Oranges and Honey

30. September 2012 · Comments Off on Oranges and Honey · Categories: Domestic, Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , ,

I have a shoebox full of vintage postcards, collected in the Thirties by the invalid young son of Grandpa Jim’s employer. Among my favorite cards are those of places I knew, like the Devil’s Gate Dam, on the nebulous border between La Crescenta and Pasadena, with a Model-A Ford on the roadway atop the dam, and Mt. Wilson topped with snow in the background, and a view of the Arroyo Vista hotel, still a landmark in the days when Mom was driving us to Pasadena to visit the grandparents, but half a century past its Roaring Twenties prime.

My very favorite is a view again of Mt. Wilson and the San Bernardino range, edged with snow against a turquoise blue sky, and acres of orange groves covering the entire plain below, even up to the foothills. From the mountain peaks and ridges, an expert could deduce where that particular vista had been taken down for 3-penny posterity. The citrus groves were long gone from Pasadena when I was a child, nibbled away by suburbia, but pockets of hold-outs still held sway in back yards; Grannie Jessie and Uncle Jim had an enormous lemon tree in their front yard, and a smaller orange tree along the driveway, shading the only place where JP and I were allowed to dig, and make mud pies amid the sweet scent of orange blossoms and the still-sweet moldy smell of the windfalls.

When Grandpa Al and Grannie Dodie first moved out to Camarillo in the early 1960ies, and Mom and Dad would drive up on Saturday afternoons for dinner, the way there from the Valley that was not rolling hills covered in tawny dry grass and dark green live-oaks, was still taken up with citrus groves. The orchards were like vast, roofless rooms, walled with the windbreak trees, and floored in neat rows of orange, lemon and grapefruit trees, guarded by tall towers with slow-moving vanes intended to move the air when it came too close to freezing.

Gradually, creeping fingers of suburbia reached into the groves along the highway, just as they had before in Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley. Between one Saturday dinner and the next, the grove was bulldozed and by the next year, there would be a tract of houses, and the windbreak around the grove would be ragged, no longer a tall, sheltering wall against the wind. No doubt a few survivor trees lingered in back yards, or maybe were planted by the builders. Redwood House was built on hills which had once been olive groves, and the surviving trees still aligned in rows, along the roads or from yard to yard, but someone had planted orange and lemon trees there, and around Hilltop House. After we moved in, Dad averred that he had favored buying it because he had a wish to have fresh-made lemonade from fresh-picked lemons from his own tree on the Fourth of July.

Oranges and lemons were so ubiquitous, so much a part of the public and private landscape that it came as a shock to realize there were people elsewhere who had to go to the store and actually buy them… and they were an exotic and foreign delicacy at that. Our neighbors at Hilltop House brought over their visiting English cousins, so their children and their little cousins could swim in the pool— three little boys who looked like various incarnations of the juvenile Roddy McDowell. The youngest happened to notice the orange tree, growing in the hillside by the steps to the pool.
“What is that, miss? A peach tree?”
“No, it’s an orange tree, “ I said, and his eyes widened.
“May I have one, miss?” he asked, tremulously, “To eat?”
“You can pick many as you like,” I said, and damned if he didn’t sit down and eat four of them.

Feeling a little guilty over the fruit that fell from the tree and was wasted, Pippy and I made a concerted effort to keep ahead of production, that summer. We filled three or four shopping bags with ripe oranges, without making an appreciable dent in the bounty. It was more than we and our neighbors could ever eat, so we converted it into juice. Gallon jugs of juice filled the refrigerator— still more than we could drink, and before we could think of what to do with it all, the brush at the end of the hill caught fire, and we would up taking it out to the firemen afterwards. They drank it gratefully every drop, straight from the jugs, fresh-pressed and icy cold on a hot day after a brushfire. So much for trying to keep ahead of the bounty, but we could not count on a fire every day.

We went back to letting the surplus rot on the ground, but at least our bees got the good out of it. Amidst the other pets, strays and lab survivors and Hilltop House, we had taken on a hive of bees. Our pastor’s oldest son had begun working on a Scout Merit Badge in beekeeping, and alas, too late, discovered that he was one of those severely allergic to bee stings. The hive had to go, and go it did, with all the paraphernalia, to the sunny hillside above the vacant lot next door, which was planted in thyme and native chaparral. For two or three years, we had our own honey.
We never did figure out what plants the bees favored, because the honey was like nothing else I have tasted since. It was clear, almost like Karo syrup, with a delicate flavor, not quite citrus, not thyme, distinctive, but unidentifiable, as rare as the oranges were common.

