Gender essentialism at the beach

Anyone who knows me will (I hope) agree that I'm no gender essentialist -- and certainly not someone interested in enforcing gender stereotypes on my kids.

But then look at these two beach sculptures created yesterday, and guess which was made by my boy and which by the girl.

.

Go with the stereotype, I'm mildly ashamed to say, and you're pretty much guaranteed to be right.

Transatlantic sock monsters

Ada and Michael's fabulous English cousin Martha made these wonderful sock monsters for them, based on designs that they sketched out together this summer. The creatures arrived in the mail just recently -- they seem to be adjusting well to the California life.

Live Oak (verse)

A year in which the street oaks, stressed, 
Cast pollen with abandon and
By fall have walkers
Running from the 
Acorn deluge

Leads one moist nut 
Come early Spring --
And hail the cycling of El Nino! -- 
To swell and
Finger down a root
Into
The hostile city muck.

Rubble, pipe, dry traps of builders' sand,
Irrigation boxes, concrete forms for
Path and pavement
But still some old
Adobe clay,
Enough;

A sapling, primed to reach 
Fast for light, 
Not branch in  joggers'
Eyes 
Or drivers' glass, 
Stretches 
From its median home 
Until it is 
The tree it is.

At ten feet
It forms a canopy, 
Is marked, now, by the 
Tree folk of the town, 
A well-positioned California freebie -- 
Sure, no first-choice arbor
(Acorns, caterpillars, the endless
Drop and leaves that
Spike)
But native all the same.

Another El Nino, then.
The plant drinks deep -- 
Divides its cells, splits skin
Once more,
Grows three feet in a year
And out as much,
Powers through another spring,
Another and another 
And now, expansive in its 
Might, the tree seeks out new land

Under sidewalk,
Sewer lateral, the road,
The deep-set rebarred
Stone and –
Where required – 
It simply pushes them aside.

A dry year next.
The street oak cleaves
(Not just its broad circumference)
Again --
The blacktop too is fissured now,
Echo to blind, thirst-gripped
Encinal rooting. 

And into that asphalt
Breech
Come Spring
Fresh pollen washes,
Joins brake dust,
Leaf bones, fragment
Feathers,
Grit blown in from desert China, 
Splinters of the neighbor's
Redwood mulch,
Her toddler's rice cake crumbs, 
Fine sump oil slick,
Thick cyclist’s hawk and
Seeds.

Crabgrass, knotweed, poppy, moss,
Dandelion, buckwheat, bindweed, dock,
Mallow, cedar, acacia, oak.

I stand outside my house and
Calculate.

A year, or maybe three, of
Civic atrophy -- Hold the Roundup!
Garage the sweepers! City,
Spare your protected roots! –
And this street would
Be broken,

Buried,

Quietly, inexorably
Rendered

And then re-shaped
Endlessly after

By Nature's legion 
Volunteers.

Random sights in and around Pt. Reyes

It's one of my favorite places on the planet and I got to spend Valentines weekend up there with my beloved. Here are a few, fairly random pictures from the trip.

This is farm country, of course.

But the National Seashore features stands of strikingly tall eucalypts on the Palomarin trail.

The early wildflowers are up.

A UFO sighting in (of course) Bolinas.

Bolinas ridge reflected in the wet beach sand (the waves were big -- it was the same day they ran the 2010 Mavericks).

Cheese at the Cowgirl Creamery. They have a new (and first) hard cheese that's currently only known by its batch number.

Lichen as moist and creamy as the local cheese (this on an apple).

Dinner at Osteria Stellina. Book ahead!

Where designers' stuff goes when designers die

It's sad, of course, but eventually even the finest of artists, architects, designers, and craftspeople, along with all their creative brethren, are feted to leave the world that, in their waking moments, they've so diligently helped beautify. Until that time, many will have amassed collections of beautifully made prints, books, pictures, rugs, and furniture etc. that will have inspired them in their work.

They don't always leave relatives behind with quite the same taste as theirs, though. So it's good that at least one business exists to 'creatively recycle' their collections back into the hands of people who really appreciate what they had.

The Modern i, which offers such a service, is based in San Anselmo, CA. It was closed when I went by. It looked like they have -- as you might hope -- some very nice stuff. Here's the sign on the door.

Ephemeral flower girl

Call her Ephemera, maybe. She'll last for an afternoon, no more, before she dries out and fades. But like a mayfly, her day in the sun is glorious.

(Made by Ada from california poppy, rosemary, grass, oxalis and an unidentified seed pod.)

Whose quince is that? The ambiguity of the American median strip

I'm an inveterate gardener of median strips -- the patches of dirt you find between a typical American sidewalk and the street. If you don't garden them they become breeding grounds for weeds, which I define as any promiscuously self-seeding plant that you don't want in your yard. If you do dig over these beds and plant them up, you get a whole extra piece of yard, with different sun exposures, allowing you to extend your planting and, you hope, delighting your neighbors and furthering the beauty of your street.

Of course these strips don't belong to you. They're owned by your local city, which puts the status of the plants sitting in those strips question. Whose are they?

I was reminded of this today walking past my neighbor's spectacular hedge of Japanese flowering quince (Chaenomeles).  It's now in full flower and a joy for anyone going down our street to behold.

But every year, about this time, I see at least one person helping him or herself to a personal bouquet of quince blooms -- someone whom, I know (because I know the owners of the house that borders the strip), typically hasn't asked permission to cut the flowers. The result is fewer blooms for the rest of us to enjoy and -- usually -- a poorly pruned quince.  But if the land belongs to the city, was the clipper really doing anything wrong?  

Maybe the right thing to do is to call the city and ask their permission -- I'm not sure they'd care either way, really.  But I think one should ask the owners too, mostly out of respect for the people who have (demonstrably) tended a plant of enough beauty that people would like a part of it for themselves.

I've had the same thing happen. My rule is that children under five get excused, but that anyone older is asked, politely but firmly, to refrain. Another local friend has a persimmon tree in her median, a fuyu, from which the fruits need to be cut and not pulled -- otherwise you really trash next year's fruiting branches.  She's always very generous with her crop and usually posts a sign begging people not to pick but to knock instead and ask for fruit when she's clipped it off, which she'll then share. Last year, though, pickers ripped off nearly all of her fruit and so this year she's had nothing to share with anyone.  We all lost out.