Photo Essay

Being Like Wildflowers

/ Merilee / 3 Comments

Winter 2021-22 in California started out with a hefty amount of rain in December.  Too much, actually, since we now tend to get atmospheric rivers of water aimed at the west coast which slam it with too much all at once.

Sort of like if you don’t water your yard for months and it’s dry and baked, and you decide to turn on your hose full-blast and hit that hard soil with a ridiculous amount of water all at one time.  It can hold only so much water before soil starts slipping.  Then you have mudslides all up and down Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu ends up a mess.  For a minute…  But no one really likes to complain about it because we want that rain.  We need the atmospheric rivers, whenever they show up.  Our mountains don’t get enough snow and the reservoirs are running dry.

In December we all thought things were going along swimmingly, that La Nina wasn’t going to be mean to us after all and would have a little mercy, giving us the precipitation we need.  But in January the tap shut off, Santa Ana winds blew again (and again, and again) drying everything out and dashing everyone’s hopes for a decent rainy season.

This not only kills the joy for everyone from farmers to gardeners, but also – wildflower lovers.  There is no Super Bloom for 2022.  A few scatterings here and there of poppies and lupines up along I5 between the LA Basin and the San Joaquin Valley, but not a lot.  I looked.

So when I spent a big chunk of time recently out in the desert, I was not surprised to see hardly any flowers.  A few running alongside the I15, but not much.  So one day I went out on an excursion to see what I could find, if anything.

I went up Jubilee Pass Road over Salisbury Pass at the south end of Death Valley.  Usually you can find flowers at the higher elevations, and I wasn’t disappointed.  They were there in occasional drifts alongside the road.

They were dwarfed, though, stunted and sparse.  But still, they are there if you look carefully.  Even growing in the cracks of the pavement on the road.  Or way up in rocks, which I always find fascinating.   There were a surprising number of gravel ghosts, which always thrills me to find my namesake hovering over the ground without a care in the world.

There’s always joy spending time with wildflowers.  They innocently bloom and bounce in the breeze, enjoying the sunshine and welcoming bees and bugs and are oblivious of the troubles in the world,  whether it’s a Super Bloom or a Little Bloom.

I would like to be more like the wildflowers.

 

Nature Is The Ultimate Artist

/ Merilee / 2 Comments

A storm blew into California.  A big storm.

There haven’t been many this year.  It’s been dry with lots of wind and little rain.  I decided it was time to venture back out to the desert for a few days, alone, to photograph that weather.  There is nothing like watching a storm in the desert.

It makes me feel alive.

I headed out the morning the storm hit and by the time I reached the desert, the winds were howling and dust was blowing.  Sheets of ethereal rain dotted the landscape, shifting and changing every second.

Watching a storm cross the land, sometimes with thunder and lightning, winds whipping up dust devils and veils of rain and snow falling like silken threads from the clouds to the earth is something that is pretty much unmatched.

Exciting.  Beautiful.  Magical.

The storm performed for three days in the desert, longer than I thought it would.  Everywhere I turned there was something fresh and new happening in the sky.   From every vantage point, all up and down the desert spilling out from Death Valley and beyond.

It made me realize that the power and wonder of nature can and always will outstrip anything that man does.  No filmmaker, painter or photographer can adequately capture the energy and vibe that is carried in a storm.

Because Nature is The Ultimate Artist.

 

For Pete.

Trees and Bees Make It Better

/ Merilee / 4 Comments

I had to have some trees removed from my yard recently.  Last weekend, in fact.  Birch trees.  They had a disease.

The birch trees had actually been sick for a long time, but I didn’t want to face it.  Each year my gardener or the tree man would come out and cut a little bit more off the tops where the branches and trunks had died back.  They were struggling to put out their leaves in spring, almost as if they had to think about it for awhile, wondering if they wanted to do it one more year.  Should they continue to move onward?…or let life go.

I had to make the decision for them.  It made me very sad.

This whole past year has been sad, really.  It was a year ago today that I went to the San Joaquin Valley to drive the Fresno Blossom Trail with my friend.  The panic over Coronavirus had already started, toilet paper was a hot commodity and Costco had none.  Paper towels and napkins were missing, too, which I thought was weird.  Why were people buying up paper goods?  I couldn’t wrap my head around it.  The Panic Buying of 2020.  It was super-bizarre.

There was talk.  Other countries were struggling with the virus and President Trump was calling it the “China Flu”, which irritated me.  I thought it was a childish thing to say.  My friend and I ate outside at a restaurant and discussed Coronavirus.  She tried to educate me about how bad it really was and I did not want to face it.  This wasn’t really going to happen, I told myself.  But I had a deep sense that it was, and that it was going to be a very bad thing.

