It’s been two months since I returned from my outrageous drive all the way to California and back for the suspect reason of helping my wife’s parents move. They are old; they really did need the help. But candidly, half the reason I signed myself up for the excursion was just to take a road trip. I grew up in the Air Force, always on the move. My dad took our family of five on a lot of car trips in cars that doubled as drag racers on the weekend. The first time I lived in one house longer than three years I was 50 years old. I can get antsy.
I saw my Mom while back too, and near her house is a split-level freeway through a gorgeous rolling mountain pass I’ve known forever. Sometime in January the hillsides all around are suddenly a shin-deep undulating sea of grass, and the deepest deep green in the season’s foggy overcast skies. I’ve always imagined it’s what Ireland looks like. I rolled in during my favorite time of year and didn’t even plan on it. As the hills came into view I felt a pang of aching nostalgia after several years away, and stopped for a picture.
But it’s short-lived. All that Spring vegetation and color – the poppies and other wildflowers, they wither down fast when the infrequent rains stop only a couple months later. The wild grass matures close to chest high and turns a light brown, then stays like that the whole rest of the year. “Golden” hills? I’ve always thought dead, dun hills. Feathery fire sticks waiting for a spark. And they can light up easily! Some friends and I once decided to make a campfire out in the marsh near our house. We brought a lighter and a coke can of gasoline. It didn’t go well.
That “season” goes on so long it’s like having only one. The stretch of summer and Fall is a relentless slog, clear skies and hot wind. The same every day, forever. I longed for another season, and is one reason I chose North Carolina to move to. I liked the idea of being just north enough in latitude to every so often get snow, but not to live in it every day for months, which is what my father always said was a driving force of why he escaped Ohio, his (and my) homestate.
I was five years old in 1969, the year my family left Spain and landed in Northern California. We still moved a lot, but except for one very short ill-fated attempt to relocate to Alabama, we never left. Now long retired and offbase from Travis AFB, my father has always felt he won the geographic lottery. “I love this place,” he’s said, “I can drive to the ocean and San Francisco in an hour.” But let’s face it, he never really did – okay, there was the one time the King Tut thing toured the country in 1979, and the family piled into a GTO, saw the mummy and went to touristy Pier 39 where at dinner I plowed into my first bowl of shrimp until my father noticed I was eating shells, tail and all… “Take the shells off first,” he told me; “here, eat some bread.” He’s also noted he can just as easily drive a couple hours north to the Sierras to visit the mountains and snow – but not have to live in it like back in Ohio. I mostly had to take his word on this; he didn’t really take us up to the snow much either.
Spring is finally poking through back home in New Bern, North Carolina, where my wife Shannon and I have been for a few years. I’m paying close attention to the landscaping here, seeing what comes back. At our last house I tinkered for nearly ten years on the yard and garden. It was god-awful to start with, had several neat rows of dangerous pokey agave in the backyard like it was a tequila farm. Nothing was native but the weeds. I had a job then driving all over Northern California and Nevada, going to remote woods and mountaintops where the cell towers are, and I gathered native plants for specific purposes while exploring, like something that seemed to do well in a dry shady spot.
A lot died of course, but I soon built a greenhouse to help resuscitate dying plants and began the tactic of maximum cultivation, to just throw as much as possible at it and see what sticks, what comes back – what wants to grow? After about five years of reaping and sowing there was no more room to plant anything anywhere on our Sacramento property. I had to stop. But eventually there was almost always something blooming in the yard, so we had fresh flowers for vases most of the year. It was our small oasis in the middle of a big city. Shannon often said she wished we could pick it all up and move it somewhere quieter, out of town.
This year I’m encouraged to see the spring re-growth looking promising here in New Bern, after my first whack at it last year that resulted in…absence. I expect some of the perennial seeds sown last year will be growing for the first time. Even after all I’ve thrown at it, the landscaping is still so, meh. But I knew going into it that it takes years. The new greenhouse isn’t even completed yet but is already functioning – and full. The grass, meanwhile, is brown here in winter. That’s weird. And I guess my homeowner’s association thinks so too because they paint the dead grass green around the gatehouse. It’s not even a remotely natural looking color, it’s nearly neon. It’s the other end of the spectrum from those hills around Travis that’s marked spring since I was kid, momentarily vibrant with colors that swirl as zephyrs sweep through like stroking velvet against the grain.