Yet farther on my road today.

My lights and bows are still up - and the tree.

The bright season of the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord is only in its sixth day, but already we need to make room in our minds for thoughts of transition, closing out one calendar year and opening a new one.

Before I go there, I need to be done with all the Christmas cookies, at least on this blog. Last night we Glads were off to another party, and I took the tins out of the freezer again and loaded up a plate to take along, but that still didn't use them all up.

I made ten different kinds of cookies this year, including five new ones. Next year I may share some of those recipes, but for now, on to other things!




Like reporting on last week's doings: We had three different groupings of family celebrations in two different locations. Sunday before Christmas we went to church with Pippin and family; this is Ivy in the foyer. I took the photo from behind so I could show her pigtails.

 

And next to a lamp made of popsicle sticks, a bunch of uncles and nephews playing a game, something they always make time for when getting together after a few months.





One of the trees that had been cut on federal land in Trinity County had been decorated with antique spice tins. I thought you would like that.










 






Back at our place, Liam got a lesson in Christmas tree appreciation and gentleness. He was a good student.



















  





I found this pretty piano ornament at Pottery Barn when they were having a special deal, and I gave one to each of several pretty pianists in the family.

Some of my own favorite presents were these books I'll be reading in the new year, given by four different people who scanned my Amazon list and surprised me with titles I had wished for and forgotten. Kind people.

I feel the Old Year rushing away, and the New coming fast at me, never mind that I'm not "ready." Sickness right before Christmas pushed some duties ahead to After Christmas, and what might have been a purely R&R&R (the last R for Rejoicing) Sixth Day of Christmas will be interrupted by the Computer Guy coming to help with our computer, a machine so rude as to take our attention off the holiness of the days we are in.

As I am in a liturgical church, the service yesterday gloriously confirmed the present-ness of the holy day that is so cosmologically momentous as to need at least twelve days to properly keep it. The carol-singing we did last night also kept me planted firmly in the Feast, so that for an hour or two I didn't have to think about the onrushing year of 2014. 

Some lines of poetry from Christina Rossetti helped me when I took a few minutes to think. The last lines were the most applicable to my heart's comfortable place, reiterating what I come back to again and again, the knowledge that whatever comes, today or in the coming year God means it for our salvation.

New Year met me somewhat sad:
Old Year leaves me tired,
Stripped of favourite things I had
Baulked of much desired:
Yet farther on my road to-day
God willing, farther on my way.

New Year coming on apace
What have you to give me?
Bring you scathe, or bring you grace,
Face me with an honest face;
You shall not deceive me:
Be it good or ill, be it what you will,
It needs shall help me on my road,
My rugged way to heaven, please God.

The rest of this poem can be found here. Whether or not you are the type of person who needs a lot of down time to process the meaning of the days of Christmas and the New Year, I pray you will find help to progress on your road to heaven. May God strengthen us all!

The wind blows warm.

The wind has been blowing balmy air into and around the house these days, but I've enjoyed some cool walks in the early mornings. Somehow this year the autumn atmosphere is calling me outdoors and I'm actually hearing, feeling the pull. I want to soak up whatever it is in the air while I can, before I get all wimpy and chilly all the time and just want to sit by the fire.

On the subject of fires, this warm wind has fanned the flames of a wildfire in one of our favorite nearby parks -- eek! Mr. Glad and I saw the smoke from our front yard where we were working on the lawn and flower bed. Thank God, it was put out fairly quickly and burned less than 200 acres, of vegetation only.

In preparation for the controlled indoor fires I'm anticipating, my husband and I had just finished moving a half cord of firewood from our driveway, to stack in the side yard. My own method of carrying wood involves loading several pieces on my left arm, which was bare on this warm day, and right off was getting a bit roughed up.

I dug around in the rag drawer and contrived an arm protector from a section of worn-out sock. I'm showing you two pictures so you will be sure to see how clever I am.

Two logs loaded on....

Mr. Glad showed me a concave piece of bark that fell off a knobby oak log, and we admired the design of its inner side, one bit of art work that must be representative of gazillions of other lovely bark designs that no one ever sees. Then I made it our computer desktop background. 

I've had to interrupt my outdoor reveries to cook up some of the bounteous harvest. Old friends hosted a women's potluck and that offered me the chance to try out a new cake on the other ladies.

When I defrosted the freezer last week I had found various flours that I want to use up, and Mr. C. dropped off a bag of Golden Delicious apples, so I tried this buckwheat apple cake. Everyone loved it, and took home what was left over, except for the slice I saved for Mr. Glad.


