Christmas Day 2019

          When it turned out that Mike's family and mine were scattered in various places doing various things for Christmas this year and that we would therefore be having our first Christmas together with just each other, I said, "Let's eat, drink, and be merry!" (Mike is my husband, as of last May. See posts on May 23 and May 30.)

          Food would be the focus. For days I pored over cookbooks before choosing an easy bacon-and-tuna linguine for Christmas Eve dinner and savory crepes (made with cornmeal and beer) with sausage for Christmas morning breakfast. For Christmas dinner we would have a pumpkin-and-persimmon soup, a beef tagine over butternut squash, a salad of beets, cauliflower, and carrots, and, for dessert, the Christmas-present cakes, two days in the making, now waiting in the freezer. (See my food blog, foodaspoem.blogspot.com for a description.)

          A few days later I left the Ashland Food Coop with my shopping bags overflowing with beautiful food: onions and oranges, squashes and pumpkins, cartons of cream, wedges of cheese, chocolate. The butcher at Cartwright's Market helped me select the best meat for the tagine, a Moroccan dish of short ribs in a rich sauce of broth, wine, prune juice, and spices. I maybe wasn't returning home with the fluttering quails and live turtle that Babette brought across the sea from France to Denmark for her feast in the movie Babette's Feast, but I was returning home with some of the excitement she felt, too, about preparing to cook good things to eat.

          On Christmas Eve Mike arrived at my house with his best bottle of wine and with brandy for the eggnog. After dinner (which Mike liked a lot, though I cautioned him that it wasn't the Christmas meal), we watched Babette's Feast because I had been thinking so much about it and because Mike had never seen it. Mike wasn't to expect quite cailles en sarcophage, I said, but our meal, too, would take hours to make. And though I understood Babette's having no need for her guests to rave over the fantastic meal she had prepared for them (her expressing herself with her art being satisfaction enough), nonetheless, I told Mike, I hoped he wouldn't just talk about the weather while he was eating my hours-in-the-making Christmas dinner, as Babette's guests had done. Unlike Babette, if the food was good, I wanted acknowledgement that it was so. 

          On Christmas Day the eating, drinking, and being merry started with coffee, homemade bread from my neighbor, and homemade nectarine-lime jam from Mike's daughter, Zoey. Then we opened gifts, then had our crepes with sausage, which weren't as good as I had thought they would be, but no matter. On with the merriment!  

          After brunch and before delving into the four hours of dinner preparation, Mike and I took a long walk up the mountain. The fresh air and physical exertion were just what we needed. It was 3:00 when we got home.

          And then didn't we make a flurry in the kitchen!

Mike, sous-chef, cut up the pumpkins and onions while I prepared the persimmons and gathered the spices and cream for the persimmon-and-pumpkin soup. While the soup was cooking, I cleaned the kitchen. Mike prepared the meat for the tagine. I sautéed onions and measured wine, broth, and juice into the pot. While the meat simmered in the sauce, I cleaned the kitchen (again). We sipped eggnog with brandy. We prepared and cooked the squash. I decided we had enough to eat without the salad and was glad enough not to have to be cooking beets. I sautéed more onions and put them in a beef broth for the couscous. Complex odors circulated through the kitchen. We set the table with a green tablecloth and white candles. Mike poured the wine. 

          We toasted "Merry Christmas" to each other. We took a moment to appreciate the beautiful food before us: the yellow-orange soup and the dark meat shining with its glaze of spices, juices, and broths on a platter of dark orange, honey-glazed butternut squash in front of a bowl of couscous pearls flecked with mint.

 And then we ate.

          It was utterly delicious. The soup was silky smooth and brisk with pumpkin and persimmon flavors. The tagine was dark and rich, flavored with cinnamon, cumin, all-spice, and ginger, perfectly complemented by the squash and minted couscous. 

The piece de résistance was the dessert, little squares of cake, with strawberry ice cream and lemon curd sandwiched between cake layers, covered with a rich, brandy-laced chocolate ganache with strips of white icing made to look like ribbons on a package. They were superb.

          It was all superb. We had spent the day eating, drinking, and being merry. Our first Christmas together was a grand celebration.

          The after-dinner port was almost superfluous.

There's More Than One Way to Decorate a Christmas Tree

          I've heard that the best thing an individual can do to counter climate change is to plant trees. Therefore, it seems that cutting a tree out of the woods for a Christmas tree would only add to the climate problem. One less tree equals that much more carbon in the atmosphere.

          But in my woods small evergreens bunch together in tight clumps and spend years of their lives struggling to outdo one another to rise to greatness, like the big trees around them. To free up the space around two or three of them would be to encourage their growth into the kind of big trees that do the most good for the environment. Therefore, when I take my bow saw and go into the woods to look for a Christmas tree, I look for an expendable tree whose departure from the forest will be good for the forest and for the planet.

          The result this year was that I came from the woods with a spindly thin tree on my shoulder. Of course, all wild trees are more sparsely limbed and leaved (needled) than trees on a Christmas tree lot, but my tree this year is especially flimsy. Most of the ornaments would have to go close to the trunk if they weren't to weigh the branches to the floor. Even ordinary glass balls would be too heavy for these scrawny branches.

          My mother used to say, every year when I was a child, "Let's organize the ornaments by color this year." Every year the children, stuck in tradition, as children tend to be, would ignore her and place the well-loved ornaments anywhere they wanted. But my mother's boldness to try something different encouraged me to do the same. When I set up my Christmas tree and saw how skimpy and delicate it was, I thought, "The only way to make this tree work is to use paper ornaments," something I had in abundance after making seventy-five origami ornaments as one item for my 75x75 project (see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com)—even after giving at lot away at my seventy-fifth birthday party. Besides, I still had the origami ornaments my son and I made when he was a child (those forty-year-old ornaments) and the stars and polygonal paper balls he made in sixth grade. With those, Christmas lights, and tinsel, I thought I could deck the tree with holiday cheer.

          It worked beautifully. 

Paper cranes are the most numerous ornaments, but sparrows, roses, lilies, frogs, butterflies, and crabs also hang on the branches, in addition to a couple of rabbits, a reindeer, a sailboat, two elephants, a giraffe, a peacock, a bear, several pinwheels, dragonflies, a swan, and a whale.

There are paper stars and ribbon stars and pointy polygon paper balls, a red-and-white one and a blue-and-white one. Ornaments are made form glossy colored paper, double-sided colored paper, and plain origami paper of all colors placed haphazardly on the tree (no attempt at color coordination). Limbs hardly notice the weight. They stay uplifted and light. Tiny white Christmas lights sparkle evenly around the tree. For the final touch, tinsel dangles from the tip of every limb.

