A View From My Garden

Yesterday the finch crowd were covering the feeders. This morning there is snow. Not much snow, but snow nevertheless. Perhaps calling a person a bird-brain is really a compliment.

I think I will call other people apricot-brains. Both my apricots are swelling their buds. Oh well, what is another year without apricots? Out of the seven years we have lived in this house, we have had apricots only once, and that year the ants got all but a handful, because I had forgotten about using Tanglefoot or some similar product to ring the trunk, and I grew up surrounded by apricot orchards.

The aorucots I knew as a young person have been replaced by silicon chips, but these two trees in my garden remind me of climbing high into the thorny branches to pick the largest and most lucius fruit. I can still feel the warm sun and smell the spring-laden breeze, and I can still taste those cots, can still feel the juice dripping down my chin. I wiped it away with the back of my hand and wiped that on my shirt or jeans. For a glorious month I was covered in apricot juice.

Even in the Santa Clara Valley it was necessary nearly every spring to run smudge pots in the orchards at night. The farmers would fill the round metal pots with rags and used motor oil or diesel which would burn all night, filling the tops of the barely blooming trees with warm smoke. It was a formidable stench, those hundreds of smoldering smudge pots, protecting acres and acres, farm after farm of apricot trees from their own silliness. We all loved it; it was a way of life.

After air pollution began to become a problem, and when there were still a few orchard-men hanging on mightily to their land; before they had been taxed out of existence and the old trees, planted when the first Italian farmers arrived from Tuscany in the great immigrations of the turn of the last century, before the last of the old trees had been bulldozed and pulped into nothingness; before the last strip mall and housing tract of a burgeoning new economy had been built, those farmers turned their sprinklers on at night in early spring and in the morning the budding trees would be coated with ice. They sparkled and shone, pink diamonds in the early morning light. I do not know why that worked, but it did.

Perhaps I should try that with my two silly apricot trees, who always think the January thaw means spring is here. So far from their ancestral homes in Italy and the South of France, they have never learned how to speak English in the robust American style. It is not that the horticulturists have not tried; we do have "northern hardy" trees, but it matters not. Two or three warm days in a row and they are dancing away into spring with a burst of those fine-lace blooms and then it snaps cold again, or course, and it will be another year to anticipate having a few apricots.

The trees, themselves, are lovely and so I shall not cut them down, and I will prune them and take care of their aches and pains, and wait and hope, and hope and hope. The neighbors will call me a bird-brain when in some magic early summer I have both cheeks full of glorious fruit and the juice is running down my chin!

588 words
Gayle Keeney