Please click on the photo of the Eucalyptus to see a lot more beautiful detailsIn 1967 I was a ten years old kid living in rural Arizona. We spent a lot of time outdoors. The house my parents built, with their own four hands, was a solitary dwelling. There were neighbors but we couldn't see them from where we lived. Though the holding my parents purchased and named “Lizard Acres” was only two acres of land, from a kids point of view we were the owners of thousands of open land. We ran wild in the unfenced high desert glory, screaming and yelling to our hearts content. We took regular excursions by foot and bike down the network of dirt roads that crossed the high desert around us.
Children played outside a lot then and nobody I knew had play structures. But we didn’t need them because we had plants, rocks and a vastness of dirt. There were great winds we called ‘tumbleweed storms’, that brought in piles of tumbleweeds. We built forts out of the big prickly branches. Our most favored play spot was the depths of a creek that ran only when the snow melted in the Huachucha Mountains. I found it particularly exciting to wade in the spot where it ran across the middle of the dirt road that ran past our house. It was softer there then the rocky stretch that actually crossed our land. We also had the impression we were less likely to step on the snakes and tarantulas we always had to be cautious of, when we turned over stones. I think now that they would probably have avoided the cold snow-melt water.
The job market for computer programmers dried up when the civil service contract at Fort Huachuaca wasn’t renewed. My father landed a new job in Southern California. Our new town was nothing like the rural fastness of Arizona. Houses were built close together and when my sister and I shouted out during our time together, my mother had to remind us to be quiet because we had neighbors living right next door.
Suburban life was exciting though. There with paved roads with buttons you pushed to inform the light signal that a pedestrian had arrived. (In fact I can remember learning the word ‘pedestrian’ the first day I started in my new classroom.) We could walk a long two blocks to a bus and arrive at a movie theatre or shopping mall thirty or forty minutes later. It was heady stuff for a sixteen year old and her ten year-old kid sister.
Southern California offered work not only to my father, but also my sister. There was a Baskin Robbins ice cream store with numerous flavors and, just as generous then as she is now, she bought me regular treats with the money she made baby-sitting.
I started to play indoors more often, but sometimes my big sister took me on a walking excursion. They were nothing like our wild rambles in Arizona but one day she took me to the edge of a golf course she’d found. Though we couldn’t walk on the manicured grass, we could hangout under the tall shady trees that ringed the course. Back in Lizard Acres the biggest trees we’d even seen had been the mesquites that grew along our creek. Here there were real tall trees that I’d only seen in books. The eucalyptus were my favorites. They had a lovely resin’y smell. Their bark peeled off and you could carry pieces of it home. Best of all, they produced sticky seed pods that my sister gathered up and carried home, where she strung them on a necklace using a heavy upholstery needle and carpet thread. The necklace smelled like heaven.
One of the reasons my parents had wanted to land a job for my father in California, was the system of affordable public universities. I missed my big sister terribly when she went off to U.C.S.D. in the fall of 1968. One day I found the eucalyptus pods she’d strung together and left behind. The sticky seed pods had each opened up in a chain of tiny feathery bloom, and the necklace still smelled like heaven.
I’d been so excited to leave that I’d left early, and gotten into town long before Eszter’s last class. I dropped my bag in front of my favorite fireplace, and put on a pair of good walking shoes. Some exercise after the long drive was in order, and there was a delicious looking antique store downtown, that I’d spotted on my last visit.
Antique prices in Bear Valley were just as high, if not higher, than those in the Bay Area. Luckily for me, and my credit card, I wasn’t planning any big purchases. I didn’t particularly gladden the heart of any of the dealers, as I wiled away the afternoon, turning over blue and white transfer ware, spreading out dainty embroidered linens and checking the clasps on the backs of brooches for sturdy catches.
It wasn’t until I asked about old photographs, that I slipped my hand in my pocket to finger the two twenty dollar bills I’d budgeted.
“Hilda’s got some, I think.” The dealer had given up on me when I told her that I wasn’t interested in spending nineteen dollars for the antique, porcelain dog pin. The hound’s stance had reminded me of a dog I’d once known, but up close the face didn’t look like Freckles.
Vintage photographs are a particular passion of mine. I know lots of people enjoy them, but I’ve spent hours studying them. I’ve always had a feeling that I’m looking for one particular photo, that hasn’t quite turned up. But like the quintessential gambler, I always expect it to turn up the next time.
