Category Archives: Musings

Rain came yesterday like the breaking of a spell.  I woke up to wet pavements and dripping eves and stood on my deck inhaling the damp cool air and thanking whatever front had pushed away the high pressure system that has hung over us for so long, with its record high temperatures and desert humidity.  The years-long drought is fearsome enough, but this time we added to it what seemed like a year with no winter.  Day after day with temperatures in the seventies and eighties may seem like paradise for awhile, but not when I need a cool wet season to plant my orchard, and rain to keep the soil moist so their roots can grow before the dry summer.   Yesterday’s rain, over by noon, wasn’t much, but it brought hope along with it, the possibility that conditions had changed and that it might stay cool and even rain again sometime soon.

Several times recently, as I’ve walked from the bus to work, I’ve seen a man walking a cocker spaniel. I never notice the man, and I couldn’t tell you what he looks like. All I really notice is the dog, who is, like most cocker spaniels, attention-grabbingly cute. Cockers generally have dark soulful eyes, but this little guy’s eyes are deep and tragic, dark as dead coals in his blunt little face and full of sorrow, like windows into all the darkness of the world. This morning it was raining, and he was walking out in a neon yellow dog slicker, complete with a little hood.

This is the time of year when the earliest fruit trees, the plums and cherries, begin to flower. Ordinary street trees suddenly become bouquets of complex pink blossoms, and backyard trees spill sprays of pale flowers over fences. And far away from any streets or houses, wild plum trees dot the hills, white lace against the dark oak and manzanita.

We live in one of a small number of places in the world with a Mediterranean climate, which means, among other things, dry summers and mild, rainy winters. In our part of California, winter feels much more like spring. In the cool air and the rains that fall after six months of dry air, heat and sun, little tender green grasses, sorrels, and mints blanket the wet earth. The hills turn from bitten gray-brown to loden and then emerald green. The dark mornings and early nightfalls of the December holidays and the letdown period of January aren’t a time of cold, stillness and snow, but of renewal, with frosty mornings and brisk days. Deciduous trees are bare, but paperwhite narcissus and a few roses are blooming in my yard, along with winter daphne, and on my walks I see occasional winter iris, grape hyacinth, and crocus.