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California Dreamin’

Posted on July 27, 2011 by sbranch

I go on and on about how beautiful New England is and how much I love Martha’s Vineyard. You know it’s stolen my heart, hook line and sinker, and I can’t help it. But there are many wonderful things about California, where I was born, and I thought I should wax a little bit poetic about it. Especially since I’ll be going there in September and want everyone to still love me. ♥

Here I come. . .

Going up the Pacific coast, along the wide sweep of coastline outside of Morro Bay (half way between LA and San Francisco), where the land slopes down to the sea and the road follows close to the water . . . I roll down the windows, feel the wind, turn up the music, and sing along to my favorite Highway-One song (try to stay in your seat now, you’re driving!) → http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_5_AD9wXuY

Can you feel the wind? Note how gently the road curves. I know, it’s like meditation, instant relaxation, but please, try and stay in your lane. ♥ About twenty minutes along this road, going north is a small town called Kokomo . . . oops, I mean Cambria, a town I know many of you have visited, where there is an English Tea Room.

The Tea Cozy in Cambria

This is where we go for delicious lunch, then we go antiquing at one of the great shops around the corner. BTW, everyone who’s familiar with the area would want me to tell you not to miss the shop called Birds Of a Feather. And for a beautiful ocean view, Moonstone Beach Bar and Grill in Cambria is wonderful. Lean back in your chair, feel the sunshine and balmy air, and watch the ocean some February afternoon. ♥

But what I really miss is our house out there, especially our next door neighbors . . .

Our California neighbors

I found out that llamas are a lot like camels in the realm of spitting; I had to get to know them slowly; you don’t just go running up to them. They will move their lower jaw in a way that signifies they will be spitting soon, and at all costs, this should be avoided. I have seen them do it to each other, and it is not nice. Now that they know me, they don’t spit; they just want me to pop a pineapple guava (or forty) into their mouths; the guavas grow along the fence, but they have eaten every single leaf, branch and fruit within reach. Now they need me. It’s so nice to feel wanted.

This is my favorite tree at our house. Whenever I want an orange I can just go outside my door, and there they are, peel it, eat it juicy in the sun. This is true for limes, lemons, tangerines and grapefruit! Not to mention avocadoes and artichokes. They don’t call it the land of fruit and honey for nothing.

Isn’t this wild? No matter how hard I try, I cannot make my Vineyard roses do this. The dry heat of California is rose heaven. They love the breeze off the ocean, just enough of it to freshen their air. This is what I cut in just one day. They do this all the time; even bloom in the winter. We have to force them to go dormant by physically stripping off their leaves! Otherwise they just keep going.

This is my California picket-fence garden. You can garden year-round in this part of California; it’s why the locals always look so happy! Nearby San Luis Obispo was mentioned by Oprah as the happiest city in America! This is one reason why.

Sweet peas will bloom from March or April through August! More than you can ever handle! Bouquets you can bury your face in.

Lavender grows like a weed. In the best possible sense of the word. See the yellow roses back there? They grow and bloom year round; they are “Julia Child” roses and smell even better than they look. ♥

And this, can you stand it? Jasmine grows over every doorway; you breathe in fragrance with every breath. You go to sleep with it just outside the window.

And the sunsets are beautiful too!

So we go watch it from one of the restaurants that dot the coast around Pismo Beach…this is the view from our table. We see whales and (real) dolphins here and watch pelicans fly over. We bring the Sunday paper, and sit for hours in the morning. Once we came with my family for lunch, and we stayed for dinner! There’s another restaurant we love to go to, just above Malibu, called Paradise Cove, where you can sit with your feet in the sand and have lunch served to you. Have you been there? Surfer pictures all over the walls. There’s a lot to be said for California. ♥

And that’s just for starters . . . that doesn’t even begin to cover the smell of the pine in the mountains and the giant Sequoia trees, where if you step out of view of any landmarks, you walk on a miles-deep, perfectly silent, cushion of pine, and could be lost in about one minute. Or what it’s like to travel over the Golden Gate Bridge, over the bay spotted with tiny white sailboats with flags flying, from a swinging contraption that only one word can describe: impossible. Or the winding ride through Big Sur, on the edge of the world, where you truly think you can see all the way to Hawaii; or late nights, listening to the owls hoot, and coyotes howl; or flinging oneself into the arms of old friends and family. ♥

On our way out to California, we are stopping in St. Paul, Minnesota for a very special event called The Creative Connection. (You can read about it by clicking on COMING SOON/EVENTS in the column on the right towards the top of this page. I hope some of you can come!) I’m sure we will fall in love with Minnesota. We seem to fall in love with every place we go. Last March, Joe and I were sitting at a table at a wonderful sidewalk cafe in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles; the food was so good; he looked up at me and said, “Let’s live here!” ♥

The moon belongs to everyone, the best things in life are free . . .

Posted in Blog | Tagged California, California garden, gardens, Highway one, Julia Child rose, San Luis Obispo, travel | 109 Comments

Domesticity City

Posted on July 24, 2011 by sbranch

If your house is really a mess and a stranger comes to the door, greet her with, “who could have done this? We have no enemies.”

♥ Phyllis Diller

H A P P Y S U N D A Y !