          The tree is delicate and lovely. The tinsel sparkles and twinkles; the ornaments dangle with dainty appropriateness. Every morning when I wake up, I plug in the lights and am enchanted all over again.

          I am free to feel enchanted because I'm not weighed down with the guilt of cutting down a tree necessary to the forest. And I can agree with my mother, too: there's more than one way to make a Christmas tree beautiful. Next year maybe I'll try the color theme.

How Old Does One Have to Be to Learn Social Skills?

        One of the items on my list of seventy-five things of seventy-five repetitions each that I set myself to do before my seventy-fifth birthday (see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com) was to have conversations with seventy-five strangers. This was not an easy task for me. I'm genial enough, on the whole, but I don't have the social skill of some admirable people who can seemingly talk to anyone and make that person feel comfortable and interesting. I'm better at it than I was as a kid, especially after my seventy-five conversations with strangers last year, but it still takes an effort.

         Apparently, though, some people simply have that skill by virtue of who they are. A six-year-old, for instance, hasn't had time to develop the awareness of social skills. A six-year-old just is who he is. I think I might be able to start a conversation with a six-year-old because I'm pretty good with children, but, basically, my fallback position is not to say anything.

          Therefore, after an excursion during the Thanksgiving holiday with Mike's family (see last week's post), when I found myself standing in the open door of the car next to six-year-old Morgan, who was already in his car seat, I was just waiting for everyone else to straighten out their gear and put things in the car and find their places. I wasn't thinking about starting a conversation. But affable Morgan took advantage of the moment to say to me, "I noticed that you like to knit. What other crafts do you like to do?"

         I was astonished. It was a surprisingly mature way of relating, not only to observe that I had been knitting during the weekend but to transpose that observation and make the reasonable assumption that I must also do other crafts—and then to use that knowledge to start a conversation!

          I recovered from my surprise fast enough not to lose the relationship opportunity Morgan was offering, but not so smoothly that I could answer appropriately. The first thing that came to mind was that I liked to sew, so that's what I said, but if I had thought more clearly, I would have realized that that wasn't likely to lead to the conversation Morgan wanted to start. He stumbled for a minute trying to find a response, so I quickly added that I liked paper crafts, too. Morgan brightened. There was a conversational gambit he could hang onto! He said he liked to make origami. I had just finished making seventy-five origami ornaments (for the 75x75 project), so we had a nice little conversation about what we had made and what was most difficult or most fun.

          He's just a kid. His social sills with his sister and cousins are no better than those of any other child's. He fights and teases; he plays tricks and wants another child's toys. So how had he already developed such easy social skills with adults? He's like his grandfather and his father, who both have that conversational ability, so it must be an inherited trait. (My father, for instance, was notorious for not being able to make small talk.) I think it is a beautiful trait. If Morgan demonstrated how easy it is to start a conversation with a stranger (just pay attention and make connections), he also showed me how valuable it is. Having had that small interaction with Morgan, I'll feel like we're friends when I see him again. And maybe, having been tutored by example, I'll be able to find the conversational opener myself that time.

Being an In-law

        Being married, I see now, brings with it certain obligations. I am now an in-law. When Thanksgiving plans turned out to be four days with Mike's two daughters and their families—a husband and two children each, plus the daughters' mother (Mike's ex, as one might say)—on Tenmile Lake, up the Oregon coast, I left my little house on the mountain and its eight inches of new snow (!) to spend the holiday as an in-law.
        In the Coogle family my three brothers-in-law and one sister-in-law were known as "out-laws." I thought it was an apt term because we were a tight-knit family, with shared in-jokes and a boisterous way of being together that bespoke decades of knowing how to relate to each other. Now, finding myself suddenly inside another such family, I could sympathize with being an "out-law."
        There was, for instance, a lot of family talk at the house on the lake: reminiscences of the girls' growing up on the commune in the Applegate, talk about what their classmates were doing now, memories of vacations together. There were the family jokes: teasing Dad (that would be Mike) for not liking mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, good-natured ribbing between the sisters. I listened and observed and enjoyed the interactions from the outside. I was "in" the family "by law" and felt completely a part of the Thanksgiving holiday, but I was, like Bruce, Billy, Jack, and Linda, an outsider all the same.
         Of course, I could hardly realistically fulfill the role of mother-in-law (stepmother-in-law, really) to Mike's daughters, for instance. The term had no meaning in the reality of these two grown women, mothers of two children each, with their own mother fulfilling every role that a mother at that time should. Instead, I related to my new (step)daughters-in-law by admiring Zoey's imaginative activities with the children—the crafts she brought, the scavenger hunt she organized for our walk through the forest—and praising Allegra's excellent cooking and handling of the kitchen. For Thanksgiving dinner we had a delicious smoked ham, accompanied by all the Thanksgiving dishes (except cranberry sauce, which wouldn't go well with ham), as well as Russian vegetable pie, a family favorite. We would have had apple and pecan pies in addition to the banana, pumpkin, and chocolate pies except that the night before Thanksgiving mice helped themselves to those two pies, which had to be thrown away. In a twinkling Thanksgiving morning Allegra's and Zoey's mother had made a peach pie and Allegra had made a pumpkin cheesecake to take their places. Smoked salmon and cream cheese for hors d'oeuvres, home-reared lamb for another dinner, chocolate chip pancakes and coffee cake for breakfast—good things to eat kept rolling from the kitchen. Well-fed guests are happy guests. Allegra's guests smiled all weekend.
        I could also hardly manifest the role of stepgrandmother-in-law, new in the family as I was and no one special to Mike's four grandchildren, who ranged in age from four to eight. I was just another adult in the house, with no disciplining, game-playing, or book-reading privileges, although the children did give me good-night hugs before they went to bed. As with all children, I would have to earn their love and respect; I would have to prove to them my place in the family, what being G-Pop's wife meant to them, who I was and could be in relation to them.
         I did make inroads. They loved the black bottom (chocolate) banana cream pie I made for Thanksgiving dinner. Food is always a good way to make friends with a child, and I put checkmarks in the score box for that one.
        On the last day of the holiday I was sitting near the stove working a New York Times crossword puzzle on my computer. The kids were playing with their toys, rambunctiously, as usual, and underfoot, as always, since the house was very small with few places for escape. Then I realized that the oldest boy, Quincy, had left the children's games and was standing over my shoulder. He asked what I was doing. I explained how to work a crossword puzzle, and even though it was a pretty darn difficult puzzle, even for me, I started asking him for help with the clues. Then his cousin Morgan joined us, and as the three of us brainstormed words, Rosie, the four-year-old girl, just climbed into my lap and sat there while we talked about words. "What's another way to say, "'Good job'?" Someone suggested the Spanish words, but they didn't fit. "What were the Wonderland cake words?" "What do you learn in Boy Scouts?"
        It was a magical moment with the children. I kept them in that aura for as long as I could until the boys inevitably lost interest and wandered away and Rosie climbed out of my lap, and I was alone again. But for some long precious moments, grandmother-in-law was one of the world's sweetest roles.