As I reached behind the art deco lamp and drew out the antique secretary box that Hilda pointed out, something inside me quivered. There was a something in this box, that was meant just for me.
to be continued
Please click on the photo above to enjoy more vintage details
Go ahead and click on the picture, to enjoy more of the beauty of Central California in the fall.
I’d first visited the area on a trip to Hearst Castle. My then nine-year-old daughter had put her foot down, when it came to roughing the entire trip. She was willing to camp out, but she didn’t see why we should have to make our own supper. It’s true that the two of us aren’t the world’s best cooks. My husband tends to do most of the supper making. But Jacob was doing field work in the Wasatch Range and we were fending for ourselves. I considered putting on my best determined parent act, and reminding her about that girl scout badge she was working on, but we’d been driving for three hours and, I’d just seen a sign for the Bear Valley Farm Diner.
The diner was everything she and I had wanted. It had been assembled in the 1970’s to resemble a pseudo-Victorian farmhouse setting, and the decoration hadn’t been changed since. There were french fries for her and a salad bar for me, plus air conditioning and hot water in the bathroom. Everything two campers could desire. I’d had a strong attachment to Bear Valley ever since.
Eszter and I had enjoyed camping together - there had been a beach within walking distance which helped a lot - but neither of us had ever been inspired to revisit Hearst’s overblown collection of more goodies than any one man could properly utilize. We had, however, stopped by the pseudo-farm every few years, on our regular trips to Disneyland. The kitschy décor of the restaurant, with it’s calico tie-back curtains and idyllic farmyard murals, gave us a soothing sense of returning to an imaginary era, nearly as good as our favorite fantasy world farther south.
Two years ago, Eszter had chosen a school from among nine colleges and universities into which she’d been accepted. And she’d chosen to go to U.Mo., just up the hill from Bear Valley Farm. I was only too happy to make the occasional three-hour drive down, to drop off clothes or sports equipment she couldn’t live without, because the Farm had a hotel as well as the diner. And every room in the hotel had it’s own gas-burning fireplace that turned on with an electrical switch. Just the spot for hanging out in an overstuffed wing chair and working on my laptop.
I suppose it was just the in-room fireplaces and the association with my daughter’s childhood that attracted me to the area. It couldn’t be anything else that had caused me to suggest to my daughter that she might cherish a visit from her mother in the middle of the quarter. Eszter was uncertain. Over the last two years, we’d transported every piece of sports equipment from the garage at home, and her closet was full. Still, I insisted she humor me. We could eat supper together at the diner, for old time sake. I was really coming down to visit a nearby specialty native plants nursery on the way back home the next day, I told her. The business was a small one, and open only certain days.
My husband was at work in remote area of Nevada. Having been married to a geologist for over thirty years, I long ago learned to enjoy time to myself as well as I appreciate our time together. But I suppose my daughter figured I was lonely, and I let her think it. The drive down highway 101 through the fields around Salinas, King City and Paso Robles was alight with color. The grape vines were decked in their autumn finery and the distant coast range was a compelling mass of blue shadows.
But I knew that something more than scenery was drawing me, inexorably, to the central coast.
to be continued
The weather’s been funny everywhere this summer. It poured rain several of the days I was in Madrid – a pattern the locals told me was normal ahora, pero antes, no! Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had a cooler than usual July and August. And my facebook-friend Judy, up in Oregon was most unhappy because it either rained incessantly or was boiling hot, nothing like the quintessential blackberry-pickin’ season I always imagined in the northwest.
I wonder if the funny weather is why every peach I tried, this summer have been crummy? I look forward to fresh peaches all year, but every one I’ve tried this year has been, what my mother would call, ‘mealy’.
Last week my husband hopefully brought home one last lovely looking box of peaches. Surely this batch would be different! They were so attractive, a beautiful shade of yellow with lovely red blushes. Today they were perfectly ripe, giving just, so, when you pressed one finger against their delicate complexions.
They tasted lousy.
What does good old Ann Landers say? Or was it Ben Franklin who suggested the connection between lemons and lemonade? But in the case of peaches, it’s cobbler. Tonight we made, and ate, the best peach cobbler I’ve ever eaten. Could it be, the mealier the peach, the better the cobbler?
