I have a friend, I think he’s still alive, who lives in Maine and says there are no seasons in California. Spoken like someone who has never lived in California and spent a long rainy winter pining for spring, or a long dry summer yearning for the rainy season.
When I dropped out of college in 1969, I was semi-fluent in Spanish thanks to a wonderful professor of Spanish I was lucky enough to study with. My semi-fluency in Spanish came in handy when in 1970 I went on an expedition with a marine biologist and his family.
We drove south along the Pacific coast all the way from California to Costa Rica searching for specimens of boring clams, not uninteresting clams, but clams that bore into rocks. And though we found few boring clams south of California, by the end of our odyssey I was fluent in Spanish, fluency I have subsequently mostly lost.
Our two lemon trees are in the midst of blossoming profusely. It remains to be seen if this astonishing blooming will produce much viable fruit, but in the meantime the thousands of blossoms are attracting more bees and hummingbirds than we’ve ever seen around here.
For the first thirteen of my twenty years in Mendocino, the local pelican presence was a small one. Then in the aftermath of a big storm that battered the west coast of North America, thousands of pelicans arrived in Mendocino and nested on the islets adjacent to our headlands, and ever since then we have lots of pelicans spending time hereabouts every year.
On a recent beach walk, this beautiful pelican was sunbathing on the shore and allowed me to snap his/her portrait. What a bird!
October is my birthday month and is also the time of year when our aloe plant sends forth her remarkable orange flower, which always puts me in mind of Dr. Seuss.
This plant has birthed two others I have potted, and now that those two are thriving, I am hopeful they will send forth flowers one day.
I wrote this blog after writing several drafts of an essay about the sorrows of our time in which I tried to make sense of why the people running our country are so intent on doing harm to others, but decided instead to share these other musings.
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Ahora Entras Tu from Todd’s album Ahora Entras Tu.