Yesterday in Sonoma: record breaking high temperatures (we hear this so often now that sadly that phrase doesn't have the oomph it once had)> 78 degrees in mid-March! And it seems the great parade of bulbs and wildflowers has picked up tempo. On the trail today: Indian Warrior Fern Flower, jumbo forget-me-nots, Buttercups, Scotch Broom, Fawn Lilies, ancient gnarled plum trees in an abandoned orchard, stumps covered with lichen, branches lacy with white/pink blossoms. Saw my first Swallowtail butterfly of the season, and the air was humming with newly-hatched gnats. So early to see a garter snake and an alligator lizard sunning, plus the insidious, dreaded, rampant, greasy, deadly poison oak making all hikes in the woods a type of obstacle course.
The beasts and I hiked up to Fern Lake, where we encountered three lads in shorts bearing fishing rods. SUCH memories came rushing at me of my own years by Lake Lotawanna, in Missouri, up at dawn and donning my worm-and-fish-guts-stained orange bikini that I lived in from dawn til disk, all summer long.
I asked the lads "What do you catch here?" "Bass mostly," says they. And at that point I could have talked shop, asked: "Are you using spinners? Rubber worms? Live crickets?" But I just said: "Bass, yum!" and moved on, but not before taking a sidelong inventory of their tackle boxes.
Pleased to report that bait has not changed much over the decades, still decorative floaters and worms and feathered/hooked items, not at all reminiscent of the actual living creature.
The dogs almost pulled the leash out of my hands when a female wild turkey crossed our path, with the wattled, impressive Tom hot on her heels. The duck were flapping their wings on the lake's surface, the birds were trilling: everyone was trying to impress. Ah, courtship! We humans could learn something about effort from the feathered ones.
All I want to do these days is plant things. Something so satisfying about filling the little six-packs with soil, marking each compartment with a stick bearing the name of some special heirloom tomato, "Ace," "Princepe Borghese," "Black Cherokee," "Mr. Stripy,""Celebrity," and tamping down your tomato seeds, imagining a bountiful summer harvest. There is nothing like reaching your arm into a tomato vine you have started from seed, the little hairs on the vine rubbing your bare arm and leaving that acidic, green scent, plucking off a still warm from the sun tomato and eating it like an apple.
It isn't officially Spring for another week, but the lilacs have just started to flower and my pea vines have flat mini-pods emerging from the white flowers. Rebirth indeed.....