Pretty easy.
1) I mixed up a batch of my 1960’s Style Buttermilk Biscuits (it’s the same recipe I wrote about earlier this month, in the art-journal entry “Kidhood Memories:1960’s Style Buttermilk Biscuits”) and filled the bottom of a deep dish, square type casserole dish.
2) I set the oven to 400 degrees (instead of the 450 degrees I’d use for biscuits)
3) Cut up 3 large, delicious looking, but mealy tasting yellow free-stone peaches and covered the biscuit dough. Then I topped the peaches with some sugar (maybe ½ a cup?) and a sprinkling of cinnamon.
4) I bakes the cobbler for 20 minutes (checking after 10 and finding it still very much un done). Then I turned off the oven, leaving the pan inside the still hot oven and took my dog for a walk around the park! (Probably for about 20 more minutes). When we returned from the dog walk, I turned the oven back on, but now at 450 degrees. It was done and fork clean, 10 minutes later.
Yummm. The mealier, the better!
Slowly I laid the old piece of paper down on top of my desk, and re-examined the envelope I’d found in the old book. I still knew Lizzie’s writing, even after all these years. And she was right when she said I’d remember that typing project. Of course I’d have recognized her handwriting anywhere.
Even after all these years. I still remembered her modern take on a copperplate hand. That paper had been twenty pages long and I’d struggled mightily to read her funny ‘f’s and ‘p’, bfore I keyed them into the file. It had been terribly important to Lizzie that that particular piece of writing be captured in digital format.
When we first became roommates, back in our freshman year, I’d explained to her that the new word processor technology allowed text to be changed and re-printed, without having to be entirely re-typed, and she’d remembered. That was back before computers got personal and we still did a lot of our programming on card decks. When Lizzie had first begun working on her senior project about Elizabeth Snowden, she told me that it was terribly important that this paper, of all papers, be kept in this form.
It was several years before personal computers had emerged on the market, and the only people at the university who had access to word processor technology were Computer Science majors. Lizzie and I were absolute soul mates, closer than sisters, she always said. So I had typed the paper learning all about the life of Civil War spy Elizabeth Snowden’s contribution to the Northern Cause in the process. Lizzie had turned up some old volumes in the university archives that no historians seemed to have stumbled on. She thought it was probably because they’d been buried deep underneath a pile of Confederate bills that someone had donated, that no one had unearthed them before. I guess Confederate money is a glut on the historical donation market.
From her reading, my roommate painted the picture of a glamorous woman who, she argued, had made it possible for the devastating American war to end sooner than it otherwise might.
to be continued.....
Dear Diana,
I found a patch of wild blackberries just up the road this morning and picked three baskets full to make into jam. They're the last I’ll find this year. The raccoons have been making regular inroads on the vines I planted when I moved in, but they’d missed these. It might be because the dogs like to ramble up that way at night. Though, in truth, the raccoons around here don’t seem to have any fear of my hounds. More likely, it’s because they were half hidden under a grassy bank.
I’ve always been a little suspicious when berry picking because of that time you and I stopped and picked olallieberries on the coast, and saw the snake. I swore it was a rattler and you thought otherwise. We don’t have olallieberries around her, not yet any way.
Remember how we made berry cobbler that afternoon? Everybody in the house, and all their friends came over? Elliot played “Cripple Creek” on his banjo and I knew all the lyrics. Was that boy cute or what? All that Dixieland talk and the charm to go with it. Then you mixed in modern attitudes towards the environment and ethnic diversity and he was it! It seemed like there was a different girl coming over to see him every week. If I’d been any more interested in blond, southern manhood than I am now, that is to say not at all, I’d have fallen for him myself. But I do sometimes admit to wondering if he ever got married!
I was up to my elbows in berries and sugar this afternoon, remembering that day. Sugar’s been hard to get since the war began, but a military gentleman owed me a favor, and I got him to pay up in sugar. Our boys in blue, particularly those of his rank, seem to be able to get whatever they want. It’ll sure be nice to have those jars put up this winter.
I suppose you’ll be surprised to see this letter. It’s been a few years, one way or another since we saw each other, hasn’t it? You’ve been on my mind a good bit, and I’ve been meaning to get in touch. There’s a lot to tell, and it’s hard to know exactly where to start. I suppose I ought to begin by telling you that that paper you typed up for me in that class I took that last winter quarter, “A Study in Original Source”, has really come in useful in my, well I guess you’d just have to call it my new life.
