California Hills in October

 

♦

 

In October of 2015 I visited my brother’s family in Clayton, California. He took us all over from Napa to The Golden Gate Bridge, yet I was fascinated with the dry, tawny hills rolling on just beyond the houses of his neighborhood. They have a painting in their home of the same tawny hills with the sparse disbribution of trees, three as I remember maybe like the first image I put here, under a cloudless blue sky by a local artist. Lone trees whether surrounded by velvety looking beige hills or mangroves here in Florida standing solitary with their prop roots in shallow water seems to strike a chord in all of us. I don’t know if it is just a sense of aloneness or if it is that there is room without distraction to appreciate the beauty of the tree and the sweep of its branches.

I made the mistake once about velvety looking hills when I was living at Clark Field in the Philippines in 1969. Off base there was a hilly area, vertical almost really with ridges covered with what looked like green velvet. I snuck off base with a friend and we climbed the velvet hills only to find them dry and hard and brittle.  Branches from the low shrubs simply came out of the dry dirt as we grabbed them to climb. We did eventually reach a plateau and found an easier way back down. California’s tawny velvet and sundrenched hills are probably not ideal for climbing either for the lack of shade or moisture. It is a wonder there is enough for the scattered trees. Certainly not much to grab onto if you were climbing a steep section.

Often when posting I love to find a perfect quote or perfect poem to support the images and how I felt about the place I was. Something beyond my often meager prose offerings. And I did find a perfect poem when searching about California’s dry hills out of curiousity. Ordinarily I would post the poem which I have done with many written much longer ago for convenient reading, but this one has a recent copyright and I need to respect that and offer you the link to the author’s site instead. My dry hills were October’s but the poem by Dana Gioia, California’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2019, is entitled California Hills in August.  

Do go and enjoy the poem and browse his other writings. The dry hills led me to an interesting poet.

 

♦

 

Tawny velvet grasses cover the gentle swell of earth’s bosom.

♦

Parts of Clayton reminded me of Italy. These trees in the foreground are Italian Cypress Trees and beyond the  beige hills.

♦

 

Many days were devoid of clouds but it is not always so. Here the velvet hills and trees are beneath a blanket of fleecy clouds. No rain though.

♦

For a Floridian used to a much flatter geography and moister climate, Clayton, California was an alien landscape I’d look forward to exploring again!!

 

Judy

 

 

~ by Judy on October 5, 2019.