Odds and Sods, With an Homage To The Peach

Another week of the "vacation" that isn't really a vacation.  As a teacher I've heard the comments about "having three months off."  Now it's really about two months, and for me it's not really close to that.  I'm not complaining, really.  The life my family and I have created means I almost always teach some form of summer school, as well as just catching up on tasks around the house and things put off until after the baseball season is over.  It's a lifestyle, as threadbare as that phrase sounds.  I enjoy tinkering, weeding, patching things and picking vegetables.  We have to spend our time doing something. So here are some thoughts for this day.

The sod I laid for the dogs is a big disappointment.  The area that is in the open and unshaded is about 70% green and growing.  Dog urine and bad sod accounted for the 30%.  In the shady area the good, green grass is about 10% of the area. In both places some of the dead grass has rooted and should come back.  On to Plan C in the re-grassing efforts.

I recently made a nighttime trip to Los Angeles. Did you know the complete name of the city is El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula?  I'm more amazed that the city never seems to sleep.  We traveled to LAX for a early morning flight, so you would expect the airport to be open, but many businesses were also. Road construction clogged the 405 in some places.  We were also slowed to a crawl in Bakersfield on the way down. Gave me pause to think about what will happen in natural and man-made disasters.  Made me start planning more.

I have to admit I'm struggling a bit with the new class I'm teaching. Crafts is what I do when I tinker around the house and yard.  To teach it is trying to formalize part of my life. I definitely will be leaning towards the "folk" arts as my execution of skills is usually rough and utilitarian. I like to call it my version of Wabi Sabi. Form follows function.

The larger struggle is the mess of the Crafts shop.  There is one large room for the students to work and room for some stationary tools. There are three smaller rooms for storage and other tools.  One room houses the pottery kilns and assorted pottery needs.  The middle room is an office of sorts.  And the third room, the biggest, is a collection of flotsam and jetsam from the previous two teachers and spans a timeline of over 30 years.  Each of the rooms has their own collection of choices of what to do as I wade through the good and bad. I recently found three rolls of mil-spec OD webbing.  Old-New stuff with the tags attached. How was this to be used?  1000 brass rivets?  A box of bound copies of the National Geographic magazine from the 1940's?  I'm a packrat and frugal to the extreme, but there is no room for all of the materials I'm looking through.  It will be an interesting half month until school starts figuring out what to do.

As I sit here in the morning the house is quiet.  I've fed animals and some have returned to bed.  Children are in bed as well.  I await my mother-in-law waking.  This signals the second beginning of the day.  Food, coffee and her needs will be met and everyone else will arise.  Cool summers morning like this remind me of my teenage years.  Child labor laws were fewer and I worked on local ranches doing the odd tasks of the farm.  Weeding, hoeing, pruning, picking fruit, irrigating, or just plain work.  The ranches I worked for grew different kinds of trees.  Walnuts, plums, and peaches being the most common.

Walnuts weren't harvested until after I was back in school, but I didn't really like the nuts.  I do love the smell of dew on a walnut tree,  the drying of the nuts, and the sweet fragrance of a fresh cut walnut limb for firewood.

Plums likewise didn't cross my palate much.  They have always seemed to be too much of a sticky mess to go through the effort to eat.  I do like the plum barbecue Maureen makes.

Peaches though are special.  In the tumultuous times of my high school years, my father and I shared a quiet time in the morning eating peaches. The men I worked for would allow us to pick some fruit to take home, and my father would peel the fuzzy skin off, slice the sweet flesh before he and I would sit in the cool quiet eating the peaches before work. I felt grown up as I prepared to do labor, but I felt more grown up because my father and I shared these moments.

Mas Masumoto wrote Epitaph for a Peach about the Sun Crest peach. Maureen scoured nurseries looking for a tree and eventually found one hours away near the coast. We planted the bare root tree and it has grown. And this year it has produced quite a bit of fruit. I few days ago I ate my first peach of the season. It melted in my mouth. The flesh held colors that no Tequila Sunrise can match. The taste moved me to another time. I sliced a peach for one of our sons.