Click on the picture above for more arty details
Been eyeing this lovely spot of wild fennel by the edge of the train tracks on my walking route back from the Atherton Library, for a month or more now. I know Californians who forage for this floral treat. The bulb, seeds, flowers and pollen are all fodder for the native gourmet's kitchen. I'm not ready to take the chance on roadside produce. The creek below is sprayed for mosquito larve and there's also the potential that some other, toxic, little plant might creep in with the greenery. I'm better off sticking with the Sunday Farmer's Market downtown.
My new friend Marcia, from piano class, says she uses sour-grass to flavor her homemade knish recipe. Hummmm... check with somebody who knows more than me first, ok? Your local medical provider, maybe. If you've got one. 
Three years ago, when she’d first graduated and landed the job at McKendricks, Alma had found the idea of working in San Francisco terribly exotic. The noise, bustle and colors of the vibrant metropolis was like working in a living art show. The diverse group of people who’d moved from all over the world, just to live in the city by the bay, made every co-worker, restaurant lunch or overheard conversation a virtual trip to another country. And the job itself represented the heart and soul of new methods and ideas that were building the countrys economy back to what it used to be.
But standing on the overpass, looking down on the old train tracks, Alma realized that she wasn’t really interested in business, no matter how vital a force it was in people’s lives. She’d never be able to muster the kind of passion for it that the people around her seemed to have. And she seemed to feel her creative potential drying up, when she thought about the status report she needed to finish tonight for tomorrows meeting. A lifetime, or at least forty or fifty years, of walking home from the same metro station stop every day after a work day spent in the city, stretched before her as unending as the train tracks below the overpass. Well, at least she’d found that great historical e-novel at the library last weekend. That would be something to look forward to after she got the report done.
Alma peered down through the metal screen that protected walkers on the overpass. The same train was there, that always sat on an old spur track. Other trains swooshed past on their way to and from their peninsula destinations, but the old train had, she supposed, been retired from service. And, for some reason, after three years it hadn’t been worth anybody’s while to collect it and send it on to the scrap yard, or wherever old trains went when they were past their prime. She leaned her head against the mesh and shut her eyes. She already felt past her prime, and she hadn’t even reached her thirtieth birthday.
A gust of unexpectedly frigid wind blew suddenly against the back of her bare neck. She straightened up and opened her eyes in surprise. It was only September, and she hadn’t even brought a light fleece jacket to work. Alma tucked her brief case more firmly under her arm, and began to turn away from the wall. It was at that moment, that she saw that something about the old train below had changed.
For one thing, it was moving towards her. For another, it was now brilliantly, and very strangely, colored. A loud whistle, unlike any train whistle Alma had ever heard before, suddenly split the air and as it did so, she felt herself falling through the mesh screen, straight down onto the tracks below.
Was she falling, or was she flying?
Engaged on an exploratory walk in suburban Millbrae last Friday, I was surprised to find that not all Time Portals sport that vintage look.
When I was little my older sister used to play this song on the piano for me. According to the "Singing in Harmony"* book that sat on our piano, it was the song that the sphinx sang to Peer when he went to Egypt on his wanderings away from his homeland. The book has lovely line drawings of the whole story behind Peer Gynt, and I still enjoy reading the story and trying out the right hand version of the melodies.
You’ll find Las Pilitas Road in San Luis Obispo County when you get off the 101 freeway, going south, just before you head over the grade . It’s quite a ways down to the old Las Pilitas Railroad bridge. You have to drive SLO, and watch out for animals that might stray across the road.
Go ahead, park the car and, walk across. You just may find more than a view of the creek on the other side.
Take your chances in 1917. You’ve got a guide waiting, after all. What’s her story?
Click on the picture above, to get the details.
It's been a really spider'y summer, and I've gotten a kick out of every different eight-legged visitor I've managed to photograph. At this age I don't shriek like I used to. OK, I admit I talk to them as I pop the container on top, slide the old piece of postcard stock underneath and carry them out on a move to the garden.
This story was inspired by our families experience creating homemade pasta this afternoon. One thing we learned was that none of us is likely to pursue a career in noodle making. Please click on the picture for more fun poster-style details.