Oranges and honey, tart and sweet, enduring, but ephemeral, a vision of California that still exists in the backyards of suburbia, and on the postcards from another era.

Boerne and the Kendall Inn

16. September 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Book Event, Domestic · Tags: , ,

Until I looked around at the Kendall Inn website, I didn’t know how well Boerne had flourished as a health spa and summer resort in four decades after the arrival of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass railroad. The little town on the Cibolo Creek was the summer retreat for wealthy San Antonians, for the families of high-ranking officers stationed at Fort Sam Houston – and for people seeking relief from all kinds of ailments. For a certainty, the Hill Country is usually cooler than the lowlands – and with the flowing creeks and green hills and stands of oak and pecan trees, it was as much a refuge from the big city as it is now.
The Kendall Inn was a part of that, even before the railway made it convenient. The original owners – who built a large house in classical Southern Colonial style out of cut-stone with walls twenty inches thick – often rented extra rooms to travelers and visitors, as there was no other accommodation for them until after the Civil War. The Kendall expanded – with the addition of wings built in the same pillared porch-and-gallery style – and early in the 20th century, the luxury of en-suite bathrooms.
So I was there on Friday last to do a talk for the local chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, on what had gone on in the Hill Country during the Civil War. Quite a few of the members were military retirees, arriving in Texas through the medium of a tour of duty – so the ins and outs of the whole mini-Civil War in Kendall, Gillespie and Kerr Counties was of at least some interest to the group. And I did the talk first, so that the luncheon was something that I could relax and enjoy.
The next big thing on the schedule for me, as far as events will be the Weinachtsmarkt in New Braunfels, November 16-18 at the Civic Center. We did so very well at it last year, that I will have a table for all three days, rather than just Saturday as we did last year. And – I have something new to ornament my official author table; my daughter and I found a model of a covered wagon at a sidewalk sale, which will be perfect to hold items like my business cards and postcards, and informational flyers about my books. Not bad for only $10!

At the Movies with Granny Jessie

07. September 2012 · Comments Off on At the Movies with Granny Jessie · Categories: Domestic


Mom’s parents, Grannie Jessie and Grandpa Jim lived in a tiny white house, crouching under an immense live oak tree on South Lotus, a block or two below Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard. The yard was narrow but immensely deep, and their house sat so far back on it that their front porch overlooked the neighbors’ back porches. A long, narrow driveway led to a free-standing garage, built at the very back of the lot, behind the house and to the left. Close to the garage, between the driveway and the fence line, there was a trash incinerator opposite the kitchen door. Up until the early 1960ies residents were allowed to burn trash regularly; after that, Grannie Jessie let ivy grow over it. There was just enough room at the back for a tiny square of lawn with a nectarine tree in it, a lean-to shed built against the garage wall, and a chicken-wire enclosure where Grannie Jessie had kept chickens and ducks all throughout the Depression.

The chicken enclosure was long empty and decrepit when I was a child, but some of the neighbors still kept assorted livestock. Someone close by kept a donkey, occasionally we heard it braying. A hedge of oleanders, lemon trees, eugenia bushes and plumbago paralleled the driveway, along the fence line. Large camellia bushes grew under the live oak at the front of the house. There was a lattice arbor, a sort of summer house up against the property line on the right, well buried in the cool shade of the camellias and a huge, sprawling avocado tree. Grannie Jessie’s lawn swing was shaded by the leading edge of this tree. You could swing in the shade, on a mild winter day, the scent of the lemon and orange trees hanging in the warm air, and look up at Mt. Wilson deep in snow.
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In the Post

09. August 2012 · Comments Off on In the Post · Categories: Domestic · Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve been thinking for a while – based on my own use of the service – that the good old US Post Office is something well past its best-if-used-by date. Oh, no – not that it should be done away with as a government service entirely. But I can contemplate delivery of the mail only two or three times a week with perfect equanimity … which is at least a little tragic for there were times when the daily arrival of the mail was a much-looked-forward-to thing. When I was overseas, or in a remote location – like Greenland (and in military outposts today I am certain) the arrival of the mail (three times a week) was anticipated with keen interest, since it was our lifeline to the outside world. There were letters from family, loved ones, magazines, catalogues and packages with goodies in them – sometimes gifts, sometimes items ordered … the whole world, crammed into a tiny box with a locking door in the central post office; the magical envelopes, the catalogues and magazines in a tight-packed roll, the little pink slips that meant a package … and then, between one or two decades, it all changed.

