Category Archives: Photographs

Redbud in bloom, snow below 3,000 feet, .60 inches rain and 36° at daylight.

It wasn’t wet December and a season’s worth
of gray rain when I got my secret wish, but March,
in like a lamb and leaving us half-a-season more,

plus our unemployed bulls rubbing thick skulls,
horns and winter hair upon the plastic pedestal
in their pasture down the road – brittle, sun-faded

to a milky green – foreign obelisk, aboveground
junction box for a hundred tangled, tiny colored-coded
wires wound with stripes like bitter-tasting candy canes.

Medusa’s bad hair day intertwined with wet and lush
fiddleneck and filaree that delivered the dead short
between us and the outside world calling, interrupting

my jam jar glass of red with Robbin in the garden,
in the gloaming, our private, slow train of thought
to wait three weeks before calling Verizon.

After another all-night rain, the creek is up and snow low enough to close the Grapevine, the Interstate between the San Joaquin Valley and L.A., and Deadwood, the steep and curvy stretch falling-off into Oakhurst where Robbin’s brother operates a snowplow for Cal-Trans. Also Priest Valley, CA 198 & 25 west of Coalinga in the Coast Range is closed. No surprise that a chunk of Highway 1 through Big Sur lies in the Pacific. 1.68 inches of rain in the past 24 hours, 2.22 inches in the last 3 days, and still raining, clouds hanging below Sulphur Peak at 3,000 feet, our ground has not dried out since the middle of last December and more rain forecast for the next ten days.

Gray, we’re sequestered inside once again as the late-month pattern repeats itself, the garden half-tilled with implements waiting, standing, planted ready in wet soil. Weeds on the periphery are making a comeback where I sprayed a few months ago. Getting off the asphalt, Dry Creek Road, with a pickup is a non-productive option, and crossing the muddy creek I can see from my desk this morning would be foolhardy.

Getting Kenny and Virginia’s calves branded Friday instead of Saturday looks like genius now, and apparently their ‘bulls too big to brand’ and hauled to town instead brought good money. We’ve got damn little to complain about and thrilled to have something other than world politics to discuss.

Thank God for the Weather! I have my desk to clean-up that after tax accounting, endless mail and disheveled stacks of books that looks like a junk yard – stuff I know is there, somewhere, but I can’t possibly find. Plenty to do as we await T-storms this afternoon that threaten the Valley’s deciduous fruit and nut trees in bloom – peaches, plums, nectarines and almonds especially vulnerable. Obviously the planet’s in revolt, reacting to something big. Our hillsides are oozing, moving with the weight of water, I suspect – nothing to do but wait, because we’ve seen nothing yet.