The recipe calls for so many apples (six), that they completely solve the problem of buckwheat being a dry sort of flour. It was not overly sweet, and would be a good sort of cake for people who like to eat cake often. I used limoncello instead of the maraschino liqueur. I don't understand how the cake on the original blog came out so pale. It's as though the cook used refined buckwheat flour, which I've never heard of.

For the potluck lunch I also made a big bowl of tabouli, my method long ago adapted from a Sunset Magazine recipe called Bulgur Salad. Next summer I'll share it. I was able to use parsley, mint, and tomatoes from our garden. I forgot to take a picture until after I'd stirred in some tuna to make half of the batch into a main dish salad for Mr. Glad.

Back out in the garden again, I've been deeply digging to break up the clay for planting some ranunculus bulbs and pansies where a shrub used to be. Some of its big roots were still hanging around and for the first time in my life I used a chopping maul to get them out of there. That was satisfying work.

One of the jobs on my autumn to-do list was to take out the Cécile Brunner rose in the far corner of the yard. This picture shows it four years ago, before it became a burden that is more trouble than it is worth.

I never thought I would say that about such a lovely rose bush, but this one is so vigorous, and vigorously invading three neighbors' yards, that it requires hours of pruning three times a year, from which I come away scratched and bleeding, and wishing I could have done something else with the time. The bush is in a place where we don't even properly appreciate its enthusiastic blooming.

I forgot that it likes to bloom in October, until my glance landed in its corner yesterday. It won't do to whack it down in its glory, so I'll have to wait a couple of weeks before I tackle the job. I will sadly remove one more rosebush from my life, trying to live with the reality of my limitations. In the meantime, I cut some stems to make one last bouquet.

I'll tell you about the stars.

The stars made the biggest impression on me, this time at the mountain cabin by the lake, but not in the usual way.

Normally what strikes me at such a high elevation is the brightness, how the Milky Way is huge and obvious, and how even my weak eyes can see the Pleiades. But last week the moon stole the show with its competing lumens. I'll have more to say about the stars later.

Just below the place that was too steep for my timidity...

Tall and Short climb Gumdrop.

We had friends with us whom I'll call Tall and Short. They are good sports and happy campers, very resourceful and cheerful when challenges arise. I will only tell you about the most fun challenge, of climbing Gumdrop Dome. I failed to surmount it for the third year in a row, and after I gave up I walked around the base to meet the others coming down the other side.
 
 


Of course I found a new plant on my walk, something that looks like a fern and a succulent at the same time, and was growing against a granite boulder, its "fronds" about as tall as my forefinger. I marked it with cairns above and below so that when my camera was returned to me I would be able to find this best of the specimens again.

I have no idea what it is, or how to start researching it. And I need to spend time on other things now, like making small dolls.

Seemingly tiny real people descend Gumdrop.

 
I took along on the trip my doll project that has been in the works for years without a single doll being born. (More than three years ago what slowed me down was stuffing-wool so dirty I couldn't bear to tell its story, but that excuse is long expired.)

And while sitting on the cabin deck in the warm afternoons I completed three tiny dollies! I'll post more photos of them when I have a bigger family to show. But it was a breakthrough that added to my contentment with a vacation that tried to scream "too short!"

More pleasant hours were spent paddling around the lake with my husband, while Mr. Tall fished and Mrs. Short sat on a rock nearby and knitted sweaters for her expected first grandchild.

Gumdrop Dome from the lake

Many rocks are exposed that we normally prefer not to see. It was a year of little snow in the Sierras, so the lake is down. But it's fun to drive out into the dry lake bed a ways and park in the midst of granite drama, as in the photo at top.

We can't imagine that there is another Sierra lake that has so many granite domes and peaks encircling it. As we floated on the lake I studied the variously shaped rocks and tried to come up with names for them. Only one is named on the official maps, but I think they all are deserving.

This picture shows at least four hitherto unnamed domes. The one on the left I want to call Glad Peak, because Mr. Glad and Soldier climbed it one time. In the center of the photo are two domes side-by-side, whom I am calling He and She. Between those in this view is a peninsula that is in a normal year called Ant Island, and which we like to paddle to and around. But not this time....

It doesn't matter if the snow pack was light, or if some trees have died, the sky is unchanged. But on the first night up there I completely forgot to go outside to greet the stars. The next day we all talked about how we must view them together that second night -- but the sun sets so late, and half of our party was in bed before the other half of us remembered again. Then I forgot and put on my nightgown, and then remembered again. Almost dutifully I opened the slider, pulled the door shut behind me... and immediately felt myself in Deep Heaven, what C.S. Lewis wanted to name what we coldly term Space.

