (or pyrocantha) grows redder every day. They are predicting rain for tonight.

Last day of Applemoon

Almost all the apples and pears have fallen. Tomorrow I pick pick the very last. They will be sweet.

The small, sweet-smelling juniper berries are blue and ripe. There are many types of juniper around here. People think they're common, but I like them all.

The pyrocantha has also just come into red berry.

Autumn Sere

There was a rain shower last week. It's early for the season, and didn't cool things down for long. Today it's warm but lovely, sunny and in the 80's. Why am I so afraid to walk? I must eschew sweets. Yearning for the cool, pure rain.

First Rain

First rain today. Nice and gloomy. Nice and cozy in my roomy. Love those clouds. Love that gloom.

Socks and Dishrags

Non-stop y'all.

Charlie down at the Creek

Charlie keep busting out of the fence and going down to the creek to roll around in the mud. It isn't even that hot out. Yesterday he stunk like he had rolled in dead animals or feces or sumpin. Nasty. Andrew and Kent washed him off in the yard. Wet diggety dawg.

Fat Quails

Another sign of the season is the packs of fat quail that frequent our yard. They are their fattest at this time of year and can often be seen grazing on the seedy, dry meadows around our house. They graze in the seed-strewn meadow behind the house. The ground is the color of straw. Mostly they come in the late afternoon, around 5 pm.

The turkeys start coming out these days too.

I was lucky to have 3 coolish days in a row in which to do yard work.

Signs of Seretowet

Applemoon? Appeloon? September is the season of apples here. Apples and pears. What once upon a time were maids-in-the-mist, all blue and blowing, now are wee tan balloons brittle as papyrus. Some have burst tiny black beads - seeds are all around. I've started clearing the yard.

Sere-to-wet Pears

I'm making up my own seasons for where I live.

Seretowet

September 1 - November 30 is "Sere-to-wet", which begins with merciless, dangerous, dry heat that seres the hills to crispy tinder. It is a season of local harvest hurrah with the best of tomatoes, apples, pears, peppers. Seretowet begins the school year, celebrates the harvest, endures the height of fire season, revels in Halloween, feasts at Thanksgiving. The Jewish High Holy Days fall within its purview, as does the late November preparations for Yuletide. The colors of this season are orange, brown, yellow and green. In the latter part of the season, sometimes not until November, the rains begin.

Our pear tree gave a bumper crop of pears this year.

Gravid-stein

The Gravenstein apples are spilled all over the side yard.

Sant' Egidio Abate

Something strange happened this morning. I woke up early, at 5 am, to make Art a lunch to take to work. After he left I couldn't go back to sleep so I came into my office to knock around on the computer. Looking back into my browser history, I still can't figure out what led me there. I was updating some pages, then I was researching 2012, a date the mother of one of Alfred's friends assures me is "when it's going to happen." She is a New Age Mormon, a character of relative rarity, but if she were to be found anywhere, it would have to be here in California. Then again, I'm pretty sure I did that after I found the Linguaglossa link because I remember being really bleary when it happened. It was soon after I started browsing but how I got there I still don't know.

There was a link to Linguaglossa somewhere. Linguaglossa is a town at the foot of Mount Etna in Sicily, not far from Catania. My father's father Alfio was from there. Its name means "glossy tongue", as in a glossy tongue of lava lapping at its city limits. Suddenly I was in a Google satellite map of Linguaglossa itself, zooming in and out - in to the sere summer piazzas and small irrigated plots, out to the hard, curvy, volatile slopes of Etna. Then there was a Wikipedia entry. The patron saint of Linguaglossa is Saint Egidio, Abbot. Today is his feast day.

Saint Egidio (Saint Giles, in English), was a 7th century French hermit who lived with a hind ( a female deer) who sustained him with her milk. A Visigoth (or Frankish) king who was out hunting tried to capture the hind, but Saint Egidio managed to miraculously create an invisible shield to keep them back. The king came back another day with a bishop and one of his party, trying to shoot the deer, shot Egidio instead. The king felt badly and established a monastery for Egidio. Egidio became the patron saint of cripples, maimed people, lepers, the poor, and for some reason, weavers.

Today is the day, the first of September, the saint day of the town from which my father's father, my namesake, hailed. Part of me feels very Sicilian, which isn't surprising given that I grew up in a house with a Sicilian-American father and his immigrant family. Even though I am adopted, I feel this way. I talk with my hands, I yell, I hug and kiss, I worry irrationally about the evil eye, I attribute magical powers to olive oil. Linguaglossa, non ti domenticaro.