Thankful for a Childhood in Nature

         This morning, the day before Thanksgiving, with eight inches of fresh beautiful white snow on the ground at my house, I'm thankful for snow. Its beauty in the silence of early morning reminds me how grateful I am for a childhood that taught me to use my senses.

        I was born on a California island, where the Pacific Ocean laid the cadence of its heartbeat over mine, but I spent a childhood in the South, where I learned to use my senses. The sense of smell, for instance, I learned to use on my grandparents' Kentucky farm—tobacco curing in barn rafters, barnyard manure of cattle and hogs, hay being baled in the fields—and at my home in the north Georgia woods, with the smell of sweet gum bark, sun warmed pine needles, and the heavy, damp moss I replanted in my secret rock garden. I knew the sweetness of wild azaleas from hiking on the Appalachian Trail, the fetid thick smell of the Okefenokee Swamp from canoeing there, and underground dankness form spelunking in Alabama caves. Now on the mountain where I have lived for almost five decades, I know the vivid fetid smell of Oregon grape blossoms, the vanilla smell of Pondrosa pine, the pungency of incense cedar, and the acrid stink of the stink bug.

          In my childhood my mother taught me to belong to the land by naming what I see and hear: a green figure in a green sheath—a jack-in-the-pulpit; a flash of red in a dogwood tree—a cardinal; a three-syllable whistle from the woods at dusk—a whippoorwill. From those lessons I learned to name my neighbors in nature on my mountain in Oregon: shooting star, pedicularis, ox-eyed daisy, Applegate paintbrush. I know the meadowlark's trill, the drumming of grouse, the whir of a rufous hummingbird in my honeysuckle. I know the barred owl sweeping through the firs, the great blue heron flying into my swimming hole, and the osprey splashing into a lake to rise with a fish.

          When my sisters and I caught a chameleon, my father showed us its color-changing magic. When we brought home from the woods a black and yellow, hard-shelled creature we called a turtle, he explained why it was a terrapin. When bees swarmed on a tree limb, he wiped them bare-armed into his hive, telling us, "Swarming bees don't sting." He taught us to recognize copperheads, black snakes, and garter snakes, to walk unafraid in the woods. Today, therefore, I honor the bears and cougars in my woods, the snakes in my garden, and the bats at my house. I swim in the cold mountain lakes of the wilderness as much at home as newts and dragonflies.

         During the barefoot summers of my Georgia childhood, I tread lightly on the earth, recognizing thorns and caterpillars before stepping on them, squishing my toes in the mud of warm summer rains. Here on the Oregon mountain, my foot recognizes sharp pebbles, the pointed tips of oak leaves, and the hard carapaces of scorpions and stink worms before it crunches down.

          After a childhood in the South, I returned, like migrating salmon and monarch butterflies, to the place where birth rhythms called—to the West Coast. In this almost half-century of living here in the Siskiyou Mountains, I have had reason, time and again, to recall these lessons of that childhood—lessons of nature and of the senses—and to be grateful for them, as they have been the foundation of my life.

Isn't It Supposed To Be Winter?

        I hate to be curmudgeonly. I'm not a grump, really. I generally have a bright outlook. I've been called a glass-half-full person. So I've tried, not very successfully, not to complain about this gorgeous autumn weather everyone says we're having. And it has been, really. Glorious hiking weather, and I've taken advantage of it as much as possible. And I love it.

        For a while. Through, say, September, or even mid-October. But it's November, ye gods, and this warm, sunny weather has gone on and on and on. Will winter never come?

        Yesterday I went into the garden and found, to my great surprise, a rose bush with eight blossoms on it. That bush hadn't bloomed since I put it in the ground last spring, when it gradually lost all its blossoms and then drooped and sighed and languished until I finally got the right kind of irrigation on it (thanks to Mike's help), when it perked up but never bloomed again. Now it must have thought it was still summer (as well it might, since it can't read calendars, and determines summer by warmth more than by daylight hours, maybe), and so it put out midsummer energy and all those blossoms.

        They are a gorgeous deep pink, a rich sunrise color. I picked the two best blossoms and brought them inside, where I enjoy them as no curmudgeon ever could.

        But it's November, for God's sake. 

        Two days ago we did actually get some rain, slow and slight, but it was recognizably rain. Things got wet. 

        Now we're back to that everlasting sun, though the temperatures have, I am glad to say, dropped ten degrees or so. Actually, since I'm not a curmudgeon, I'll say that chilly sunny days are my favorite kind of November days. (A little colder would be even nicer.) But these days should come after days if not weeks of dreary, gray, rainy, drizzly, what most people would call miserable weather. After that, chilly sunny days are glorious, especially when there's snow on the ground and blue skies above. 

        We can enjoy this kind of autumn, but let us not be anthropocentric. We all need the rain, in whatever form it comes. I would give up these sunny November days for days of rain. Even my rose bush would be happy with a good hard rain. 

Hiking Partners: Me or the dog?

        When I first started going out with Mike, he had a dog. Let it be known right away that I'm not a dog person. Bailey was an all-right dog, and I probably don't do her justice because I didn't have much to do with her (or she with me) and because she was an elderly dog and wasn't showing off the best that dogness has to offer. But I recognized that Bailey was an important part of Mike's life and that they had hiked many trails together before I came along. It was understood between them that she would go on hikes with him, whether I were there or not, so, if I were going to hike with Mike, which I very much wanted to do, I would have to hike with Bailey, too. Love me, love my dog.

Bailey is the light brown dog at the water's edge.

       Bailey died a few years ago. And Mike and I have hiked many miles together. Somewhere recently on some trail for some reason we started talking about the differences between me and Bailey as hiking partners. As the pros and cons were thrown out, I began to get a little nervous that Mike would get another dog as a preferred hiking partner.

        I had to admit that Bailey had some advantages over me, but I was quick to point out that I had the advantage in other ways. I am, for instance, by far the better conversationalist (one point for me). On the other hand, Bailey didn't talk back to Mike or argue about the names of the peaks. If Mike said, "Oh, there's Mt. Elijah," Bailey didn't say, "No, it isn't. That's Grayback," as I am apt to do (though I am usually about as correct as Bailey would have been). Bailey never corrected Mike if he used "imply" when he meant "infer," either. Bailey didn't care. That put grammar-dictator me up against all-accepting Bailey (one point for Bailey).