We drove out into the orchards on a beautiful day with fluffy, white clouds and breezes, admiring the almond trees in full bloom with bees flying all around.  Peaches and nectarines, too, all dressed in their frilly, pink blossoms.  It’s a sight to behold when the landscape is divided into large rectangles of color.  Whites and pinks of all kinds, stretched out in rows.

Sometimes we saw bee boxes stacked up here and there next to the orchards with swarms of bees flowing back and forth, from flowers to hives.  It’s fascinating, really, to sit inside your car and watch them.

I like bee boxes.  Some are all white, while other stacks are of different colors, which makes them cheerful.  I think bees and bee boxes are happy things.

Bees showed up in my photographs from that day as little black dots zooming over the trees.  I thought about eliminating them, but decided not to.  Why would you do that when the whole point of the photographs is to tell the story of the orchards?  Bees buzzing and making blurry dots in the photographs are a reality.  So they stayed.

Until now, I never did anything, really, with those photographs.  I didn’t feel like it.  I haven’t felt like doing anything at all during the Pandemic.  For a whole year I have done not much other than garden.  The last time I was in Death Valley was in March 2020 right before California shut down.  I came home from my last journey to Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra Nevada right when the state closed.  My local market was empty.  The produce section had been cleaned out as had the meat and dairy sections.  There were no eggs.  Even Stouffer’s lasagna was missing from the freezer section.  Don’t ask about toilet paper or Lysol.

Thankfully paper products weren’t an issue for me and I figured out how to deal with food.  I stayed on my property and cleaned my house, over and over again.  I worked in the garden and became addicted to the news, simply because I wanted to understand what was happening with Covid-19 and…what was going to happen to us all?

I have had to go through troubling and sad times in my life, just like everyone else.  Some years are really great, while other years are filled with grief and sad things, bad people and situations.  It’s part of the ebb and flow of life.  But 2020 really, to me, was deeply disturbing for everyone on the planet.  Not just me.  I actually have had it relatively easy.  Thankfully few people that I know have contracted Coronavirus.  My gardener did, though.  He said he thought he was going to die.  He couldn’t breathe and had a fever that made him feel like he was on fire.  He told his wife he didn’t think he was going to make it.

Hearing about the thousands upon thousands of people who have passed due to this horrible virus along with job losses, people having no food to eat, and losing their homes has taken its toll on me mentally and emotionally, but so has the political environment.  I think that has depressed me almost more than Covid-19.  The fighting and more fighting.  Politicians lying and selling their souls for their careers.  Backstabbing and more-than-usual-icky-behavior on the part of lawmakers and leaders.  Lies and riots.  I became physically sick to my stomach from the events of January 6.  There was no reason for that ever to have happened.

Social media has become a toxic place that I don’t really like visiting any longer.  Ten years ago I liked Facebook.  It was fun.  But it’s not fun anymore.  I have an account with very few friends.  I deactivate my Instagram constantly, even though there are artists and photographers whose work I like to look at.  The world has become a very divided and ugly place with angry people.  It depresses me, and there really is nothing I can do about any of it except to do my part with staying home, wearing a mask when I do go out and to try to not listen to the news.

When my trees were taken out last weekend, it made me feel badly.  I knew that the trees knew that they had to go, but that didn’t make it any better.  It was a death from a virus that is not controllable and it’s killing trees in Southern California.  I still have two more that need to go, but I’m waiting to see if they send out any leaves.

A few days after the trees were removed, I decided to take a drive.  I had to.  I needed some way to get myself out of the depressed state I had been in for months on end.  I headed up to the San Joaquin Valley for just one day, alone in my car, knowing I would encounter no person.  Just trees.  I needed to go back out to the orchards to see the blossoms and bee boxes.  I knew they would make me feel better.

And they did.

 

The Joy of Japanese Anemones

/ Merilee / 9 Comments

Once you plant them, they are with you always.

Every summer their leaves come out and then the stems come up, tall and slender and elastic.  And just like clockwork the first blossom pops open near the end of August.

Anemones. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 8. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 7. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 16. Copyright Merilee Mitchell

Throughout September the stems get longer with more and more buds and luminescent, white flowers.

They bounce silently in the breeze.  They have no scent.  Joy emanates from them instead.

They are Japanese anemones.

I’ve had them in pink and I’ve had them in white.  They can be frustrating with their greedy habit of taking over a garden, but when the blossoms are on 3′ tall stems, you can’t be mad at them for liking to dominate.  In winter they disappear again under the ground.

