{"id":6933,"date":"2024-11-08T11:03:40","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T18:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=6933"},"modified":"2024-11-08T11:03:41","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T18:03:41","slug":"hummingbird-yum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/6933","title":{"rendered":"Hummingbird Yum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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We recently changed the name of our two-acre place from Skunk Hollow to Hummingbird Hollow. Why the name change? First an anniversary update.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As reported on October 17, I turned 75 on October 17. No, that\u2019s not a typo. Then on October 26, I celebrated what would have been my mother\u2019s 102nd<\/sup> birthday. On October 31 I celebrated the 19th<\/sup> anniversary of my moving to Mendocino. I\u2019ve now lived here longer than anywhere in my life. Then came the national election that made me glad I live in California. And on November 10, Marcia and I will celebrate our 17th<\/sup> wedding anniversary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fun fact: Marcia and I have forgotten our anniversary twice now in those seventeen years. We\u2019re just so busy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now back to the name change. What didn\u2019t we like about Skunk Hollow?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well\u2026 when we first moved here to these two acres a mile inland from the coast (making it impossible to grow tomatoes, eggplant, or corn) we were delighted to find a family of foxes sharing the land with us. There was a mama fox, a papa fox, and every year they had kits, sometimes two, sometimes three. So cute!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus when we made our first batch of blackberry jam and I made the labels for the jars, we decided to call our little dip in the terrain Fox Hollow. And for some years that was what we called our place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Then\u2026 no more foxes. We still used Fox Hollow on our labels for a couple more years, but we began to feel disingenuous referencing an animal that didn\u2019t live here anymore. This feeling coincided with a plethora of skunks traversing our deck every day at dusk, these handsome beings stopping to drink from the water bowl in front of our statue of Ganesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And since we didn\u2019t want to call our place Raven Hollow or Deer Hollow, though we have lots of both, we chose Skunk Hollow for our new name despite the stereotypical and only sometimes correct belief that skunks stink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the foxes returned! For a year. So we switched back to Fox Hollow. And then the foxes vanished and so did the skunks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Which brings us to the story of our lemon trees, two of which grow magnificently in two big tubs outside my office windows. These two lemon trees were some of the first trees I planted when we moved here twelve years ago. And because I planted those lemon trees (and two others) in the ground rife with redwood roots as all our ground is, they did not thrive. In fact, two of the lemon trees simply died and the other two grew into wimpy little bushes that never made fruit, though I lavished them with food and water and sweet words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally after seven years I heeded the advice of local gardeners who had warned me I could never grow lemon trees in the ground here. I dug up the little survivors and transferred them into hundred-gallon tubs filled with beautiful soil and they grew into big robust specimens, set hundreds of blossoms, and made lots of glorious delicious lemons and became the favorite haunt of local honeybees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And then the honeybees disappeared. Pollinators became scarce, lemons few. But we still got some<\/em> lemons every year because one breed of pollinator did not<\/em> disappear: hummingbirds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Every day, several times a day, hummingbirds visit the lemon trees to sip from the few or many blossoms, depending on the time of year and the exigencies of fate. And this year, for the first time in five years, honeybees have been visiting the blossoms and there are dozens of juicy lemons to be had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Not long ago, I took a break from writing and went out to the orchard to see how the apples were faring, and a great cloud of ravens rose from the trees, the ravens having pillaged those trees and carried away hundreds of the delectable orbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We saved enough apples to make two big batches of Apple Yum (delicious apple sauce), and the labels this time, for the first time in our tenure here, read Hummingbird Hollow Apple Yum<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

fin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Speaking of yum, you might enjoy my books<\/a> and music.<\/a> They make neato gifts<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We recently changed the name of our two-acre place from Skunk Hollow to Hummingbird Hollow. Why the name change? First an anniversary update. As reported on October 17, I turned 75 on October 17. No, that\u2019s not a typo. Then on October 26, I celebrated what would have been my mother\u2019s 102nd birthday. On October […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8204,2223,8202,8201,8203,4305],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6944,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933\/revisions\/6944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}