After writing a year and a half ago that we hadn’t had any gopher plants come up in years, this summer a seedling somehow popped up, so now I can show you what they look like.

Next, these cheerfully declare each year that December is for green and yellow in California.  They’re just starting to bloom, and they open up in the light each morning and then pull the blankets over their eyes at night. They totally charm me.  And if there should be a freeze, the plants look for awhile like all is lost–and then they grow right back up and bloom all over again, declaring the season theirs and not to be wasted.

My kind of plant.

I was on my way to the post office today and pulled over to snap what picture I could get, curious that one pond in the marshlands here was full of birds (enbiggen to see them) and the other had none in sight.  For whatever it’s worth, the one big fire we had in town last summer was at the city compost heap, that long low mound in the upper right.

I have a fondness for gophers, and I love how this last picture resembles the fur on one.   On the other side of the street and down a bit from where I pulled over to snap the baylands, there was a gopher mound.  One that made me laugh, albeit a tad ruefully, for its sheer ambitiousness: there was a paved bike path.  Then a grassy strip, then the two-lane access road I was on, then a busy freeway with eight lanes’ worth of pavement, and the mound was between the access road and that freeway.

I wondered how many times, tunneling under the path and then the two lanes, the gopher had tried to come up for air or to see if it could finish its tunnel yet and had hit hard pavement with its paws or head.  Nope, that doesn’t work. Keep going.  It had finally made it all the way to where there was soft dirt on top and green growing things and new flavors of roots to chew on.

Good thing it could go back to where it had come from.

I got a message out of the blue yesterday from a friend I hadn’t heard from since high school graduation.  Turns out she’d been looking for how to contact a classmate I’m in touch with who’s been quite ill and who I’m sure was thrilled at being offered pictures of them in first grade together.  Then today, another long-lost classmate sent me a hello too.  I tell you, in great delight: you CAN go back where you came from!