The stars crowded me, pressing their quietness down. I was alone, standing on the deck barefoot with the cool night air on my legs, but barely noticing the slight discomfort, because of the great company of beings so close -- just me and them being familar, and me wondering. It would have been rude to leave after only a quick glance, and besides, they were telling me something.

I walked slowly around in the dark, annoyed by the light from the lamp inside, which I tried to keep behind me. Not a human sound could be heard, not even an animal sound. It was the kind of quietness that is roaring -- but with what? I couldn't pin down what it was, so I stood and listened. The host of heaven with weighty silence conveyed the presence of The Holy, and it was almost too exhilarating, that close to bedtime.

Eventually I had to go inside and climb under the covers. But my exciting encounter with the stars changed me in this way: Years ago I did make solitary mountain retreats here at the cabin, for several days at a time, but I haven't felt up to doing that again. Now that the feeling has been revived in me, of being alone and at the same time the opposite of lonely, I am hungry for more of it, I want long days and nights of it, and I plan to return in September. I think those stars are angels.

The parasitic snow plants are blazing at Tahoe.

Mr. and Mrs. C. invited us to their cabin again on the south end of Lake Tahoe. At 6,000 ft. elevation it's still pretty brisk in May, but the sky was SO blue, the lake was SO blue, and the air was dry, full of the smells of pine trees and cedars with some wood smoke thrown in. I breathed deeply.

Here is a map if you need to get your bearings. The lake itself lies on the Nevada-California state line. We usually approach from the southwest and drive through the state capital of Sacramento to get there.

I had escaped the world down below where picture storage was one of the many time-consuming computer problems that had recently worn me out, and I arrived with a reluctance to use my camera. Of course that didn't last long, especially when wildflowers are out. May in the Sierras brings flowers you can't see in the summertime, so I had to seize my opportunity, didn't I? My other blog posts about the Tahoe area have different photos from what I came away with this time.

Cascade Lake in foreground, Tahoe in distance.

We hiked to the top of Cascade Falls one day. It drops and flows into Cascade Lake which lies just south of Emerald Bay, a little higher in elevation. This picture was taken from a granite shelf looking as straight-down as I could manage to the bottom of the falls.

Sticky Cinqefoil

                      This looks to me like some kind of buttercup but I haven't found it in a book yet. (Update: I added the caption after one of my readers enlightened me.)

The Snow Plants have popped up all over, here and there on the floor of the conifer forest, with no leaves. Mrs. C. was coveting one, wondering how she might get a specimen to grow near the cabin, but what I found out on Wikipedia when I came home makes me think that would be near impossible to make happen.


 


The snow plant is sarcodes sanguinea, the only species in the genus sarcodes, in the heath family. It is unable to photosynthesize its own food, "...a parasitic plant that derives sustenance and nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi that attach to roots of trees." Now I can imagine the roots of these bright plants extending deeply into the world of tree roots. If we are lucky, perhaps the right conditions will in the future concur and surprise Mrs. C. with a burst of red.

A lagoon by Kiva Beach

Another color that got my attention was the sand around Lake Tahoe. We took the yellow lab to swim and fetch and I sat on the shore and considered how all the grains of sand were warm golden tones, not like any ocean beach I've seen.




 
 Wooly Mule's Ears, also known as mountain mule's ears, were in bloom, and I got a photo of them as in a perennial bed planted by Mother Nature, with a border of Squaw Carpet in front.

Wyethia mollis and Ceanothus prostratus

Here's a nice flowering bush that I don't know. Maybe someone reading this knows this plant? It grows in the forests on public land and in private yards. (Update: the same reader in a comment below is kind enough to tell us that this is Western Serviceberry.)

 

Did you ever do a Google image search of "lichen"? Amazing, amazing plants. Here is one of the more subtle designs, which we saw on a rock at the top of Cascade Falls, a lovely arrangement of vegetable and mineral and just one example of how God's artwork is splashed all around the world for our pleasure and His glory. Thank You, Lord, for the refreshment.

When it rains it pours.

We got rain in the night, and we're getting a little today. A little rain, and that's not the pouring I refer to.

It's our Glad life that has become a little too much for us of late -- or so it would seem, but we haven't left anyone in the lurch yet. We had a blessed and happy visit from Mr. and Mrs. Bread, alongside difficult and sad situations to bear up under with other friends. That kind of thing always feels like too much.

The dirty dishes have been left to sit on the counter (in the lurch?) longer than I like, and it hasn't done any permanent damage that I can see.

The Johnny Jump-Ups appear to have been nibbled by snails, but as I breeze by I don't want to take time to hunt under rocks for them.
 