        I don't run off into the forest chasing squirrels, so Mike doesn't have to call me back, as he did Bailey (point for me). On the other hand, Bailey did obey him (point for Bailey). If Mike said, "Comel" Bailey came, wagging her tail. I'm likely to balk at commands and sometimes affect a fetch-it-yourself attitude.

        Bailey accepted that Mike was her master. He is not mine. I did not promise to "obey" in my wedding vows. Bailey's hero-worship was flattering, but, sorry, as much as I love Mike, I'm not going to take him as my master. Still it's another point for Bailey, the yes-master worshipful hiking partner.

        Bailey, like me, liked to swim in the lakes. My advantage is that I don't spray water over Mike with a vigorous shake when I get out (big point for me).

        Bailey would lie next to Mike in the tent and keep his body warm. I do that, too, except sometimes my feet are so cold it's like putting a bag of ice on Mike's legs. Point for Bailey, though I'm reluctant to concede it because my warm body feels good against Mike's, too.

        Mike doesn't have to follow me picking up my poop. Big plus for me.

        I don't jump up and lick Mike's face when we meet, no matter how glad I am to see him. But maybe Mike liked that kind of greeting from the dog. Some people do. I don't. From my point of view, this is a plus for me, but Bailey would say such an enthusiastic show of affection would be a plus for her, so this is a draw.

      After a hike Mike had to feed Bailey, whereas it's I who give Mike good things to eat. Big plus for me.

      I don't shed hair. Well, I do, these days, but not a lot. Not like a dog. Point for me.

       Bailey was always in a good mood. I'm usually in a good mood, but I get irritated from time to time, which Bailey never did. Bailey never complained, as I sometimes do. Point for Bailey, the good-natured, Pollyanna, thank-you-master dog.

        Counting points, I barely come out ahead, with six points to Bailey's five, but an even stronger factor is the strength of various points. Being a good conversationalist is a very big factor, but so is Bailey's never-complaining outlook on life. I am fairly secure in thinking Mike won't replace me with a dog for a hiking partner, but maybe, without moving into hero-worship or obeying every command, I could learn a few things from Bailey about being a good hiking partner.

When God Forgot the Chlorophyll

          It has been a great mushroom season. The woods are so full of mushrooms my friend from Lithuania complains about how easy they are to find. In Europe, she says, you have to hunt all day for mushrooms. Here, you just go into the woods and pick them.

          Walking in the woods this season reminds me of an essay in my first book, Fire from the Dragon's Tongue, about how beautiful mushrooms are, so I'm using it for my post this week.

When God Forgot the Chlorophyll

          God was in a frenzy of creation. He only had six days in which to finish the project, and there was so much to do! But deadlines always arrive; the sixth day did come, and God was just finishing up, painting those last-minute thin lines on the wood duck and looking forward to a day of rest, when he saw the mushrooms.

          "Oh, my God!" he cried. "I forgot the chlorophyll!" But it was too late. Chagrined, God hurriedly bestowed on mushrooms four compensating factors: strength, shape, the use of all other colors than green, and edibility.

        Thus it is that mushrooms push up through the earth with iron-fist force, the eponymous metaphor for unstoppable strength and sudden emergence.

Nothing stops a mushroom once it begins pushing itself into the dark, damp light of the forest. Sticks, leaves, bark, logs, and stones are shoved aside. Vines that would bind anything else are forced to stretch around and twist the shape of but never stop a mushroom, the quintessential "out of my way; I'm coming through!" emergent. And yet mushrooms are so soft. How could anything as delicate and soft as a mushroom, so mushy to the touch, so spongy and fragile, have such strength?

          Mushrooms are flat like tabletops or pointed and curved like umbrellas. They are bulbous or convoluted, small as buttons or big as cups, thin as platters or thick as steaks. They are smooth as a madrone limb, scaly like lizard's skin, bumpy, flaky,

or in the terminology of the mushroom book, covered with warts, a word much too ugly for the delicate flakes and spots of white on the regally scarlet amanita.

Large, yellow-brown, flat mushrooms with edges slightly curled look like buttermilk pancakes, which, when they age, look like they've been left too long on the griddle.

        Mushrooms are freckled, striped, or plain. They whorl with concentric rings or fade their colors with the delicacy of a sound fade-out. They grow singly, in clumps, or in large colonies The white ones look like scattered eggshells, the brown ones like chocolate wafers, the orange ones like yam skins. A scattering of mushrooms in the woods looks like a turned-over compost heap.

They are shiny, wet, dry, slimy, curly, convex, concave, rubbery, slick. They emerge folded like butterfly wings, or they jam a six-inch-wide top through the earth like the head of a nail being pounded from below They measure from half an inch across to eight inches or more.

They have curdled edges or smooth, tree-trunk stems or toothpick stems, under-layers like petticoats or like leaves of the Bible slightly warped with dampness or like sponges from Florida's seas. They have all the floral colors: red yellow, purple, grey, white, brown, pink, coral, but no matter how bright the hue, the tone is muted with earthiness.

          And they are edible—sometimes. Mushrooms are the big gamble of the vegetable kingdom. "Try me" is the tempting message. Just as good as some are to the palate exactly so poisonous are others. Some mushrooms are so good enthusiasts dare the edges of edibility, others so poisonous the unwary can die for having touched them and brought fingers to tongues. Some mushrooms are poisonous to some people in some circumstances. Other people eat the same mushrooms safely with gusto. And even as some delight the tongue and some poison the body, others send the mind on strange journeys, another gamble between sensual delights and mental dangers. Nothing is certain except the gamble. 

          But the inconsistency is understandable. God was rushed.

Being the Consciousness of the Universe

          What a beautiful autumn it's been!

I've lived in the Siskiyou Mountains for almost fifty years, and every year I forget how beautiful autumn can be. Now that I'm half a century distant from my childhood in the Appalachian hills of north Georgia, too, I've forgotten how gorgeous the Appalachians were. I just don't think autumn could be any more beautiful than it is here.

          When I expressed this thought to a friend who grew up in Pennsylvania, he gently reminded me that with the Appalachians in full autumn glory, entire hillsides are ablaze. Here, the hills, covered in evergreens, are ever green, year-round, and are autumnally dull in comparison. And, of course, it's true. I've just forgotten.