Now, the packages come mostly through UPS or Fed-Ex. The various utility bills arrive as emails and are paid on-line. My pension and my daughters’ VA disability are paid by automatic deposit to bank accounts. Magazines? I dropped a lot of my various subscriptions through lack of interest (I am looking at you, Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly) or through the magazines or the publications themselves going under. My news and intellectual-contact jones is fed on-line. Email works for just about everything else save for birthday cards to Luddites like my mother. My various businesses as a freelance are conducted thru Paypal, or through email with my business partner. I realize that not everyone has this kind of luxury – and in the case of the zombie apocalypse or some sort of solar event that crashes the internet I will be SO screwed … but then I am not advocating abolition of the post office. Just that in those metropolitan areas in the continental US that are well-served by internet services and by the various rival delivery services, the Postal Service can probably dial it back, quite a bit. Nothing much comes in the daily mail any more, save the print equivalent of the stuff that I empty out of my spam email box. Really – I am never going to respond to the Capitol One offers for a credit card, so do they need to have their weekly c**p underwritten with tax dollars? My way back into the house from the group mailbox leads past my trash and recycle cans; convenient, as that is where the bulk of it winds up.

I’ll shed a nostalgic tear for the USPS, when they cut back services. I really will – as there are (or were) the occasional business that would send a payment check by mail, instead of an automatic transfer. And the businesses which depend upon cheap bulk mail deliveries will be set back a peg or two. I do dispatch my own books when bought by readers through media mail, and the workers at the post offices where I do and have done business are wonderful, competent and cheerful people (Yeah, I know that is SO much against the usual stereotype) … but otherwise I fear that the USPS is a zombie corpse, being kept alive out of habit. To enable it to keep shambling around in those places where it does truly provide a neccessary service, I’d be willing to give up delivery service on Saturdays and at least two weekdays.

I’d also be able to avoid encountering my slightly-deranged and very chatty neighbor, who haunts the group mailbox; another win-win, as I count it.

Country Roads and Confiture Bar le Duc

07. August 2012 · Comments Off on Country Roads and Confiture Bar le Duc · Categories: Domestic · Tags: , , , , ,

(For the anniversary of the beginning of World War One – which began August 1, 1914. This was supposed to be the war to end all wars, which ended instead three monarchies, came close to ending one republic and saw another empire totter … one of my best archive posts from my original blog.)

We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.

“We’ll cross right over Luxemburg, and then we’ll be in France,” I said. “You know, Gaul.”
“Will there be indomitable Gauls?” my daughter asked, seriously. She was just coming up to five years old. Her favorite comic books followed the adventures of the bold Gaulish warrior Asterix, and his friend, the menhir-deliveryman Oblelix, whose tiny village was the last to hold out against the imperial might of Roman conquest, thanks to a magic potion worked up by the druid Getafix, which gave superhuman strength to all the village warriors. The drawings in the books were artistically literate, and there were all sorts of puns and word-plays in the stories – and they had been translated and distributed all over.
“There could be,” I said, noncommittally. Three or four weeks ago, we had left the apartment in the suburb of Athens where we had lived for most of what she could remember of life and taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, on our way to my new assignment in Spain.

In easy stages I had driven the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, through the tiny neck of Austria, and across Southern Germany. We had so far stayed in a castle on the Rhine, a couple of guesthouses, a hotel outside Siena which could have been nearly anywhere, as it overlooked a junkyard on one side, and acres of grapevines on the other three, and another which covered two floors on the top of an office block in Florence and offered a view of the Duomo from the terrace. We had been to see ruins in Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the wondrous Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a Nazi concentration camp, and a mineral bath in Baden-Baden.

“Where are we going to do first?”
“Buy some jam,” I said.
“What kind of jam?” my daughter asked.
“It’s very superior jam, made with currents. They pick out the seeds by hand with a goose-quill, so it’s very expensive and only made in this one little town in France, but it is supposed to be the tastiest on earth. It’s on the way between here and Paris.”
Well, it wasn’t any odder than anything else I had taken her to see in the time that we had lived in Europe. She curled up with Asterix, while the VEV’s tires hummed tirelessly down the road.

