Bucolic suburbia
It's 11am on a Saturday, the first really summer-feeling Saturday since the winter rains. The sun is getting high and the air is easily in the 80s already. J got home from work at 3am and Christian got back from the bars sometime later, so I'm sitting alone on the back porch in my Adirondack chair, feet up on the fire pit I converted from wood to propane a couple of summers ago to warm and light the cool northern California evenings. I'm drinking coffee with cinnamon and listening to bees explore the blossoming orange tree above me and the rose bushes just off to my side.
The yard smells like summer. The grass is dewy still in the shade of the orange and lemon tress but the concrete path around the garden is hot and the sun is baking the potting soil under the tomatoes and pepper plants nearby. There's hardly any breeze, so the smell of the young plants, the grass and the orange blossoms hangs lazily around me. The only sounds in the neighborhood are the bees and a couple of songbirds, and somewhere a couple of houses away the faint sound of a weekend news program on someone's TV comes through their open porch door. Dan Rather, I'd say, if he hadn't passed away earlier this year.
I picked an orange, encouraged by the bees, and turned my thumbs and one fingernail yellow trying to get into it. I got half the peel off and ate the insides like an apple, leaning ungracefully over the arm of my chair so the juice running down my chin would miss the rest of me. This tree is leftover from when suburbia was an orchard, and it produces a hundred or so baseball-sized oranges at a time in 2 or 3 blooms throughout the year. When the blossoms for the next crop appear (and they're littering the grass and walkway under the tree with little white curls now), the last crop is ready for picking and juicing or falling from the branches and tempting the ants, which seems to keep them happy and out of the house.
J emerged in powder blue pyjamas and an old tank top to glower at the bougainvillea and inspect the climbing peas and the impatiens. We put the bougainvillea too close to the fenceline and it doesn't get enough sun; but it gets enough to look alive for a small portion of the summer months. She then retreated from the sunlight to find a coffee. I hear a seagull now, a little too far inland from the San Francisco bay. A couple of the gang of crows who make up our neighborhood toughs, probably chasing off a pigeon as they're wont to do. Doors are opening and closing in the houses nearby and the still air carries percussion from a good distance. A faint horn- the weekend commuter rail to San Francisco going by a mile or two away, carrying families to the Earth Day celebration in the city, most likely. Soon there will be the usual sounds of men working on pet projects in garages, the occasional car going through the neighborhood, people strolling with babies or dogs or on bicycles. It's time to sort out breakfast or brunch or whatever you call it when the morning has passed and you've got no pressing needs but those of basic biology, at least for the better part of a warm and lazy day.
The yard smells like summer. The grass is dewy still in the shade of the orange and lemon tress but the concrete path around the garden is hot and the sun is baking the potting soil under the tomatoes and pepper plants nearby. There's hardly any breeze, so the smell of the young plants, the grass and the orange blossoms hangs lazily around me. The only sounds in the neighborhood are the bees and a couple of songbirds, and somewhere a couple of houses away the faint sound of a weekend news program on someone's TV comes through their open porch door. Dan Rather, I'd say, if he hadn't passed away earlier this year.
I picked an orange, encouraged by the bees, and turned my thumbs and one fingernail yellow trying to get into it. I got half the peel off and ate the insides like an apple, leaning ungracefully over the arm of my chair so the juice running down my chin would miss the rest of me. This tree is leftover from when suburbia was an orchard, and it produces a hundred or so baseball-sized oranges at a time in 2 or 3 blooms throughout the year. When the blossoms for the next crop appear (and they're littering the grass and walkway under the tree with little white curls now), the last crop is ready for picking and juicing or falling from the branches and tempting the ants, which seems to keep them happy and out of the house.
J emerged in powder blue pyjamas and an old tank top to glower at the bougainvillea and inspect the climbing peas and the impatiens. We put the bougainvillea too close to the fenceline and it doesn't get enough sun; but it gets enough to look alive for a small portion of the summer months. She then retreated from the sunlight to find a coffee. I hear a seagull now, a little too far inland from the San Francisco bay. A couple of the gang of crows who make up our neighborhood toughs, probably chasing off a pigeon as they're wont to do. Doors are opening and closing in the houses nearby and the still air carries percussion from a good distance. A faint horn- the weekend commuter rail to San Francisco going by a mile or two away, carrying families to the Earth Day celebration in the city, most likely. Soon there will be the usual sounds of men working on pet projects in garages, the occasional car going through the neighborhood, people strolling with babies or dogs or on bicycles. It's time to sort out breakfast or brunch or whatever you call it when the morning has passed and you've got no pressing needs but those of basic biology, at least for the better part of a warm and lazy day.