Not much UV at this hour. I ventured forth. Curious how many buds have opened up alongside the window on the azaleas, while the rest further away wait awhile longer: is it the extra warmth? The extra sunlight from the reflection?

The allium from outer space (don’t know if the squirrels planted it or the birds) doing a Bill-the-Cat impression:

And inside. My tall Dancing Queens look different each year they bloom. From orchestra to jazz to a simpler folk melody sung along to a guitar, whatever may be playing, they dance freely with the tune.

It’s a beautiful day out there.

And inside, as well.

Snowing in March. California style: shovel-free.

Sitting here in our family room, these white flowers whose name I wish I knew suddenly required of me that I look up out the window and notice them. That I notice that it’s November and that they’re blooming and that there are things about living in northern California that I enjoy very much.

So I picked up the camera, walked outside–something I, with my lupus, too seldom do–but it was 3:30, the late-fall San Francisco fog had rolled in, and the sky was darkening; the exposure seemed like it couldn’t be a risk. The flash went off repeatedly as I was snapping pictures. The leaves on the apple trees are a beautiful bright yellow. The lemons are turning color to match. I picked one, and as I sat here quietly typing away again on my email, its lovely scent was on my hands, so much so that I went back out and picked more and now a lemon cake is happening in my kitchen. I will cook down some frozen mixed berries with just a smidgen of sugar to pour as a sauce over the slices after it cools.

My mother and mother-in-law were newlyweds together, friends living across the street from each other in DC proper, before they bought houses and moved their growing families to the suburbs. They both owned the then-recently-released Betty Crocker cookbook, and Mom Hyde told my mom that the hot milk sponge cake was a great recipe to try.

When I was a teenager, I stumbled across that same cookbook, 1950 edition, at a sale being held as a school fundraiser. I recognized it, and since I was about to go off to college, it seemed a good idea and I bought it.

Mint condition. Original edition. Looked like it had never been opened. I have since been told it would have been worth a fair amount had I left it like that, but like our mothers before us had done, I put it to the good use it was meant for.

And when we moved here, I pulled out that same hot milk sponge cake recipe that I remember my mom making more often than any other cake, for a treat for my kids, except, I made a substitution. And later told my mother-in-law about it.

Why, she asked me, even if it was so good, why would I want to use fresh lemon juice for most of the milk? Wasn’t that, like, hideously expensive?

She’d forgotten we had that tree.

Tart and not too sweet and the top with an intensely lemony melt-in-your-mouth texture like the filling of a fine pastry. Almost no fat nor guilt. You can have your cake here, and enjoy it, too.

I was going to clip a gladiolus stalk and bring it inside yesterday after we got home; we have a patch of them that my mom planted for me a few years ago. A bag of bulbs on sale, late in the season, while my folks were visiting that year, hopes that something might still grow from them, a risk and a chance taken, a morning’s hard work on her part, and here we are now.

Just as I went to open the sliding door, a hummingbird appeared and buzzed the flowers. No way was I going to take food from a hummingbird!

Last night we got a rare summer rain, and today a lot more stalks opened up. Two of them, however, toppled of their own weight and snapped over. Fair game. There were a lot more for the hummingbirds than me at this point, and those two are now inside in a vase. Glorious. Thanks, Mom!

I promised Lene a shot of our tree to go with her tree photo. This is the flowering pear that nearly died after the woodpecker ringed it, but recovered; there are no brown leaves this year. Hale and hearty and tall, it lifts my spirits every day to see it.

Meantime, I seem to be able to get large or quite small photos on WordPress, but I haven’t quite found out how to get that perfect size yet (but at least you can click on them).

I planted a small patch of baby gladioluses, years ago, and the plant that I will forever now think of as the Orchid Tree (I like that, Karin!) grew its leaves around their spot. 

This popped up and grew from under the neighbor’s side of the fence to come and chat with the flowers on mine.   Seemed appropriate for the holiday weekend.

