A Funny Thing Happened...

...on the way to a balmy spring after an almost weirdly dry and warm winter. Winter arrived. In a big way over a six day period.

I can't find exact totals, but I'm fairly certain that we had twelve inches of rain from March 12 through March 16. That's a gully-washer of a downpour. Streams and creeks over-flowed their banks, and we were under a flash-flood warning, but it all was resolved by Saturday morning.
We woke to this, amber fog and soft blue skies.

That lasted until some time Saturday afternoon when the clouds rolled back in. By nightfall the snow started. We read the national weather service report and expected a light accumulation of one inch.

This is what we woke to on Sunday morning. By noon it was still falling, and there were six inches on the ground. It's obvious that this crazy storm has stalled on the western slope of the Sierra foothills and is just pouring its snowy little heart out here. Less than an hour's drive down the hill in Sacramento it's sunny and mild.

Ah life in the mountains. Beauty abounds.

Remembering My Father

At sundown on Tuesday I lit a yahrzeit for my father, as we mark the 20th anniversary of his death. It's hard to imagine that 20 years has passed since that sad early morning of March 14, 1992, but it has. I was only 39 years old when my father breathed his last breath, and soon I will be 60. I think a lot about time, always have. When I was young and my favorite cousin would come to visit with us, I would count the hours she was there, and then count them when she'd left. I think I was eight when I calculated that a week was 168 hours long. When I held the numbers like that, it made the anticipation and separation containable, hours and seconds seemed knowable to me, less painful than days and years.

My father has been gone for less than a billion seconds. Seems like a blink of an eye, doesn't it? We don't even breathe a breath a second, I feel like I could almost recapture him just by remembering the air. I wrote a poem for him once that ended:

...in spirit they say you are everywhere
yes, everywhere everywhere
but here...

But now, I look around and see that that's not true. My father is everywhere and here. Not in spirit, but in fact. Nothing is ever lost. Oh thank you for that "The Law of Conservation of Energy." I do take great comfort and solace in that reality. Still, I wish that he were in his body, laughing and eating his favorite foods, dancing the shimmy with his crazy shoulders and doing the cha cha with my mom, loving his family like a man who knew he would always be remembered.

Our Winter So Far

Before the storm, the sky darkened in the east while the late afternoon sun shone on the sugar pines.

The first day of snow, the birds came and waited for food.

And, huddled together on the rocks.

It snowed on and off Wednesday and Thursday. We couldn't get out for a walk until Friday. We headed out to the irrigation ditch. There were no other human footprints for most of the walk.
Sometimes after a snow or rain the sun appears, and the moisture evaporates from the tree trunks. I always like to imagine that I'm seeing the tree's breath.

By Sunday the snow was mostly gone. Temps were up in the 70s, and we could walk in sneakers and didn't need jackets, enjoying the last soft white bit that still remained.
This is our winter so far, two days and counting.

Wordless Wednesday: What We've Been Seeing

Red-breasted Sapsucker

Western Bluebirds

Yellow-rumped Warblers

Pileated Woodpecker

Mountain Chickadee (at the nestbox!)

We're expecting our first real winter storm of the season. We think we're ready for 6 to 10 inches of snow. Wheeee!

Ghosts

We drove over to the coast last weekend to help unload a trailer of Roger's mom's stuff into the beach house (above photo view from the upstairs bedroom window at sunrise). We stayed for two nights with no internet connection and no TV. Talk about feeling disconnected. But it was good to focus on the task at hand. The Capitola house has been in the family since 1938 and has been the repository for unwanted-but-can't-part-with stuff for all that time. We had to toss a ton of really really old ghostly stuff to make room for just plain-old old stuff. We shopped for new silverware and dishes, frying pans, and sheets. Some of the sheets and pillows had been ghosting around that house for more than 40 years. There's lots more to be done (new toilets, kitchen faucet and sink, and a fresh paint job on the house) in time for the memorial service we're having for Roger's mom on Memorial Weekend there in May. It will feel much less ghostly by then.
Whenever we drive to and from the coast we always take the same highways and always stop at the same vista point. We've been doing this since the late 80s. The place we stop is Lake Herman Road, just on the north side of the Benicia-Martinez bridge. It's an interesting place because there's a Ghost Fleet of Navy ships rotting in the water there. We've always found something eerily beautiful about these ships, like remnants of a dying culture still present in the moment. Sadly, though, we did just learn that the ships' paint is peeling off into the water poisoning the wetlands with millions of pounds of toxic waste. Our ignorance had truly been bliss for years.
On this most recent trip, I mentioned to Roger I thought there must be a Lake Herman somewhere up the road. Something we had never explored, but might want to. So, when we arrived home I actually remembered to google "Lake Herman Road" to see if we should take a look. The results shocked me. The first page of entries about Lake Herman Road was about the Zodiac Killer and his first two victims (high school kids on their first date) on that very road in 1968. What a creepy surprise.
Yes, there is a lake on Lake Herman Road, and it looks like a nice spot for a picnic. I wonder if we'll ever do that knowing this ghastly ghostly history. Would you?

Living The Old Way

Wow, have we been quiet or what? I don't think I mentioned here that my mom arrived on January 9th, and we've been hanging out with her for the month. It's been a great visit. She got to see her first bobcat walking down the road, and this very fine juvenile Cooper's Hawk that was hunting our yard.
She's also been watching the deer come and go and enjoying their sudden interest in being my friend. While I do scatter sunflower seeds and millet for our ground feeders, I don't really consciously toss anything for the deer (or squirrels) to eat. I expected the squirrels to come and munch, but the deer were a total surprise. The other day I went out in the early morning to scatter seed under the big cedar tree, and I scared the momma deer and her twin yearlings. But instead of high-tailing it down the hill, they stopped and looked at me. I said "hello" and momma started walking toward me. I was shocked. I moved away, and she came over to the tree and started eating the birdseed. She blew my mind. And then, she did it again Sunday morning. I surprised her when I came out the little garage door, and instead of running away from me, she watched me go to the cedar tree and scatter seed. She walked over. I walked away. It is not my intention to be her human friend. I don't think that's a good thing for a deer. Her behavior is entirely her own initiative. I suspect there must be other humans feeding her.

Other than that, the sun continues to shine day after day in these clear mountain skies. The word now is that we are entering into a critically dry period. We're hoping for rain, but it is unlikely we'll get anything that could make up our deficit. It'll be interesting to see what the summer will be like after such a warm and mild winter.

We're taking my mom to the airport on Thursday. She's going home with her brand new Kindle Touch. We've stocked it full of good books for her to read. She's planning on moving up here to live with us as soon as her condo sells. We're looking forward to it. Multi-generational living is like living the old ways. We're glad to turn the clock back a few hundred years on human relationships. Modern life can be so silly.

So, how are you?