          But that autumn in the Rogue Valley is not as spectacular as it is in north Georgia or Pennsylvania doesn't mean it isn't mouth-agape beautiful here. The hills might be green, spotted here and there with the deep, butter-rich yellow of maples, but to hike on trails studded with viny maples, dogwoods, and big-leaf maples in and around the firs and cedars

is to come to a standstill with awe in front of now one tree and now another. It's the individual tree, in the Siskiyou autumn, that astonishes, not the broad, sweeping panorama. It's the blazing red maple at the bottom of Thomspon Creek Road that I call my favorite autumn tree in the Applegate. It's the canopy of big-leaf maples so yellow I stop the car, get out, and slip-slide down the hill just so I can stand under them, where the air itself has turned yellow, and absorb that color through my skin. It's Lithia Park in Ashland, where autumn-rich trees are reflected in the pond,

and Riverside Park in Grants Pass, with its tall, magnificent yellow, orange, and red trees. It's this tree of umber, that one of scarlet, the next one of bronze, the next of pink.

         Earlier this autumn, when I was walking up a trail on the mountain, I stopped in amazement before a glowing big-leaf maple at the edge of the trail. I gawked for a long time, awash in the colors of that tree, and I wondered if the deer and cougars who walked this same trail were aware of that beauty, whether the tree itself were aware of its own exquisitneness. Could the creatures of the woods walk through autumn's glory without noticing? It seems impossible, but it also seems true that all that beauty was just there for its own sake, whether I was there to see it or not, whether any being was there to appreciate it. 

          Thomas Berry tells us, in his wonderful book The Dream of the Earth, "The human is that being in whom the universe comes to itself in a special mode of conscious reflection," or, as physicist Brian Swimme puts it, "The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human." That, I think, is what I was experiencing as I absorbed what I was seeing in the maple tree and its surrounding mountains: myself as the consciousness of the universe. It is a responsibility of all of us as we walk through this world. 

         

Harvest: Picking Apples

          The day after I helped crush grapes for wine in Seattle, I went to an orchard on Vashon Island, off the coast of Seattle, to help harvest apples for cider at Dragon's Head Farm. If at T2 wine cellar I was transported to the Middle Ages of France or England (see last week's post), here I was transported to the mythological land of Hera, whose golden apple tree was guarded by the Hesperides, nymphs of the evening. Since even nymphs can't be trusted not to taste apples, Hera hired the dragon Ladon to guard the guards, so to speak. Ladon is often depicted with multiple heads; thus the name of Dragon's Head Farm. Although none of the hundreds of apple trees in the orchard seemed to be entwined by a dragon—the only creature in the orchard was a large and very friendly dog—I did keep my eye out for Ladon when I snuck an apple into my mouth.

          Actually, there wasn't much time to eat apples because there was so much picking to do. The dozen or so adults and six or eight children who had come to harvest the apples were given small light-weight bins, like milk cartons, to put the apples in, as well as apple-picking aprons for a couple of people and one rolling scoop, with a long handle like a rake, that rolled over the apples on the ground and scooped them into its wire net with efficiency. When our bins, aprons, or scoops were full, we poured the apples into one of the two large bins that Wes, orchard owner and cider maker, drove between the rows of trees and then, when they were full, to the cider yard.

          The trees were small and the apples were small, so if you had an apron and could stand and pick, the picking was fast and easy, but most of the apples were already on the ground, where the picking was also fast and easy. The best method was to squat and scoop all the apples you could reach, three or four at a time, into your hands and toss them into a bin, then crawl a few feet forward and do it again. Wes, with his big hands, could pick faster than any Ladon could have seen. After emptying a bin into the wagon, the picker would leapfrog over other pickers to the next tree with apples on the ground and work there. Every once in a while someone would give the whole tree a good hard shake, bringing apples down like rain. When the squall stopped, pickers would move in and start picking apples off the ground again.

          Although the sky was cloudy and the air chilly, we warmed up with our exertion, and it wasn't long before coats and jackets littered the row. We chatted companionably as we worked. When I picked on the other side of the tree from the children, I caught snatches of their 'tween-age conversations: "Sandra didn't study at all for the history test." "Did you know that the sun is going to explode? Maybe not for millions of years, but it is going to explode." The children picked apples for a good long while before they lost interest and wandered off on their own.

       In late afternoon, with both sides of two rows of trees harvested, the day's work was done. Dragon's Head Farm owners, Wes and Laura, were ecstatic. "This is the best way ever to harvest apples," Laura declared. I thought so, too. We had picked 9000 pounds of apples for no telling how many gallons of cider. The work had been its own reward, but we were also well rewarded after the harvest with Laura's good salad and coconut-lentil soup, eaten around a beautiful walnut-slab table. As we left to return to our respective homes, Laura and Wes gave us paper bags and told us to fill them from a bucket of their best eating apples on the front porch. Ladon, they assured us, was nowhere around.

Harvest Season: Stomping Grapes

        As soon as I stepped into the bin of grapes in the big winemaking warehouse of T2 Cellar in Seattle, I felt like one of the peasants depicted in Medieval illuminated manuscripts: stomping the grapes in large barrels, dancing a jig to the lively tune of fiddles while brawny lads haul more bins of grapes from the vineyard and everyone—men, women, youths, and children—enjoys a festive harvest on a sunny autumn day.

        It wasn't quite like that, especially because in those days the men did the stomping because women, of course, wouldn't be lifting their skirts and showing their legs. Also, although it was a sunny autumn day in Seattle, we were indoors, in a very clean warehouse where T2 Cellar makes its wine. There wasn't a speck of dirt anywhere, and my son, Ela, and I cleaned and sanitized our feet in four sequenced buckets before stepping onto the grapes.

 (I wondered what kind of sanitization the peasants did to their feet.) Everything else was pretty much as it was centuries ago. We were stomping on the grapes because the grapes needed to be pulverized, and, as in days of yore, there was no better way to do it than with the feet. 

        This being the era of machines, however, and hand (or in this case foot) labor being more costly for the winemaker than machines (unless the winemaker has willing friends to come and help for the fun of it), winemakers now use a machine, called a destemmer, 

Todd Threlkeld, with Grenache grapes, destemmer in the background

which does the work of foot-stomping for the Granache and Sangiovese grapes T2 Cellar uses for red wine. The destemmer will juice the grapes and send them through tubes into storage jars in one smooth process. The foot-stomping was for the Marsanne grapes, a white-wine variety, which weren't numerous enough for T2 Cellar's large press and unsuitable for the small basket press, which doesn't press white clusters very well. Therefore, Todd Threlkeld, head winemaker, told me, "the stomping was not a lark but the most efficient and effective way to process a small amount of grapes"—fortunately for me, because it was a lot more fun to squish grapes with my feet than to pour grapes into a machine.

          Just as in Medieval days, there was music, if not fiddlers on the ground, then contemporary rock music on the stereo, that had us jumping and dancing like the peasants, at least for a while. 