I went back out there a few more times. My gopher was clearly slowing down as the day went on; I wondered why he never went back down into his mound. I startled him at one point, (sorry gopher), and to make it up to him, I found a quite long dried straw and stroked his back gently with it. He seemed to like that, and calmed down while I did that.

And then one of the kids and I headed down to Karen’s Rug and Yarn Hut shop in Campbell, where we set the date for my first official booksigning there on June 23 and chatted awhile. Ran one more errand. Then came home and decided to go check on our little guy in the back yard.

Who was gone. The zucchinis would be safe after all. But…but…! On his last day, his little gopheriness had been well loved, and for that I am grateful to a degree that might seem silly. I debated easing him back down nice and safe into his mound with a shovel, but practicality and basic common sense intervened. I just hope he doesn’t fall out of his paper bag for the trashmen next week.

A number of years ago, I planted a garden and had gopher holes appear in my yard; one day I went out there, and a new hole had appeared right at the stem of my zucchini plant and the zucchini was gone. This was war.

I asked the neighbor’s advice, and then stuck the water hose down the hole and turned the water on for two days to discourage the thing from thinking my yard was a hospitable place. My water bill jumped thirty dollars, but the gopher just laughed and moseyed on over a bit to a new spot. So at someone else’s advice, I went to Common Ground in Palo Alto, bought some Gopher Plant seeds, and tried that.

It’s supposed to be an old Native American tactic; the roots supposedly give the gophers poison ivy, and they stay away. And it worked! We went from lots of mounds to no further signs of any activity. Those plants multiplied like crazy, and it was a bit of work to get rid of them after they no longer seemed needed, but both plants and gophers have been gone about ten years now.

This year mounds started popping up again, not in the same area around the perimeter of the yard this time, but dead center of the back. About an hour ago I saw a beautiful jay outside my window here and decided to try to get a picture of it. The jay didn’t seem to mind, so I got closer–and what I’d first thought were leaves near its feet suddenly moved.

I have never watched a gopher going about its day before. When I got close, it held still for the camera. When it walked, its first steps were a tumble to one side till it got its bearings; I looked at it and thought, poor little gopher, did a speeder smash into your car, too? It totally charmed me. It walked like me. It had lousy balance like me. And it was a total ham for the camera.

I kept going back out there and looking at it again, and it kept holding still every time I went near. It even let me stroke its back with my foot (very gently, and with my shoe on; I ain’t quite so dumb as all that.) So now what do I do? Put a basket over it so it can’t escape? (It’s a GOPHER, like that’s going to work!) It’s like the Alice in Wonderland scene, where Alice is introduced to the food, which curtsies to her, and then she can’t eat it. You can’t off an animal you’ve made friends with.

Clay soil, good soil aeration. My own personal rototiller, right?

I never liked zucchinis that much anyway.

Not long after we moved here, our ancient Gravenstein apple trees were dying of old age, and I bought every kind of apple I could find in the markets to decide what to replace them with.

And so we planted a Fuji tree, a variety that was pretty new at the time.

It grew well enough right away, and we’d been told we would have apples by the second year. The third, fourth, fifth years went by, the tree branched out beautifully, but where were my apples?

Till one morning, quite early, I happened to go in the back yard. Now, of all the pests imported to a place they don’t belong, with the original intention of providing food (or whatever) to the new settlers there–snails? Someone couldn’t live without their escargots?? And so California is besieged by snails and slugs with no predators (they’re not dumb), and, lo and behold, my Fuji was in flower: and there was a whole herd of snails and slugs sliming back down the trunk at daylight, with a few still munching on apple blossoms before calling it a night.

I read recently that they won’t climb over broken eggshells. Makes sense. I mentioned this to someone buying a 25 lb box of snail poison in the hardware store, and he listened sympathetically, but exclaimed, “Lady–I’d have to open a restaurant!” to get enough eggshells.

I’ve been baking a bit lately–it’s appleblossom time.

