“I feel Springish” announced Anna on the way to preschool this morning. She was wearing a flowery sundress, flip-flops and copious amounts of sunscreen. White blonde hair pulled back in to a ponytail, lip gloss over 50% of her face and a healthy glow from the last few days of sunshine. Every inch the little Californian.
In comparison the mood in the front seat was decidedly wintry as I have failed to win both the HGTV Dream Home (there goes my entire financial plan for the year) and a lottery place at the Wine Country Half Marathon – there goes my newly found waist, because it will be very hard to motivate my arse out of bed in the mornings if I don’t have to run 13 miles in May.
Having said all that, Anna is right. Spring has sprung in Southern California. We’ve had an unusually wet and cold winter. Imagine me making air quotations when I write both of those words as ‘wet’ and ‘cold’ are both highly subjective and would garner us a good kicking from anyone living on the Eastern Seaboard this winter.
Overnight we are back to high 70s, glorious sunshine and a verdancy you rarely see in this area of the world. The hills are lush with vegetation, even the burn areas from last year's fire are beautifully greened over. The air is literally heavy with jasmine and eucalyptus (LK has the streaming eyes and nose of the allergy-ridden to prove it).
I decided a family outing was in order. We packed the family in to the car and made for the hills, destination Figueroa Mountain, home to carpets of wildflowers; orange poppies, purple lupins, fiddlenecks, Johnny jump-ups and blue dicks. I'm not making those up .
I envisioned hours of Anna pirouetting on the mountainsides a la Julie Andrews , with me in the
background yelling ‘don’t pick them, just look, don’t touch, don’t pick them, someone stop Lucy eating them, this is a fucking nightmare..….’.
I envisioned hours of Anna pirouetting on the mountainsides a la Julie Andrews , with me in the
background yelling ‘don’t pick them, just look, don’t touch, don’t pick them, someone stop Lucy eating them, this is a fucking nightmare..….’.
It didn’t quite pan out that way. It was beautiful, there were flowers, just not hillsides full of them. Anna kept repeating ‘this is NOT Figueroa Mountain’. A real ‘wildflower mountain’ does not live up to the Dora image of ‘flower mountain’ I can tell you. There was a lot of subversive muttering from the back, so LK said "you know what? I’m thinking the flower cows got there before us and ate them all, so, if we just drive really fast and getahead of them then bingo, flower central’.
There was a pause while the information was digested.
"Dada, I don’t think there is such a thing as a flower cow." She sighed. "I think people just forgot to water them".
Here are the few that we did see:
6 comments:
Wow spring in the US is dramatic - those are beautiful flowers (& at least nobody ate any!)
My children regularly wonder aloud why they can't float inside bubbles in outer space, like Micky Mouse & friends. That's how I know they watch too much TV.
Thank you for the last shot esp. The gnarly old oak trees against the fresh green grass of NoCal are amazing.
As a resident of central Vermont, where we are *just* beginning to emerge from winter (the one remaining snow pile is still 4 feet tall and maple sugar season is almost at an end), it felt totally decadent simply to LOOK at the pictures of the flowers you saw on your outing. Thank you for sharing a bit of spring with us!
As we woke up to 10 inches of fresh snow this morning...these are LOVELY pictures. I decided today that Colorado just isn't doing it for me anymore... I need to move to where it's milder and closer to the beach. All I'm lacking is money. Drat.
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