Pretty soon I began thinking this was a lot of work, after all, until an experienced wine-maker told me it wasn't necessary to jump. We just had to squeeze the grapes until no more balls of grapes rolled under our feet. After that I stepped firmly but quietly onto the grapes, pressing hard, taking small steps, chasing with the next step the grapes that escaped towards the edges of the bin.

          When all the grapes had been brought to submission, when there were no more rolling balls of grapes underfoot, 

we poured the resulting pulp into a press, another ancient piece of equipment, and turned the crank to press pulp into juice, which we then poured into large jars.

 Now I was catapulted not into the Middle Ages but to my father's basement, where I used to help him bottle his wine when I came to visit from Oregon. He would have enjoyed this day with me.

          After pulping, pressing, and pouring, the six of us working on winemaking that day had delicious dolmas and falafels from a near-by Greek deli, washed down with some tastes of T2 Cellar wine. Good wine. The next time I go to Seattle, I want to go to T2 Cellar and have some white wine from Marsanne grapes. I'll lift my glass to the light and squint, seeing in the wine my bare feet stomping the grapes in the bin like a peasant at harvest in a vineyard.

          

          

Inside Things

          Take a child to an apple tree and pick an apple. Cut it horizontally and open the broken halves. Look! Do you see the secret star inside? The child's delight will reinforce your own sense of wonder at the beauty inside things of nature.

         Beauty, of course, is everywhere in nature, but the hidden beauties—the patterns and surprises inside things—are the best of all. When I was a child, my father cut a pine cone lengthwise. Look! Inside! Another tree, with a trunk tapering towards its top and branches to the sides.

          A geode is boring on the outside—rough in texture, dull in color, interesting only in being unusually round. Break it open and find purple crystals rising like teeth in the mouth of a sea monster or clustering like petrified forms of the swaying tentacles of an anemone.

          The wonder elicited by the beauty of crystalline teeth inside a geode is enhanced by what the imagination does with the slightly menacing image of a sea monster, but when my leg slipped into a crevasse when I was mountain-climbing in the Alps and I looked down into the inside of a glacier, the danger was real but the beauty so surprising it blinded fear. The depth was unimaginable. As it plunged, the inside of the glacier echoed a deeper and deeper blue, from light-brightened turquoise to light-deprived turquoise and on beyond where I could tell what color it was. The color inside snow was as surprising as crystals inside a rock or a star in an apple, so surprising and so beautiful I never thought of the danger I might have been in. But maybe I had the luxury of not paying attention to the danger because I was roped to my companions. Or maybe I saw only the beauty because I was twenty years old and unaware of mortality. Whatever the reason I was able to concentrate on the beauty inside a glacier, I am grateful for it.

          Everything has something inside. Inside a seed is a tree; inside a bud is a flower. Inside a raindrop is a rainbow. Inside your eyes is your soul. Maybe a bear becomes angry if you look him in the eye because he doesn't want you to see inside his bare soul. A dog, on the other hand, has such confidence in his dogness he will beg you to look inside his eyes. When I looked at an owl through my binoculars, straight into his big owl eyes, he stared back into mine, then flew away and didn't return to the tree outside my bedroom for years. Was it what he saw in me or what he didn't want me to see in him that kept him away? His privacy? Or my rudeness?

         I could, if I wanted, reveal what's inside my heart, but how could I even know what's inside a bucketful of stars? What wonders of color or pattern might be inside a grain of sand? Look deep, look deeper, look deeper still: the beauty inside of things has no end.

Hemp Galore

          To drive through the Applegate this late summer is to be deluged with the odor—the stink, some say—of cannabis. For some people the smell evokes those times, in days of yore, when someone wafted a bud under our noses before rolling it into a joint. In this case, though, the marijuana smell doesn't come form the smoking variety but from hemp. The Applegate is awash in hemp.

          To the astonishment of Applegaters, hemp fields sprang up all over the valley this summer (hemp is planted late in the season), stretching on both sides of the river to the hills. The first signs were the ugly strips of black plastic covering the fields. From hiking trails above the valley, they looked like shimmering lakes. Then the seedlings went in. Signs went up: "Hemp. No THC." This was not marijuana. It would not make you high. No use stealing it. Hemp grows fast, like the weed it is called. It grows short, bushy, and sticky (with CBD: cannabinoids). It emits a strong odor.

          Hemp has a variety of uses. It makes a great fabric. I can't wait till enough of it is grown to put hemp clothing on the market. Of course, everyone talks about hemp rope, but the main, maybe only, purpose for the hemp grown in the Applegate is medicinal. There seems to be a good market for CBD oil, made from the stalks, leaves and flowers of hemp, and for hemp oil, made from the seeds. Some Applegate hemp fields have already been shorn to the ground, but carloads of harvesters are working in others, so maybe both products come from Applegate hemp. 

          My visitor from Tennessee last month bemoaned the legalization of marijuana because it took a source of income away from the small-time growers (mom-and-pop, he called them, apparently without noticing the irony) and put it in the hands of Big Industry. I don't particularly think it's a good idea to make one's living through illegal means, either, so we disagreed on that topic, but apparently even the hemp grown in the Applegate is already in the hands of Big Industry, whoever they are. The fields of hemp we see so extravagantly spread throughout the valley are mostly on leased land, which, though probably leased for a pretty penny, are no doubt making a ton of money more for the grower than for the landlord. Some hemp money does, of course, trickle down into the hands of local field workers, baristas, and other merchants. 

          Everyone is talking abut boom and bust. There is no way, the argument goes, that the market can sustain so much product. Oregon's marijuana is a case in point. The large backlog of unsold marijuana has caused the state to put a moratorium on further licenses. People clack their tongues and say the hemp crash is sure to come. There is much head-wagging and tongue-clacking in the Applegate these days. 

          I miss the innocuous and uncontroversial hayfields in the Applegate, but I like seeing our valley kept agricultural, whether with hemp, grapes, or hay. Tomatoes were once the major crop; the air then was redolent of ketchup. Now it smells like cannabis. In some places, if the sun is hot, it might smell like grapes. Sometimes you can still catch the odor of fresh-cut hay. The Applegate is a beautiful place, partly for its mountains and forests and partly for Oregon's wonderful land-use laws, established in 1969, requiring comprehensive land-use plans for every city and county. These laws have helped us keep agricultural lands for agriculture and forested lands for forests, preventing unsightly sprawl  in our beautiful countrysides.

