Spanish Flats
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Nearly a half-inch of slow rain at daylight and showers predicted throughout the day, we and our grass are relieved. A cutoff low off the California Channel Islands has delivered fairly warm southern moisture with only slight runoff. Nice! This is the time of year we live for here!
Lush April dreams upon November green at dawn,
another Sabbath flush with fiery face cards drawn
from a sawtoothed deck of peaks and ridges
glinting prosperously, sheets of gold burning
slowly into canyons thatched with dark oaks –
fractured seams between the uplifted lit with fire
igniting awe as the pieces come together –
as all the gods arrive at this crossroads
to rest and collaborate – to take the day off.
Our perfect start to the grass with an inch and a half of slow rain over five days at the first of the month was followed by a week of high temperatures in the high-80s, breaking records set in 1936. Not only did the grass jump, but began to fade on the west and south slopes. The flats and ridges have held well, keeping cows and calves scattered, no longer waiting at the gate for hay.
Watching the stacks of expensive alfalfa shrink has been almost as tough as bucking it onto the truck and flaking it onto the ground for cows for the past three months. Despite our reduced numbers, the empty space in the barn reflects our pocketbook, and with the current economic meltdown, it’s anyone’s guess what we’ll get for our calves next summer. With plenty to keep us occupied, we try to tend to business.
A welcome injection of marine air brought Valley fog and lower temperatures this past week, fire in the woodstove, and cautious forecasts for showers over Thanksgiving, beginning Tuesday towards the end of the week. We’re believers, of course, taking a moment to catch our breaths, cutting a little wood and making last minute preparations for an unpredictable California winter. Happy Thanksgiving!!
Finding a forgotten classmate
or shaking hands with old friends
summoned to court, we knew
the cops and their foibles –
sometimes even the accused.
Judge Freddie McKenzie once asked
if finding Tommy Estrada guilty
might be embarrassing, or would
knowing the arresting deputy
favor the People’s case. Her gavel
quelled the laughter of those days.
It’s still difficult to impanel twelve
impartial people when college kids
can’t miss a class, or Hispanics
can’t speak English – mothers
with sick babies, young buck rednecks
squirming to escape homogenization.
I understand how anger works –
how my father worked me with it,
how it can rip the heart apart
from caring – a relentless river
that can’t be stopped, it still worms
with leaks that shame me, yet
I judge this man gone berserk,
charged with three felonies
only the ambitious and the vengeful
might not settle with a misdemeanor plea –
plus damages, instead of the potential
of twenty-five years in prison.
Weighing it all for three days, I drive
one hundred and eighty miles in silence
to judge this young man not unlike me.
6:30 a.m. PST
Sixty-six hundredths overnight with sprinkles yesterday, clean air with the sweet scent of dust subdued, of mud, is plenty to start our grass. We begin again optimistically, watching the weather, dreaming of the perfect season.
7:00 a.m. PDT
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