OF DECIDUOUS TREES AND PIZZA

What, you may be asking yourselves, do deciduous trees have to do with pizza?  Allow me to explain.

These are two of the things (along with people, of course) that I miss from my early years in New Jersey.

 

In truth, I am happily ensconced in the Pacific Northwest, and don’t think much about New Jersey.  Still, there are a few things I dearly miss, and deciduous trees and Jersey pizza are among them.  

 

A number of years ago, while my husband, Bill, and I were visiting New Jersey, my brother and his wife took us for a stroll around the Princeton campus.  It was winter.  The trees were bare, and I walked around exclaiming over the beautiful, symmetrical shapes of the branches against the winter sky.  

 

My brother and sister-in-law thought I was nuts.  Bill was also a bit perplexed.  

 

Earlier this month, we visited Indianapolis to visit Bill’s siblings.  I once again spent a lot of time oohing and aahing over the airy profiles of deciduous trees. I was delighted by the openness of the views.                    

An Indianapolis street view

 

It’s not that we don’t have deciduous trees out here.  We do.  On our property, in fact, we have a weeping cherry, two maples, a Japanese snowbell, a Korean dogwood, a clarodendrum, and a winter hazel.  

We also have six enormous Douglas firs (“Doug firs” to locals). These majestic trees are over 150-feet tall and over 100-years-old. They house birds and squirrels, and give our back yard a park-like appearance. I am deeply grateful that whoever built our home (and the other homes in our neighborhood) 60 years ago chose to leave these trees standing, rather than taking them down as is so often the practice.  

 

Here’s the thing, though.  I love the Doug firs, and they are problematic.  They make our neighborhood what it is, and they are dangerous. Every year, at least one major windstorm comes roaring out of the Columbia River Gorge and takes out one or more Doug firs in our neighborhood.  One came down in a nearby yard a couple of winters ago, landing on and uprooting an enormous big-leaf maple in an adjacent yard.  A huge chunk of the maple landed in our backyard, killing several bushes, and creating a huge mess.  

 

It's not the danger or the mess that is bothering me lately, however.  Being surrounded by these trees is worth the risk.  I’m also happy with the evergreens on our property, intermixed as they are with deciduous trees, shrubs, and flower beds. It’s something else that is bothering me (and I hope my saying so won’t get me in trouble with my PNW friends).  Come winter with its gray skies, the endless lines of evergreens on the horizon can feel a bit, well, lumpen--a bit depressing.  Here, for instance, is the view beyond our front yard from an upstairs window.  

 

I don't wish to be rid of our evergreens; I just wish for more deciduous trees to open up the winter skyline.  I prefer the ratio of deciduous trees to evergreens that I grew up with in New Jersey.  I suppose that’s what comes of uprooting oneself. If I had grown up here, my heart would likely swell at the sight of an unbroken line of Doug firs.  

Ok, enough about trees. Let’s talk about pizza.  Jersey pizza. I have eaten healthier pizza – is that an oxymoron?  Heck, I have made healthier pizza. But, give me a Jersey pizza, thin-crusted and drenched in so much olive oil you have to pat it with a napkin to take off the excess.  

 

Now that’s pizza.  I make a bee-line for it whenever I visit my home state.

 

I wasn’t always a pizza afficionado, though.  I didn’t grow up eating it.  My British parents eschewed it, and, never having tried it, I assumed I didn’t like it. Hah! My first close encounter with a pizza was at the home of a friend over 50 years ago.  We were young enough to still be living with our parents, and this friend’s parents had a pool in their basement, where several of us had gathered to swim.  Someone ordered a pizza, and I, getting out of the pool without looking where I was going, stepped squarely on the poolside pie.  Was that mortification what finally got me try a slice the next time one was offered? I don’t remember.  Whatever it was that got me started, I have been a fan ever since. 

 

Here are a few other things I miss from my home state:  

 

Thunderstorms.  Despite the many thunderstorms you may have seen on Grey’s Anatomy, intended to convince you that the show is set in Seattle, we hardly ever have thunderstorms here in the Willamette Valley.  

I love a good thunderstorm, as long as I am indoors and out of danger. Every time I am back east, I wait in vain for one to appear. Sadly, I seem always to just miss them.  I well remember the way the New Jersey summer sky would turn an eerie almost-yellow, followed by, thunder and lightening and drenching rain. (Wait. Was the yellow sky caused by pollution?  This was before the Clean Air Act.)

The Jersey shore.  Sure, it often took my friends and me four or more hours to drive to the closest shore points, a trip that would have taken less than two hours if the Garden State Parkway hadn’t been perpetually bumper-to-bumper. (I can only assume the trip is more arduous now.) But, it was so worth it to bask in the sun (before I understood about skin cancer) and to swim in a swimmable ocean.  (The Pacific ocean off Oregon and Washington is, to put it mildly, rather chilly.)

 

Proximity to New York City.  No explanation required.  

 

Listen, I know Jersey gets a lot of bad press, but as you will have surmised, I believe this is quite undeserved.  It’s true that, after so many years on the west coast, I won't be moving back, but I am glad I grew up there and got to eat that delicious pizza under a deciduous tree.

 

 

THE YEAR'S LAST, LOVELY SMILE

(The poet William Cullen Bryant called autumn “the year’s last, lovely smile," and, as I can’t think of a better description, I hope his soul won’t mind my stealing it as the title of this post.)  

 

Hooray! My favorite season has arrived.

 

Well, not officially, but it's in the air.  And yes, this photo, taken in October of last year, is aspirational, but it’s keeping me going. 