I could tell, without having to see a border sign, when we had left Germany. Germany was as clean as if Granny Dodie had dusted it all, and scoured it twice with Lysol, and then groomed all the grass and trees with a pair of manicure scissors. Houses and cottages were all trim and immaculate, not a sagging roof or a broken shutter to be seen – and then, we were in another place, where slacker standards prevailed. Not absolute rural blight, just everything a little grimier, a little more overgrown, not so aggressively, compulsively tidy. And the highway became a toll road, and a rather expensive one at that. I made a snap decision to take the rural, surface roads at that point, and the toll-taker indulgently wrote out a list for me of the towns along the way of the road I wanted, hop-scotching from town to town, along a two-lane road among rolling hills and dark green scrub-forest, and little collections of houses around a square, or a traffic circle labeled ‘centre’ around which I would spin until I saw a signpost with the name of the next town, and the VEV ricocheted out of the roundabout, and plunged headlong down this new road. (Good heavens, a signpost that way for Malmedy! Well, they did say snottily in Europe that wars were a means to teach Americans about geography, but I was interested this day in the earlier war, and my route led south.)

Always two lanes, little traveled on a Sunday it seemed. I had no shred of confidence in my ability to pronounce French without mangling every syllable, but at least I could read signs in Latinate alphabets. And this was Alsace-Lorraine, I was sunnily confident of being able to make myself clear in German, if required. The VEV’s tank was still better than half full, and it was only midday. Here we were climbing a long steady slope, a wooded table-land, and a break in the trees, where a great stone finger pointed accusingly at an overcast sky. A signpost with several arrows pointed the various ways farther on – Ossuaire …Ft. Douaumont … Fleury. A parking lot with a scattering of cars, the same oppressive sense of silence I had felt in places like Pompeii, and Dachau, as if even the birds and insects were muffled.
“What’s this place?” My daughter emerged from the back seat, yawning.
“There was a horrendous battle here, sixty years ago. The Germans tried to take it, but the French held on.”
“Indomitable Gauls,” My daughter said wisely, and I pointed up at the Ossuary,
“That place is full of their bones. We’ll go see the museum, first.”

This was the place of which the stalwart Joffe had commanded, “They shall not pass,” the place in which it could be claimed— over any other World War I battlefield— that France bled out as a significant military power. For ten months in 1916 Germany and France battered each other into immobility, pouring men and materiel into the Verdun Salient with prodigal hands, churning every inch of soil with shellfire and poison gas, splintering the woods and little towns, gutting a whole generation of the men who would have been it�s solid middle-class, the politicians and patriots, leaders who might have forestalled the next war, or stood fast in 1940. It was the historian Barbara Tuchman who noted that the entire 1914 graduating class of St. Cyr, the French approximation of West Point had been killed within the first month of war. For this was a wasteful war, as if the great generals all stood around saying “Well, that didn’t work very well, did it?— so let’s do it again, and again and again, until it does indeed work.” And afterwards, no one could very well say what it had all been for, and certainly not that it had been worth it, only that the place was a mass grave for a million men.

There was the usual little sign at the admittance desk to the museum— so many francs, but students and small children were admitted free, and so were war veterans and members of the military. I got out my military ID, and politely showed it to the concierge, a gentleman who looked nearly old enough to have been a veteran of Verdun saying
“Ici militaire…”
He looked at me, at the card, at my tits, and at my daughter, and then at the card again, and laughed, jovially waving me on to the exhibits; models and bits of battered gear, mostly, and a bit in the cellar made up to look like a corner of the battlefield, hell in a very small place, all the ground stirred up again and again. Supposedly, they had despaired of ever planting a straight row of trees; there was so much stuff in the ground.
When we came out again, the clouds were lifting a bit … down and across the river there was a golden haze over the town.

“Are we going to buy jam now?” my daughter asked.
“When we get to Bar le Duc. I think we’ll get something to eat, and stay the night there,” I said, and in that golden afternoon, I followed the two-lane road, the Voie Sacree, the only road into Verdun from the railhead at Bar le Duc, where traffic never stopped during the battle, two hundred trucks an hour, and 8,000 men shoveling gravel under their wheels day and night. The only visible mark left along the road were square white-washed mile markers, topped with a metal replica of a poilu’s helmet, like grave markers for a France gone sixty years ago.

I bought six jars of the confiture, six tiny jars of preserve as bright as blood, filled with tiny globes of clear red fruit. It was exquisite; saved for special occasions; I made them last for nearly a decade.

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