One of my best friends and her husband are coming to stay for a week. We pick them up at the boat on Wednesday!

When I’m working hard on a book, like I am now, I try to stay focused; which means our house suffers from drop-it-and-leave-it syndrome. We drop it, then we leave it. Nothing like company coming for inspiration to get things picked up and organized!

So today I take the day off to “play house.” I started out right by making pancakes. I don’t make them very often; but they were delicious, in butter and maple syrup! With cold slices of juicy cantaloupe! And then we got busy… Joe went outside to clean the fountain, and I started working on the kitchen.

I took the yellow wine glasses off the high shelf and put them in the dishwasher. They don’t get used often enough and have tiny little dead bugs in them. Very nice. They had to be washed.

Then I noticed the sugar spoon, it looked so tarnished; it made me remember, just the other day, a girlfriend told me about this method she has of cleaning silver that she says definitely works, and gave me her recipe for it.

I’d heard of doing it like this before, but I never really thought it would work, so I never tried it.

But all my silverware looked so bad; what did I have to lose? What if it really works? Way better than polishing every piece, one at a time. On a summer day. Which I wasn’t going to do anyway. Then I thought, Maybe the girlfriends would like to see this scientific experiment; I could blog it! So out came the camera and, here we are.

I did what my friend suggested: I lined the sink with aluminum foil, the bottom and up on all sides.

Then into the sink, I poured a half-cup of ordinary table salt and a half-cup of baking soda; filled the sink with hot water, and dropped in the silverware.

You can see, if you look close, that I also dropped my wand in there. Even though the wand is brass and not silver, I thought I’d give it a try. Joe came in, peered into the sink, and said, “what’s that?” “It’s my wand,” I said. He looked at me, rolled eyes, and said, “Why didn’t you just wave it over the silverware and forget all this?” He is very funny. He makes me think of that quote by E.M. Forster where he says, “Logic? Good gracious! What rubbish!” 🙂

So, how did it work? It worked pretty good! I left it in the water for about a half hour. Here are the before and after photos: “Before” is on the left, and “after” is on the right. There’s definitely a big difference. I think you get more of a polish when you do it by hand; however, for speed-cleaning, and getting so many pieces done at once, this is my new, go-to way to do it. Then I polished my wand the old-fashioned way.

Time out: I just turned on some music and this song came on, thought you might like to listen while you read . . .

But you don’t have to! (It’s Frank ♥)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6ZAb8IuvDQ

But here’s the real magic…I went to clean up, and look at this…the tarnish is all over the aluminum foil. Some sort of transference has occurred. Must have been the wand!

So OK, that was the silverware; next, up to the bedroom. I can’t put our friends in the Peter Rabbit room, because these people bring half their house with them. ♥ Since we bring half our house with us when we travel, we understand perfectly. They need the front bedroom, it’s bigger, at the top of the front stairs; it’s the one I would have loved being twelve-years-old in. Has two windows that look out over the front street, and one that looks out on the garden. I love it in a snow storm when the flakes are whirling around in the sky, leaves are off the trees and you can see all the way up the street. But I digress . . . first I wanted to iron a clean dresser scarf.

Then I realized we’re out of iced tea, so I started some.

Joe was out weeding the garden, I took him my other favorite summer drink, sparkling seltzer water with a splash of lemonade in it. Over a ton of ice. With straws. Because he deserved it!

♣ ♣ ♣

Now upstairs, to the bedroom, to fluff it up, put it in order.

I could spend hours in here; it’s a perfect room for dreaming. I put a pillow in the chair, hung the quilts, straightened the heart rocks on the window sill…. I put out a copy of two books I love, one is Consider Poor I (a biography of Nancy Luce, which I tell all about in the next Willard that goes out starting Tuesday), and the other is A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen. Both of these books you could pick up, start anywhere, and be happy you did. ♥

I put clean sheets on the bed; tucked them in with neat nurse’s corners, put a clean cover on the comforter. I have a thing I do with sheets . . . I put a one-inch fold across the bottom of the top sheet, the entire width of the bed, so when my friends put their feet in, there’s plenty of room for their toes. ♥ One of the only Girl Scout meetings I really remember in detail was the one where our leader taught us how to put on a pillowcase without using our teeth. Why do I remember that? I guess because it was a homemaking tip and I couldn’t wait to grow up and have a house of my own. So I glommed on to pillowcase 101.

O Bed! O Bed! O delicious Bed! That heaven on earth for the weary head. ♥ Thomas Hood

I found this seashell in a California antique store and couldn’t resist it. So homemade. I think you could do this with any quote if you used a permanent ink marking pen to write it on the shell with. And look what a charming little thing it turns out to be. ♥

Then I put plate hangers onto these old fish plates, to hang over the dresser. I love dishes so much, I don’t just put them in the kitchen; I put them everywhere, even in the bathroom! These are hand-painted Limoges.

I put my favorite Laura Ashley hat on the bed post. And then I gave this room the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval…

With this old magazine to sit near the chair. And that was it, pretty much ship-shape and ready to go. I still have a little bit to do, I need to cut flowers from the garden for the pitcher on the dresser top. But that will do for now; it’s iced tea time.