3/23/2006

You know, if I were hired to write a blog, I would have long since been fired…

I’ve just taken the last hour to re-read blogs that I’ve written over the past two years – and I look at the date in August of LAST YEAR when I wrote my last entry and ask myself, “what have you been doing with yourself, girl?”

Don’t really have a good response to that one yet. Gimme time, tho – I’ll think of something…

But now it’s Springtime, and today was the first day that it was warm enough to actually feel like Spring. As I drove my mom to her dialysis for the day, we happen to notice that there were strips of tiny ice-plants along the roadside and some of the field edges as we followed the Arroyo Grande valley back towards Lopez Lake. Those little strips were vivid purple swashes that contrasted with all of the green surrounding them. The hills behind were green – or at least, as green as hills with very poor ground cover will get with ample rainfall. The sky above was blue, virtually cloudless.

Then, as we turned onto another lane that wanders closer to the hills amid various and sundry vineyards and wineries, the sides of the road were freckled with little green puffs of California Poppy plants – all of which were bursting with the bright orange flowers. The spring poppies are so happy, so full of life – the summer poppies are generally the die-hards blooming more to prove a point than anything else. What’s neat is that with a law making it illegal to touch those plants, weed abatement on the side of the road (at least on this little lane) is done by hand with a weed-eater. The grass is cut away, leaving the little green and orange-speckled puff-balls standing tall and proud.

I’ve learned to appreciate the local agriculture, making this drive three times a week over the last two and a half years. I’ve watched the vineyards go from trimmed and tied-down and virtually nude vines to the fragile yellow-green of new leaves, to more verdant and covering mature leaves, to seeing the bunches of grapes dangling, to seeing the leaves turn golden, then brown, and then drop away, to seeing the vines looking like a person who stuck a finger in a light socket with vines stretching long and far in all directions. Then, it seems, within a few short weeks – maybe three of them – the vines are pruned, tied back, and readied for the process to begin all over again.

We have a grape vine here at the house too – right now it’s been trimmed in what we’ve affectionately called a “Butch” for years. The new leaves don’t usually start to show for another couple of weeks yet – and yet, I watch my own vine (a very OLD vine – set out when this house was moved into its final location about 100 yrs ago) go through much the same stages of the vines in the vineyards. We’ve made wine from those grapes – wine, jelly, juice, you name it. And we give grapes away – boy howdy do we!

One thing I’ve noticed: those vines in the vineyards are never allowed to grow to their full potential – each year they’re pruned back to mere nubbins. Our vine – a single plant of old-fashioned Concord slip-skin grapes of the purple-black variety – covers an arbor of roughly eight feet by ten feet – and we’ll eventually have to set in new posts and let it actually take over the extra four feet it is encroaching on toward the house. It is a healthy, happy vine with roots deep in the remains of the old septic tank (now filled to the brim with broken whiskey bottles, courtesy of the old man who lived in the house before we bought it) and watered year-round by the run-off from our greenhouse.

The wisteria vine outside my window is ever so much more grown up than before – I really hadn’t considered how much having a living awning over my window would mean that I can’t see out quite as well as before – but I’m enjoying the blooms that drape so gracefully long before any leaves make their appearance. I can remember when this wisteria was nothing more than a remnant of a vine that USED to cover our chimney – but my dad cut it down (he thought) about thirty years ago when he rebuilt the brickwork. For years after, we’d find a wisteria vine trailing off through the rose bushes – and I’d tolerate it for a while before my dad, bless him, would come along and lop it off again. One day, he decided to keep it. Now that little limp vine is as big around as a garden hose, has been trained up onto a trellis.

Nature is persistent – have you noticed? A wisteria vine, cut and actively discouraged for decades, eventually gets a trellis of its own over which it is invited to bloom its light lavender canopy in early Spring. A walnut or avocado that falls and the resulting sprig that grows not being cut down or pulled out becomes a new tree. We have one English walnut baby and one avocado baby – both in bad places for walls and other stuff on the property. The walnut is producing nuts now – the avocado, I’m not sure. But despite the fact that my husband is starting to get that look in his eye that says that I may have to wish these interlopers farewell soon, I take heart in the fact that Nature doesn’t care – she doesn’t ask permission to push ahead.

I guess there’s a lesson there – that whatever the obstacles in Life (capital L), to just keep on doing what one is supposed to be doing and eventually reap the rewards of a job well-done. There’s another lesson in agriculture: there is a time to grow – and a time to die back.

As my parents push closer and closer to that threshold to what comes after this life, I’m finding that looking to Nature to help me cope is working. Every year, the mustard blooms on the hills, the lupine blooms amid the grass, the poppies are carefully trimmed around by patient men with weed-whackers. And each year, the plants that bloom and make the drive on the back-roads a joy are new ones – not the same ones from the year before.

When I was young, I watched my parents take care of my mother’s mom until she was too infirm to remain at home. I took it for granted that, when the time came, I would do my stint in taking care of my parents until their health becomes too precarious for me to handle alone. I can only hope that one of my kids follows suit, IF it is to be that either I or my husband live that long.

But even if it doesn’t come to pass – this is how Nature works. Were it not for the constant movement toward that threshold, there would not be room for the new generation to make a place for itself. Death is as much a part of life as the Springtime is – and just as necessary.

Maybe this is just me, getting myself mentally prepared to say goodbye. There’s never going to be an easy way to do it – but it’s something I feel is in my own best interests. My brother is coming to spend a week with us in May – and there are times when I wonder if he’ll have two parents to come home to, the way things are going. He’s going to see a huge difference – one that I see but don’t find as startling. I’m like that little frog in the saucepan over a low flame – I jumped into cold water, and now the hot hasn’t got me frantic. At least, not QUITE yet…

I love Springtime – not quite as much as Autumn, but almost.

I *WILL* try to write in here more faithfully – even though I sometimes wonder if anybody (other than Adelaise – bless her heart!) reads these things regularly. But, to be honest, right now I’m busy just making sense of the One Day At A Time. If another few months pass without any new material, consider that I’m just keeping doing what I’m supposed to be doing – and forgive me.