After returning home to see if family was grounding, Tara invests in believing that seasons are matters of projection and will rather than passive to the abstraction and metaphysics of calendars. Who is to say? I enjoyed most of this section in two sittings and was bummed when that era was exhausted and moved past, albeit with a bit of unexpected plot and a suspenseful crises left somewhat open ended, as with the encounter with the coin seller couple in Book I. I wondered if I was in on a Patricia Lockwood style joke after when Tara then returned to the roman coin from Book I and more-than-dwelled on thinkin’ about the Roman Empire, as one does, for a while. Probably not, but haha, what if? The cliffhanger has me looking forward to Book III but the meat of the story is simply engaging with the idea that there isn’t much space between those days when maybe a bit of petrichor or surprise plant growth makes you think out of time, of a day in a season opposite from the one you are in. Delightful.
A few gardening wins to celebrate:
This fiddle leaf we inherited from friends leaving california came to us with a three braided trunks and a healthy tight dome of branches and leaves. It grew and grew and grew and then one day a few years later with consistent care, seemed to have exhausted the soil and dropped nearly every leaf.
Heartbreaking.
I pruned a lot of the branches back to the trunk, including one of the three all the way down to nothing but a dead stump. Or so I thought.
We also had a monstera that was just out of control so we split it off to a new pot and left nothing but a stump of the repotted original.
It returned strongly and that was how we learned that new growth leaves don’t have the characteristic finger-length fringe that mature growth has. Neat!
A worker at the garden center we go to took one look at picuters of our struggle before this and explained that house plants are generally ground growth in forests and prefer shade.
Well I’d been blasting ours with direct sunlight, which explains the scorched leaves I worried about but had no idea how to fix. We have shears in the windows, so now we use them.
I also think that plants know seasons by day length and temperature so I stopped closing the curtains at night and open the ones I do close as early as possible so that they get the maximum duration of daylight, first through shears and then in “direct” shadow. Seems to help?
I think I need to tackle soil chemicals and fertilizer next and don’t really know where to start.
Feeling emboldened with a pair of gardening shears, I took about 2/3rds of the height off of our stalky, spindly rubber plant and put the strongest bit in some water for two months, which I changed whenever I watered the rest of the plants.
As foretold by people who know, the bit in the water started to root so I planted it. Meanwhile the now-shorter planted plant began to bush out like I wanted it to. Huzzah!
None of these are, I think, difficult to care for plants in California, and this thread is very much "area man follows basic advice after 20 years of repeatedly disregarded exposure.” Alas and nevertheless.
We camped Friday and Saturday night at the excellent Slide Ranch at Muir Beach. Camp is a short hike from a lot to a meadow west of US 1, and from there, it’s a short hike to tide pools and the Pacific Ocean. We saw rabbits, fox, raccoons, lizards, brown pelicans, and turkey vultures.
A two and a quarter mile (three and three quarters kilometer), 289 foot (88 meter) elevation walk over two and a quarter hours, (one hour moving) in California. About 4500 steps.
I enjoyed the prose. It is kind of funny and refreshing for a story like this specifically to engage with history and popular culture so little. If it weren’t for the mention of a phone and maybe kitchen staple trends that aren’t critical to the plot (yet?), this could be set any time in the past hundred years. I appreciate the disregard for time travel tropes where rules are supposedly crisp if you ignore everything the author ignores. Here rules are magical (again, so far). And there were a few things I expected the Tara character to explore that go unmentioned, but that’s fine. I will try the second one.
We saw Y La Bamba ( https://ylabambamusic.com/music ) at SF MOMA (part of this year’s Noise Pop Festival) with no expectations beyond it being a rooftop party because I live under a rock and am deep into “I don’t recognize any artist on that festival line-up” years old.