Lost in the Emigrant Wilderness

          Deep in the Emigrant Wilderness Area (north of Yosemite), after four days of backpacking, I was now standing at the top of a granite ridge, surveying the miles and miles, acres and acres, of wilderness around me. As far as the eye could see, it saw granite—mountains and valleys of granite; humps, steps, shelves, and peaks of granite; miles and miles of granite splotched here and there by green stands of trees that managed somehow to get a toehold in the granite. The distances were vast. I thought, "If two people were lost in there, no one would ever find them."

Not the scene I was looking at, but another place in the Emigrant Wilderness, showing the granite

          The thought was sobering because my backpacking partner and I were, at the moment, lost. We had no idea where on the map we were. We had gone off-trail, over the mountain and across the granite, thinking to go to Red Can Lake, but the lake we had come to was not Red Can. Now, looking into the granite slabs and mounds we had crossed to get where we were, I saw that retracing our steps would be impossible. There was no going back, and, not knowing where we were, we didn't know how to go forward, either.

          For a brief moment, there on the ridge, looking into the chasms and peaks of granite, a flame of fear fluttered through me.

Another place off-trail in the Emigrant Wilderness

          But that was all. It was true that we were lost, but we had found a lake, which would have to be on the map somewhere. We were lost, but I was pretty sure we could find ourselves again.

          We decided it would be smart to find a way out before making camp at the lake for the night, so we left our packs at a campsite and started looking for a route to a main trail or, best, to the historic cabin and barn we had passed in the forest hours and hours earlier in the day, another lifetime earlier, when we knew where we were.

          Not far from our campsite, we discovered a line of cairns. Following it, we went up the mountain, to the ridge from which I surveyed the vastness of the wilderness. Apparently the cairns would take us over the ridge to the other side, except we didn't want to go up any farther; we wanted to go down, to known territory, so we left the ridge and went back to the lake to try the other direction.

          Now we followed the stream flowing from the lake down the mountain. Pretty soon we crossed the stream to climb on the rocks, where the walking was easier and where we found another line of cairns, this time heading down the mountain. At a vantage point, my hiking partner gazed at a distant clump of trees and said, "That's where the cabin is. I'm sure of it."

          I hoped he was right as well as sure. He had been sure before. For the past couple of hours he had been studying map and compass, trying to figure out why he wasn't also right.
          Back at the campsite, I sat on a rock to write in my journal. He disappeared with his compass and map. Twenty minutes later he was back. "I think I know where we are," he said. He showed me Five-acre Lake on the map.

         Everything fell into place: the shape of the lake, the contour lines of the ridge, the stream leading to the woods where the cabin was. If we were really at Five-acre Lake, it looked like the line of cairns we had followed to the top of the ridge would take us over the top and down to Leighton Lake and that the streambed-and-cairns trail would, as predicted, take us to the old cabin.

         I was tempted to go up and over the ridge the next day. The high mountains were so beautiful! And I would love to swim in Leighton Lake. But more than anything, I wanted to be on a trail marked on the map. 

          The next morning I took a swim in pretty, little Five-acre Lake.

Morning swim

Then we put on our packs and headed down. The stream led us to the cairns, as yesterday, and the cairns led us down the granite to the forest, where we still had to do some trail-finding to get through the woods.
          Suddenly I saw a barbed-wire fence in front of me and, just beyond it, the cabin and barn.

          I have never been so happy to see barbed wire. We were found! We gave each other a joyous hug, then hefted our backpacks again for the continued hike to the trailhead. Even the snow that fell later that afternoon, as we lay in the tent weathering what we thought was rain, was small potatoes of inconvenience compared to being lost in the wilderness, even if only for half a day.
          Bob is good with a map and compass, but I was relieved to hear him say he thought he would get a GPS before he went into the wilderness again.

Hawaiian Rhythms

        Holualoa. Kamehameha. Aloha kakahiaka. Mahimahi. Ukulele, which isn't pronounced "yook-a-LAY-lee,' but "oo-koo-LEH-leh."

        The paucity of consonants and preponderance of vowels in the Hawaiian alphabet—seven consonants (h,k,l,m,n,p,w), the usual five vowels—force a syllabic repetition that falls on the ear like the rhythms of the Hawaiian landscape—the endless drum of surf, the incessant warble of birds, palm trees curling and uncurling in the wind. The swirl of syllables is as constant and repetitious as the tunnels of waves surfers ride, as the endless summer of Hawaiian weather. Like hula dancing, like ukulele music, the language partakes of the landscape in Lotus-land repetitions, beautiful rhythms of words that croon a spell of Hawaii.

        Forbidden by Hawaii's conquerors and missionaries to be spoken, the language survived in hula dancing, which, according to internet research, depended more on the chant that accompanied it than it did on the movements of hips and hands. Chanting the words kept them alive. Now there are Hawaiian immersion schools, at least for the first three years, and although only one person I asked (and I asked a lot of people) knew any Hawaiian, and although she said she only knew a little, I found the language everywhere.

        Place names and road names were inevitably Hawaiian. "Henry Street" sounded like a foreign language. Reading signs everywhere I went, I practiced the sounds of the language, working out its rules: Pronounce every letter. Make a glottal stop at an apostrophe. Extend the sound of a vowel with a macron (long mark) over it. Accent the penultimate syllable. There are never any consonant clusters, though there are vowel clusters galore: "kamamaina" (native-born), "aloha'auinala" (good afternoon).

        The repetition of syllables makes the words difficult to remember. Was the word for children "keiki" or "kieki"? Was the word for help "kokua" or "kukoa"? I was caught in a whirlwind of syllables, always a vowel at the end of a word, always a vowel following a consonant, but which vowel in which syllable? Seeing a word in its component parts made it easily pronounceable: see "Kamamaina" as "kamama" (accent on the penultimate syllable), followed by "eena": kamamaina. The famous humuhumunukunuku'apua'a (trigger fish) looks intimidating, but following the rhythms smooths it into pronounceability:  humu, humu, nuku, nuku, a pua'a (remembering always to accent the next to the last syllable and to mimic waves). Rolling it over your tongue, you feel the rhythms of the deep in which the fish swims.

        When I stepped off the plane into the open-air (roof but no walls) airport of Kona, I heard my first two Hawaiian words: the ubiquitous "aloha" and then "mahalo," "thank you," at the end of the usual airport announcement about gate and boarding. The other Hawaiian phrases I had learned were never needed, though I did call Mike my ku'uipo (sweetheart) while we were there. I never found the opportunity to tell his grandchildren that they could call him "kuku pane" (grandfather), which is a pity because I think any child would love the chance to call an adult "kuku pane." It was useless to have learned "O wai kou inoa" (What's your name?), as I did for one item of my 75x75 project (see post on January 24, 2019), but learning to count to 75 (100, really) in Hawaiian enabled me to mumble house numbers as I walked down a street. That was as useful as it got.