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Boston Angel

This is a photo of an angel is Boston Commons. I took it from a moving bus. Andrew and I spent a few days in Boston before and after spending a few weeks in Southampton in July with my sister. I like it there a lot.

Vancouver Island

Back at the Dogpatch on the Hat, in Malahat, that is. It is so lovely here and the kids like it too. Poor Alfred has been kvetching a lot about being overscheduled this summer. He had over 2 weeks after school ended to goof around and a few days between Los Angeles and Canada. Maybe he’s stressed about starting high school. In any case he and Andrew both adore Canada and seem to be relaxing quite effectively now.

Gretchen has one of her old students and his wife visiting and they are also good company. The husband loves to cook so we are being regaled with all sorts of homemade goodies. He told me about a "no knead dough" for bread which I will try when I get home in an attempt to resurrect my moribund dream of baking bread. He is a behavioral therapist for severely disturbed children.

Yesterday we made our annual pilgrimage to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. It's August so everything is much more crowded than usual. The main exhibit is on the Titanic. What hubris to proclaim that it was "unsinkable". Many people died because they refused to go into lifeboats - they believed that it was indeed insinkable. Most moving were the testimony of people about the musicians who did indeed play until the sink went down, never running off for their own safety. It was amazing how many fragile things could survive for 73 years in a frozen ocean at the depth of 60,000 feet.

We also enjoyed the exhibit on northwest Pacific "First Nations" (what we call Native Americans in the US, or did.) They were mostly settled rather than nomadic. Some of their masks reminded me of Japanese Noh masks.

Later we strolled on crowded Government Street visiting Rebecca's Hats and Munroe's Books. I picked up 2 of my favorite Robertson Davies books which youc an't get as individual volumes in the states: "The Rebel Angels" and "The Lyre of Orpheus".

Third Family Trip North: California to Canada

Art's Dad moved to Canada a few years ago. This our third family trip up there, to lush, cool Victoria. On our first day venturing north we climbed a bit of dusty Mount Shasta where Andrew made his own native-inspired rock towers, balancing rock on rock on rock in improbable shapes. The second day we ventured to Crater Lake in Oregon, a glorious crystal clear volcanic lake far away in the wooded mountains. The lake is the deepest in the United States and the clearest in the world. There is a marvelous volcanic island on one side of it called Wizard's Island which looks something like Merlin's hat. On another is a lava outcropping called the Phantom Ship. In the lodge I read about parties that were held there during the full moon. I would like to visit the cerulean disk of Crater Lake during a full moon. I wonder if the water will still seem blue in all that bathing white.

The next day we stopped in Portland. Unfortunately I couldn't find The Mallory hotel (of Bastard Nation Measure 58 fame) in the AAA book. We visited the Oregon Zoo, which is blissfully shaded, and which has a very good collection of arctic and the usual global beastie wonders. A favorite were the Indonesian water pigs: black, wiggly, and endangered. Washington Park is home to the zoo as well as to several other museums. We took a steam train ride to the international rose test gardens and the Japanese Garden. Alfred loved to the Japanese garden and kept trying to get away from us to think for himself, moody, reflective adolescent that he can be.

Yesterday we visit the Museum of Aviation in Seattle. Art and I loved it and I suspect the kids liked it too, despite general grumbling here and there. It made me wish again that I had had a proper math and science education. It made me fantasize about making a machine to automatically scrub my kitchen counter and suck up Charlie's fur from various surfaces.

Today we are in Vancouver, Canada and it's not clear what we will do. The boys have been mostly well-behaved with some gloominess from Alfred and some brattiness from Andrew but they are good travel-mates on the whole and I enjoy the quantity time we are having together.

Southampton, Mass

I'm in Southampton, MA helping my sister with her twin baby girls. Andrew is with me. Wow, it's a lot of work. It's hot here too, but beautiful. For some reason they have no ice cubes. I'm exhausted.

Michael is trying to set up a Vinyasa yoga studio nearby. Baby Lucia and Mamma Sofia show their respects to Laksmi, Goddess of Domestic Harmony.




Andrew does his best to be a good big cousin to Phebe, who is in a less staid moment.

I really miss my kids

I really miss them. I wish they were here. I wish summer was over.

Pastel by Stephanie Wellman