A Year with No Fruit

I’m not sure when I first noticed it, and then I hoped that maybe it was just me not being very observant, not looking closely enough. Also, my friend pruned my plum trees pretty aggressively this year, so maybe they were stressed and decided to take a year off?  But then I talked with my neighbors, and we all agreed.

It wasn’t just my plum trees that were barren this year.

None of our local trees have fruit.

There are no pears. No apples. No plums. Not even any grapes.

Strange.

It adds another layer of unease to this peculiar time that we are living in. Just another consequence of climate change? I can’t think about it too much, because it shoots me down a waterfall of worry. What will happen to my bear friend, who drops by every year to gorge on pears and plums? What would happen to all of us if for some reason this continued on a larger scale?

My friend had a redwood tree just up and die in her front yard this summer. It went quickly, she said. When I’m driving up the freeway, heading toward home, I’m noticing dying trees, too. Makes me think of that old story about the frog who gets boiled because he’s in a pot where the water heats up slowly. He could jump out, but he doesn’t bother because the change is so gradual and everything seems fine to him.

(I wonder if we are all in a simmering kettle now.)

I keep feeding the birds at my feeders, but I don’t think I could ever offer enough seed to help a bear through a year without fruit. Not that it is my job, but I worry about him. Also, what happens to all the animals made homeless by the recent fires that burned through here (and the people. Also the people who lost their homes)? Our local fire was only 48 acres, but the Mosquito Fire across the ridge, the 76,000 acre one?

Sometimes it seems like things are going from bad to worse.

Yes. That may be true.

But also, there is good news.

It rained in Northern California this week.

Thank God.

Maybe soon I will start to feel safe leaving my laptop home again. I might take my passport out of my wallet and put it back in the file box where it usually lives. I’m afraid that it’s still too soon to empty the car trunk (since fire season in these parts will last until the rains come, and we probably need more than a few good days of storms to feel safe), but I won’t have to turn the sprinklers on for a few days. It was more than a minor, inconsequential rain. It was a real soaking. My phone even popped up a “flash flood watch” for the new burn scar area from the Mosquito Fire.

Isn’t that something?

Fire and then the chance of flood a few days later.

There was no fire growth earlier this week, though. That was good news. Also, a host of evacuation orders were lifted after the rain, so people could start to go home.  And as of today, all the evacuation warnings and orders have been lifted. The makeshift camps next to the freeway will disappear. The RVs at the Rec Park parking lot will be gone, too.

Hard to believe the heat was breaking records around here just over a week ago.

Earlier this week, our high temperature was nearly twenty degrees below normal.

My son wore sweats to school today for the first time all year. I pulled out my fleece pajamas. Almost time to start a fire in the woodstove. Almost, but not quite.

It was a treat to sit at the kitchen table and stare out the window at the rain coming down.

Another “both/and” kind of week, I guess.  Good and bad together.

The trees have no fruit and it rained.

Both these.

All this.