I’ve tried to pull them out once or twice before, then regretted it afterwards, remembering the autumn blossoms, thinking how much I love them.  The plants become so large that they swallow up everything else in the garden, including azaleas.

They always come back, though, no matter how thoroughly I thought I had pulled each and every piece of plant out of the ground.  It makes me happy to have them back even though they completely take over.

Japanese anemones are just one of the things that I love about autumn.  When the light gets a little softer and the air has a slight crispness in the early morning and the setting sun backlights the garden in late afternoon with the most golden of colors.

And the anemones bounce in the breeze.

Telling you to be happy.

Just Outside The Fence

/ Merilee / 10 Comments

When disaster strikes and it’s all over the news, the media is inescapable, pushing everything at us.  The news tells us about floods, super Arctic freezes and blasting Nor’easters, tornadoes and avalanches.  Naturally it’s assumed that the entire world knew about the horrendous fires that burned California last year, and in particular the Woolsey Fire, because it affected me personally, as well as thousands of other people who live in my area.

The beginning of the Woolsey Fire of November 2018 from the back of my property

I recently returned from an East Coast trip knowing that first thing the next morning I’d have men removing the fence at the far end of our property.  The fence was burned to a crisp back in November.  You wouldn’t think fire would do much to wrought iron, but it does.  So it had to be taken down, sand blasted, repaired, repainted and put back up again, providing a delicate and somewhat humorous boundary that doesn’t really keep wildlife out.  I’ve watched coyotes and bobcats simply jump over that fence.  It’s merely a form of entertainment and exercise for them. The coyotes like to eat my persimmons.

The Woolsey Fire of last November burned our property.  It raged all around the entire neighborhood, taking out one house and torching the area for miles.  It was a fire storm that had us evacuated for five days, living in a motel in Burbank.  It was all that was on the news day and night, night and day.  The Camp Fire in Northern California was going on at the same time along with various other fires all up and down the state.  In essence, California was being burned from one end to the other.

While in New England last week my conversations with other people were interesting.  They either had not heard of the fires at all, or thought they were still burning.  A couple of teenaged girls insisted that the Sierra Nevada Mountains were still burning.

“You can’t go to Yosemite or anywhere in the Sierra Nevada.  It’s all burning.”

“Ugh….no.  No, that was last summer and fall.  It’s now under tons of snow.  There are no more fires in the Sierras.”

“Oh, no, they’re still burning.  The fires are always burning in California.”  This seems to be the impression of California.  It’s either burning or sliding all of the time.

Social media allowed lots of people to vent their antagonism towards the rich and famous during those fires.  It was the Woolsey Fire that took out a huge chunk of houses and businesses in Malibu.  Twitter was filled gleeful people, happy that celebrities and the wealthy were losing their homes.  That was amazing to me.  Why would you be happy that someone lost their home to fire?  Or to any disaster.  A lot of people had their homes burn in 2018.  Rich and not so rich people lost everything in fires all over California.  Why is it funny, desirable or even justified if it’s a celebrity who loses their home?  I never understand this kind of thinking.  It’s clearly sick.  Reading these types of posts really made me dislike Twitter even more than I did before.  In fact, I struggle with social media in its entirety.  I’m not so sure it’s a positive thing, but that’s a whole different topic.

A lot of people associate California, and in particular, Southern California, with mudslides.  Yes, we have mudslides.  Lots of them.   But a lot of the time, mudslides are caused from previous fires that have burned the hills.  Then the rains come and the naked hills slide due to the vegetation being gone and soil structure changes.

When the men removed the fence that’s supposed to keep out coyotes and bobcats, it allowed me to venture out onto the rest of the hill our home sits on.  It was liberating and freeing, not having that fence in place and I realized that the entire hill is absolutely filled with wildflowers.  Lupine, blue dicks, mustard and many others I’ve never seen before.  The abundant rains of this past winter unlocked seeds that probably were dormant for years.

I walked out into the heavy growth of wildflowers to photograph them.  It was a thrill to be standing inside a thicket of flowers, taking their portraits before the men finished welding the fence panels.  I don’t know if I will ever see such a wildflower display again.  Drought has a way of creeping back in when you live in California, and wildflowers don’t like drought.

Actually, in all of the years I’ve lived in California, and that’s been nearly my entire life, I have never once seen so much rain, but also so many wildflowers.  They are just outside my fence, filling the hills that were blackened and charred a few months ago.

It’s like a gift after the disaster.