        Although I never heard any more Hawaiian than "aloha" and "mahalo," I saw a lot of Hawaiian. Besides street signs and place names, I occasionally found long paragraphs written in Hawaiian, as on a large mural at a shopping center. In that way I learned that "aloha" means "love" as well as "hello" and that "aloa" means "sacred," and "pa'aloa" "very sacred," along with other scattered phrases and words.

      Finally, at the Tropical Botanical Gardens gift shop, near Hilo, I found a Hawaiian phrase book. I bought it, even though I was leaving Hawaii the next day, so I could keep the language at my fingertips and, to some extent, on my tongue. Therefore I know that, at this moment of writing this blog post, on this particular auinala (afternoon) at my hale (house), there is uila and hekili (lightning and thunder) outside, though it's just an iki 'ino'ino (a small storm) with some kauanoe (misty rain). Speaking the words takes me back to Hawaii, to its endless surfs and winds, its repetitions of waves and flowing scents, its cooing doves, chirping tree frogs, and endlessly swimming, brilliantly colored tropical fish.

Perfect Storms

        A few years ago, camping at Ruby Lake (11,121 feet) in the John Muir Wilderness Area, I awoke in the night to intense, bright flashes of lightning, flung from the hovering clouds with all the force of Zeus's vengeful arm. Thunder, like the heavens' loudest timpani, matched audially the blinding lightning, crashing over the tent without a pause between flash and crash. Fists of wind and rain pounded the tent. I cringed in my sleeping bag. I screamed. My hiking partner threw an arm over me: "Here! Creep, wretch, under a comfort/serves in a whirlwind."

        Then I heard a sound I had never heard before nor have heard since, a rushing, terrifying roar, growing louder with the Doppler effect until it was over the tent and I knew what it was: hail pounding across the lake with the force of elephants. Hail battered the tent, then gave way to a torrential downpour of rain that battered it just as hard. 

        The next morning I crawled shakily from the tent, which still had water on the floor. It had been an unusually severe storm. In Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm, I learned that scientists define a "perfect" storm as a rare tempest caused by an unusual combination of meteorological phenomena. I don't know if meteorologists would tell me that the storm I experienced at Ruby Lake fell into that category, but to me, cowering in my tent on a bluff above the lake, it was certainly an unprecedented, powerful combination of meteorological phenomena. 

        But I wouldn't call it a "perfect" storm. It was much too frightening. I would call a perfect storm the sort that swept around my own house last night. 

        The lightning was the goddess-glow, not the Thor-and-Zeus kind, and the thunder was distant and playful, following the lightning as an afterthought. Because the lightning was so far away, there was no fear of fire, especially when the clouds kindly dropped a brief light rain that dampened the earth. Even if lightning did strike a match to a tree, it would find the kindling around that tree too wet to start a fire. The wind was merely zephyrous, not the rip-roaring, branch-strewing kind. After the sultry sulk of humidity released its bad humor with the fall of rain, the clouds closed in over the light, but the sun shone behind their blackness, light and dark playing tag, and then suddenly I looked up, and the air was entirely orange, a dense tangerine color that saturated vision. As quickly as it had come, it fell into disuse; the air returned to normal dark-storm color, and the rain poured down. I ran to close the windows, but the rain was falling so straight I left them open. The fresh taste of rain hung in the air inside the house.

        It was a lovely storm, full of sensual pleasures. It watered the earth and cleared the air of its humid sulk. It started no fires and caused no damage. It instigated no fear. It was a perfect storm.

Kona Coffee

        One morning in Hawaii Mike suggested that, instead of drinking the ordinary and not very good brewed coffee at the airb&b where we were staying, we take a drive to find a good coffee. Envisioning a latte on some coffee house lanai overlooking the ocean, we googled "good coffee near Kona" and were directed, to our surprise, into the hills above Kona, on a narrow, winding road, and then up a driveway with a house at one edge and only one small sign saying not "Coffee on the Lanai" but "Coffee tours." A little unsure about Google's accuracy, we continued up the driveway.

        We came to a small house-like building, from which a small, hurried woman rushed out to greet us. "Are you here for the tour?" she asked, shoving laminated one-page guides into our hands. "It's self-guided."
        We explained that we were just looking for a cup of coffee, and she said we could have complimentary coffee after the tour, which we really should do. She was slightly hunched in her hurry and had hair so tightly pulled into a bun it might have slanted her eyes. She was enthusiastic about the tour, to say the least.

        It wasn't what we were there for, but we were there, and so we did the tour, which turned out to be pretty interesting—past the coffee bushes with beans just turning red

(harvest comes when they are burgundy, the woman had told us) and into the open-sided building with the shaker that took the paper husk off the bean, leaving the parchment (which seems like backwards terminology to me); then to the drying shed, where beans are strewn on the floor and stirred every few days while they are drying; then to the size separator, which was only a series of sieves of different sizes—size determining quality.

Everything seemed very low-tech.

        Back in the small barn cum large shop, we had our coffee, which the woman identified for us as (a) air-roasted coffee (very light, roasted in a popcorn-popper sort of process), dark roast coffee (roasted enclosed, to let the smoke saturate the bean), and vanilla-macadamia coffee, infused, she told us, sneering slightly, not with those sticky syrups that Starbucks uses, but with essential oils. It was all exceedingly good. She had reason to be proud of Holualoa Kona coffee, which is organic and still made by the family that started the business.

        The walls were lined with historic pictures of workers in days gone by, the women in their long dresses, the men in their mustaches, horses pulling wagons. There was a second-place ribbon from a coffee competition and a schematic outline of the history of coffee, everything on the funky rather than the slick side of things—except for the coffee, which was packaged in gold-foil bags and graded from "estate" through premium, excellent, and good to "rubbish," according to our guide.

        I was impressed enough with the coffee that I bought a bag of green beans (estate grade) for my son,

 who roasts his own beans and is either a coffee snob or a coffee expert, depending on your point of view. It was not cheap, as you can imagine, and mailing it to Washington after I got back stateside cost another $10, but it was all worth it when Ela roasted the beans and tried the coffee.
        He texted me: "Kona coffee.   Y-U-M." And then, "Like wow. Really fantastic." He said he was contemplating mortgaging the house so he could fly to Hawaii and get more. He said if only he were a stingy person! Then he wouldn't have to share his coffee beans with his coffee-afficionado buddy, as he was going to do. 

        Going to the Holualoa Kona Coffee Company's Kona Le'a Plantation was one of those surprise finds that tourists love to stumble onto. The tour was fun, the coffee was good, and nothing I brought home from Hawaii could have pleased my son more than those green Holualoa Kona coffee beans.