After our remodel, we had a long bare spot in front of the windows along the front walkway. I bought a packet of silver dollar flower seeds on impulse, and scattered them along there and told them basically to fend for themselves, while trying to figure out what to really put there.

Never buy flowering bushes when they’re not actually flowering: the pink azaleas we followed that up with there? Regardless of the tags on the plants, the one on the end turned out to be white, like when a dyer ties the knots too tight on a hank before throwing it in the dyepot. (Guess who learned that lesson?…) Maybe that’s why we never took the white one back out. It fits, somehow.

Meantime, the silver dollars established themselves here and there among the azaleas, particularly here on the corner, with the white azalea behind them, hanging out with the oddball. Their name comes from what their seed pod looks like after the flowers are gone; they’re biennials, coming back year after year. They’re also called Honesty plant. Never knew honesty was a color. And a majestically purple one at that. Curious.

When our moving van finished up and drove away, 20 years ago, the retired neighbor across the street, who’d been casually watching off and on all day, sauntered over to our side and said wryly, by way of introduction, “I saw them taking a snow shovel off the truck. What do you think you need THAT for??”

Well hey, if it ever snows here, we could rent it out for a hundred bucks an hour and make a killing, right?
(Our tree, the neighbor’s car.)

There were once three Modesto ash trees towering over our backyard here. One died well before we arrived, and the former owners had left the thick trunk lopped off at about eight feet high. Woodpeckers nested near the top of the dead wood every year, and if you were still, you could watch the parents flitting in zigzags from the branches of the remaining trees above it, never flying directly into the nest but always feinting right, then left, then darting in at the last. Sometimes you could even see them feeding their babies; we held ours up high so they could look in and see, too, from a safe distance.

Those other two trees, though, were attacked by the clouds of unpredatored white flies that hit California not long after we moved here; borers moved in for the kill, and a quarter of one ash fell across our yard and beyond in a storm. They were a danger. We had plans to add onto the house anyway, and they were in the way. Down they all came.

The next spring, our woodpeckers came back. Where were their trees? Hey! And so, they ringed the ornamental pear out front: they pecked a series of closely-connected deep holes, most of the way around, to cut off the flow of the sap. A naturalist explained to me why: it wouldn’t be ready this year, but by the next it would be dead and easier to carve a new nest out of. Just the natural order of things adjusting to the new circumstances. The sap oozing out attracted ants, which would provide food for the birds.

I heard them going at it, but didn’t realize till later where they were and what was happening. The pear tree suffered, badly; half the leaves turned quickly brown and we were sure we were going to lose it. It is hard, at times, for someone who grew up in the woods like I did to live in such a city place as it is here, and I need every tree; I didn’t want to lose this one, too.

The next year about a third of the leaves that came out grew to only half their normal length before giving up and turning a shrivelled brown. There was just not enough sap getting through with that break line in the trunk.

Same thing the next year.

But by now it has been a dozen years. I hope the woodpeckers have long since found a new spot; this tree was far too close to the ground for them anyway, the neighbors’ cats could have reached them where they pecked it. But. Somehow that flowering pear, not much more than a sapling when it got ringed, survived the process, and it grew and bloomed more and more just the same.

And look at it now.

Happy Spring.

Seven years ago, I bought these daffodil bulbs, and then was head-injured when a speeder totalled my car and his before I could plant them. I wanted my flowers! I dug along the front walkway with one hand, holding onto the spinning ground with the other. Every year since then, they have reminded me why I did that. Life goes forward. The daffodils celebrate every year–after the rains come.

Typed the woman whose Crohn’s went nuts at 4 am today. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll be fine. We just get these occasional blips to remind us how good we have it. And to make us go notice the flowers. I think I’ll go snip the rain-bent ones and bring them inside where they can perfume-ify the kitchen.)

Edited to add: between when I started writing that and when it actually got posted, most of the daffodils doing faceplants in those pictures taken this afternoon brushed the rain off themselves and got halfway back up. The two that did not are now in a vase.