Seasonal observations

[ritaxis]

When people gather at this time of year, somebody will surely mention that they saw a whale recently. It spouted and everything. The really lucky ones were out on a boat and saw a whole bunch of them.

Also, suddenly, everybody is either an expert on persimmons or wants to become one and which ones can you eat now, anyway? (The flat kind which is less astringent, the pointy kind has to wait until it is dead soft)

And suddenly, too, everybody wants to know what they can do with all these pumpkins everywhere (you can ask me, I've been eating them all along).

The hillsides in some places have a little color to alleviate the endless gold: bright red leaves on the poison oak. The air quality is different, so that people keep asking when it's going to rain (the answer is, not yet. Some more fires have to happen first).

But the thing I noticed this morning -- the thing that makes walking down the street a different experience, and can make a person feel transported into a better, more beautiful world -- the Monarch butterflies are back for the winter.

Comments

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

The annual monarch migration over here goes along the Hudson River on their way to Mexico. It did not happen this year. At all.

Love, C.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

We've also had drastic reductions. But one year they seemed not to really ever show at all, and the next year they were back, so there is hope.

There's a campaign out here to plantg lots and lots of milkweed everywhere within a broad swath of the flyway. There's a far amount of research into what might mitigate the pressures on the beasts. One thing they've done is increase the distance between the monarch resting trees and the visitor viewing spaces. I remember standing right under the trees in the past but now you can't get closer than ten yards or so, because there's indication that breeathing our scent and our exhalations is enough to be disruptive to them.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I like pumpkin, but we can only get them for a few short weeks in the run up to Halloween -- and then they disappear! It's as though they're only regarded as a seasonal decoration and not an actual foodstuff. :(

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Until relatively recently it was pretty much like that here too. I think a fair part of the local culinary renaissance of the pumpkin here is because a town up the coast (Half Moon Bay) made itself a big name as a pumpkin center and part of the publicity was promoting the other thngs you can do with pumpkins besdes carve them.

There's actually a town called Pumpkn Center, but I think they are more of a grain-growing town.