My kitchen didn't produce any bread -- the disorder was beyond the point where I could be creative that way -- so thank God I was on the communion bread team at church yesterday and could happily knead and cut and stamp and let the senses of both my body and soul fill with warm and satisfying smells. Even the dough smelled good and soothing. In the photo I am the reflection in the oven door.



And even before the rain, the freesias started blooming, almost too brightly for my camera's limited settings. We did go for a quick walk around the neighborhood, and I saw that even the most rundown ugly house with junk scattered about has been blessed with a gorgeous tree all in blossom, sitting as though dropped from heaven in the middle of the front yard.

I've been too busy for thoughtful writing sessions, but the pictures I snapped reassure me that the seasons are going around normally still. You know Who we have to thank for that.



The tulips are still making progress up through the now-softening soil, and Sweet Alyssum is growing the perfect blanket to spread below the blooms that are on the way.

Mr. Glad and I are going on a tiny trip this week, leaving behind the clutter of our forever unfinished business, and there will be time and mind-space enough for me to collect some more images and thoughts of Spring and Life. I think I just wanted to send this note that I am here and God is still at work.

Bodega and Stories of Horror

Portuguese Beach - Sonoma County

This week we tripped over to the coast with Mr. and Mrs. C. A walk along the shore north of the town of Bodega Bay was first on the leisurely agenda. Schoolhouse Beach was closed, so we drove a little farther north to Portuguese Beach. It's steep where the waves break on the sand, and signs warn you not to turn your back to the surf or to go on the down side of the slope, where an undertow can get you in its grip.

The View Landward

We strolled the length of the beach and back, admiring the view landward and seaward, and then sat on a log. Mr. and Mrs. C didn't have their frisky Yellow Lab with them, but we've seen how she loves to romp in the water at Lake Tahoe or at nearby Salmon Creek Lagoon.

As we were climbing back up the cliff to the car, we met a couple coming down with four dogs, no matter that pets are not allowed on that beach. A tall great dane, two medium dogs with long hair, a tiny dog, and their owner carrying colorful beach ball.

Drowning at Portuguese Beach in 2011

We stopped at the top for a while and watched the Dane canter around joyfully. The mid-sized dogs pushed the beach ball into the waves and along the ocean's edge -- all right at that steep part that is so dangerous. Mrs. C. commented about how many people go into the ocean to rescue their dogs; the people often drown, but if they only had known that dogs almost always manage to get back on their own....

When I was researching for this post I discovered a news story and photo depicting a case of that very thing: a dog owner having drowned when she went after her dog and got caught in the surf. That time the dog did drown also, and it was at just this time of year. These accidents, though not always involving dogs, happen so often on the Northern California coast that the multiplied effect has turned them into horror stories for me.

"Birds" children running downhill from schoolhouse

A bit inland from Bodega Bay, we came to the town of Bodega. Confusing, isn't it? Both are famous for the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds" being filmed here in the early 1960's.

I saw it in my teens, and can still recall sitting on the living room floor, self-consciously and silently terrified. Ever since then, when I see crows looking down from telephone wires, I know from the experience of that movie that they have a sinister intent.

The schoolhouse today, a private residence

Hitchcock mixed up scenes from the two towns for the film, and we checked out two of the landmarks that remain in Bodega: the schoolhouse and the church, which stand very close to one another on a hill. Within the last year we Glads and the C. couple watched "The Birds" together. It wasn't as scary as I remembered, but I still don't like it. I do like the buildings in Bodega.


On our way back from the beach we first stopped at a historic watering hole in the town; the Casino's bar was built a hundred years ago by the bartender's great-uncle. His grandmother still manages the place, opening the doors and closing up every day even in her 80's.

The dining room (the sign said "Dinning Room") was most appealing to me. It was fresh and clean and empty that afternoon, tables, chairs and floor of bare weathered wood as old as the bar. A dozen or more deer and elk heads decorated the walls around. I drank an Ace Peary Hard Cider, brewed locally.

After our refreshment we walked along a muddy little track through the grass along the bank above the road, to see the church and the school.


The church is St. Teresa of Avila. Services have been held there weekly since its dedication in 1861. From the church you can look down on the little artsy town of Bodega, as in the photo below.

When we had set out from our house that morning, I decided not to bother with a camera. Then of course I regretted it many times! I was lucky to find all of these pictures on the Web.

I'm happy to say there was nothing horrific about our meandering day. That's a good thing about enjoying the present moment: one doesn't have to be subject to artists' imaginations, to old news articles, or to one's own memories of bad things. "Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof," and as there wasn't any of that sort of thing on our outing, it provided sufficient R&R for my weary soul. Thanks be to God!

Town of Bodega, California