 

Sure, there's something to be said for each season.  Winter has its charms, at least until after the holidays.  And I love spring with its lengthening days and explosion of blooms.  (I'll get to summer in a moment.) 

 

But it is autumn that has my heart, autumn that suits my soul. And it's not just that I am in the autumn of my life.   I have loved this season for as long as can I remember.  

 

When I was a child, autumn signaled a new school year, new school supplies, new clothes, and – in those days before such burning was illegal – the smell of leaves going up in smoke.  As an adult, I love the rituals of getting out sweaters, preparing the garden for winter, and planning indoor projects.  I love the chill in the air and the change in the light, as it slants low across the late afternoon sky, showing scarlet and orange leaves to their best advantage. I welcome the early closing in of each day.  I feel called to turn inward myself, to allow the introvert in me to prevail.  

 

 

This year in, particular, I have been longing for autumn since July, so, please bear with me while I detour to address what has become my unfavorite season.  As I trudged through midsummer this year, I heard myself saying more than once, I don't like summer.  I was surprised.  And then I wasn't.  It wasn't a case of hyperbole.

 

I meant it.  

 

Before you start in on me, let me explain.  I used to like summer. I liked it until four or five years ago.  Here is the back story.  I left New Jersey almost 50 years ago, in part to get away from the miserable heat and humidity of its summers.  

 

Moving to the Pacific Northwest was a good choice.  Such a temperate climate.  Maybe one snowstorm and one heat wave a year here in the Willamette Valley.  Yes, it rains in the winter, but summers are dry, and all that rain means we are living in a paradise of greenery.

 

Well, we were.  

 

This beautiful place is changing.

 

Instead of one heat wave a year, we now have several.  And then there's the smoke from forest fires.  Not here in the valley, but close enough for it to come our way.  I am now running two air purifiers whenever the smoke starts to drift in.  

 

And don’t get me started on watering.  Oh, the watering.  As noted above, our summers are dry, and for reasons unclear to me, I have never installed a sprinkler system in the 31 summers I have lived in my current home.  Watering was a chore in the past, but now, with episodes of extreme heat, it is overwhelming--my garden beds and large trees are facing an existential crisis.  Our native flora is no longer suited to our changing climate.

 

But enough about summer and its discontents. 

 

Give me autumn, with its occasional rainfalls.  Give me changing seasons, especially this one.  Let me exchange summer’s toils for the year’s last, lovely smile. 

 

And allow me to leave you with these words, put in the mouth of her young heroine, Anne Shirley, by the author L. M. Montgomery: “I’m so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers.”   

 

Me too.  So very glad.  And grateful.

 

How about you?

 

 

 

OF HEAT WAVES AND TRAIN WRECKS

I’m on a train and I know it’s about to crash.  There is no way to stop the crash or to get off the train.  I can only brace myself and hope I will survive.

No. I’m not describing a vivid dream.   I’m describing how I have felt this week while compulsively checking and rechecking the weather forecast.

 

Here’s what it looks like today:

 

OK, so maybe the train wreck analogy is a bit dramatic.  I don’t expect to die of this heat wave or even sustain injuries.  But, I do feel like a sitting duck – nowhere to hide—and, come on, this is the Pacific Northwest, not Arizona.  

 

When I moved out here from New Jersey many years ago, I had lots of reasons, not least among which was NJ’s heat and humidity.  I may have grown up there, but (in those pre-air-conditioning days) I never got used to the summer weather.  The PNW would be perfect for me – the climate much like Scotland, the country my folks had left behind.   

 

And it worked out well for me.  Most years we would have one heat wave—generally in August—usually in the 90s – very occasionally over 100, and almost never lasting more than three or four days.

 

And then things started to change.  Was it two years ago or three that we had more than one heat wave?  I think we had three last year and we’re into our third one this year.  

 

Friends, it’s only June. 

 

What the ever-loving #&*%  ?

 

Last year, I finally gave in to my husband’s lobbying and agreed to have AC installed in the form of a heat pump.  I was not gracious about this.  Our house, after all, is surrounded by trees and generally stays quite cool.  Only our bedroom would get hot, and this only during the above-mentioned one heat wave per year.  For those few days, we could sleep in our lower level, which is always cool.

 

The truth is I don’t like air conditioning.  I am always cold when it is on.  But, I will be glad to have it this weekend.  Big trees notwithstanding, three days of 100+ temps, followed by multiple days in the 90s will cause quite a heat build-up.   

 

And there’s this.  The train wreck won’t kill us this weekend, but the wrecks will keep coming; they will keep piling on.  Heat waves and fires here.  Drought in California.  Melting glaciers causing rising sea levels.  You know the litany. I don’t need to spell out the dangers.

 

Climate change isn’t going to come in some far-off future. It’s here now. Last summer’s fires and accompanying smoke (which kept us indoors for a week) and this year’s heat waves have brought this home to me. 

 

I have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the JFK and MLK and RFK assassinations, the Viet Nam war, the gulf wars, 9/11, and four years of you-know-who in the White House.  All of these were awful.  But, nothing has scared or shaken me quite as much as climate change bringing its train wreck to my doorstep.  

 

I recently read a novel called The Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.  It takes place in the near future, and opens with a description of an unsurvivable heat wave in India that kills a huge number of people.  The  description was so horrific that I had to walk away from the book for a while.  When I returned to it, I was relieved to find that the novel went on to posit many climate fixes.  In fact, it turned near utopian.  

 

Utopia seems unlikely. My wish today is simply that we and our leaders will wake up in time to stop the train wreck. 

May it be so.