It's really happening

The view we're leaving behind

Controlled chaos - that's what it feels like. At 8:30 this morning, a five man crew from 1-2-3 Moving and Storage arrived, and the house became a hive of activity.

Furniture is padded and wrapped with plastic. One young man spent four hours in the kitchen carefully wrapping and packing all the dishes, kitchenware and utensils. Another young man - the youngest and probably most junior crew member - was assigned to ferrying the scores of already-packed boxes to a loading station in front of the house. Things have been dismantled, packaged, labelled and stowed.

There's a lot of furniture we can't or don't want to keep, and we gave the buyers of our home the right of first refusal to it.  Among the pieces they are keeping are our huge rustic pine table and the barstools for our kitchen island - things we likely won't need in a future apartment. This, plus our ruthless winnowing down of our belongings, will reduce the number of storage pods we need from an estimated five down to three - a good savings.

After a lunch break, the guys returned to start loading everything in the truck.

Our steep Topanga driveway was too difficult to navigate, so everything has to be carried, dollied, and hauled up to the street - the most arduous part of the job. This also came during the hottest part of the day.

It's a good thing we had five beers in the fridge for when the work was done!

These guys are great; friendly, hardworking, and respectful of our home and our belongings. We're lucky to have found them.

Boxing Day

The days are passing very swiftly now. In two days, the moving and storage company comes to pack up our stuff.  We have been boxing stuff up ourselves, though, because this isn't a move like our last move (almost twenty years ago).

For this move, we are separating everything we own into four piles: Store. Donate. Discard. Move to New Orleans.

Our rental house in New Orleans is fully furnished, so very little is coming with us - just clothes, treasures, and important books and papers. That means that we will pay to store whatever we keep - it's a compelling argument to downsize.

It's odd to examine the bits and pieces of crap we've surrounded ourselves with for nearly twenty years. That rusty baking sheet? The paper towel holder? Tupperware?

Buggy!

I took a photo of this awesome bug on my front porch. Does anyone know what kind of bug he is? He's big, about one inch long.

A bushel and a peck

 

"I love you, a bushel and a peck
A bushel and a peck, and it beats me all to heck!
Beats me all to heck how I'll ever tend the farm
Ever tend the farm when I want to keep my
Arms - about you -
About you!
About you!
The cows and chickens
are goin' to the dickens!
'Cause I love you a bushel and a peck
You bet your pretty neck I do - "

We're feeding our neighbors animals while they're gone this weekend. Dog, pig and chickens.

The chickens are amazing - there are several varieties. Pure white, ruddy red, and golden, with black markings. The feathers of the black hen are iridescent in the sun. The eggs come in brown, white and pale green.

There are half a dozen young pullets that are black and white with fluffy top-knots and fuzzy booties, but they don't stay still enough to take a good photo.

Henri the pig has sure grown!!

Topanga Days

Today was the Topanga Days Parade, a rag-tag, irreverent bacchanal open to anyone who can wear a funny hat and make a fool of themselves!

We used to go to the parade every year when our son was young, but for the last several Memorial Days, we've slept in. But this may be the last chance at Topanga Days for a while, so we got out of bed and took Jack down to the boulevard to watch.

Letting go

We just accepted an offer on the house. Next step....letting go.

Storm belt

Today's storm was followed by another one tonight, and as we sat in our cozy, clean - and echoing empty - living room, we watched the clouds move over the mountain.

Thunder growled and the wind grew cold as I hauled a hamper of clean laundry up from the basement.  Moments later, as I sat at my desk, a brilliant flash of lighting came, with a simultaneous huge clap of thunder - the storm was right overhead. Then the skies opened up. Including hail!

I guess we should get used to this, if we're going to live in New Orleans!

On the market

House p0rn

We're on the market!  Today our agent held her first open house. Despite our California drought, today it rained, right during showing hours! Still, she said there were at least 45 visitors. We're having two more open houses this weekend.

Our agent is quite firm at how she wants the house to look, and I feel chastened if I mess things up, even for our own lives. Truth be told, it's not really our house anymore, it's hers!

Where'd the mountain go?

June gloom has arrived early this year. The mountain is completely hidden.

A time of change

Well, I'm feeling a little foolish to be writing about this now. Some of you have commented; other discussions have gone on  Facebook. I didn't mean to be secretive, it just never seemed to be the right time for An Announcement.

You know that I'm in for a big change - I've submitted my retirement and notice at work, and I'm going to New Orleans to become a graduate student in Creative Writing.

But there's more change for us. Yesterday [The Man I Love]'s colleagues and co-workers honored him in a celebration of the thirteen years of service he has spent serving in an administrative role at the university. At the end of June, he steps down from that position and returns to the faculty again as a professor. It's been a good, long run with many great accomplishments. But it's great for him to get back to the work he loves.

But before he returns to the classroom, he is on a year's sabbatical. So for that year, we've decided that both of us will go to New Orleans - along with Jack the dog. [The Man I Love] will return to Los Angeles the following year to resume teaching, while I stay in New Orleans finishing my degree. We'll see what happens next.

The other decision we've made is bittersweet. We are selling our house in Topanga. We love our house; we've lived there almost twenty years. But it is too much for two people. When we return to Los Angeles, we'll live differently; a more urban life, perhaps, more downsized. We want to be more nimble, less burdened, with shorter commutes and fewer things to maintain.

It will be hard to leave this wonderful community, and the glorious natural world outside our windows. When we're back in LA, we'll be close enough to return, of course, and hike our favorite trails. I'm not sure how it will feel to be an outsider, though.

It feels good to go through the vast amount of material objects we've accumulated over the years and jettison them.

Do you ever wonder why people tend to say they're "buying a home" but "selling our house?"

Topanga light

Our living room, near sunset on a Sunday afternoon. The light is so beautiful!

That didn't take long!

It took us about three hours to fill the dumpster!

Now we have a clean carport and a clean pretty deck.  Our gardener came today, and trimmed the dead branches off the apricot tree, and he took down a broken swing hanging on the pergola (it went into the dumpster too!).

The basement is still too ugly for pictures. But we got a lot of stuff sorted out. Maybe tomorrow it will be more photogenic.

Here's what's awaiting the next dumpster! Tomorrow we hit it again.

My feet and legs are killing me, my hands are rough and my back is sore, but I feel pretty good!

Our dark secrets

One of the shameful secrets of our life in Topanga has been the mess in our basement. Our basement is full of boxes that include books and papers we moved here from Seattle in 1996 and never opened, obsolete computer equipment, broken furniture, boxes of discarded children's toys, things we meant to donate to Goodwill but didn't, old paint, and panes of window glass from old windows.

We've rented a dumpster and are starting to tackle all this. It's been both alarming and embarrassing - I thumbed through a box of old photographs of my 30 years-ago self, soiled and stuck together by rat droppings. I found a stack of my old vinyl record albums from the '70s, still wrapped in bubble wrap.

The rat droppings is a theme. Our rural habitat is a very hospitable home to roof rats, also known as black rats or rattus rattus. While we've finally managed to get them out of our living spaces, they've moved right into the basement, slipping under doors and gnawing through window screens. This is going to be a dirty job.

Grey grey day

Is June Gloom coming early this year?

It's grey outside, and chilly.

Jack doesn't mind it, though; he likes lounging on the back deck in almost any weather.

Blue skies

Phacelia grandiflora is a native wildflower of the coastal chaparral habitat of the Santa Monica Mountains.

This specimen is growing on a sheer dirt cliff on our road. It makes me happy to drive by and see that flash of blue. Today I walked to where it grows so I could take photos.

Before it goes away

Spring is fleeting here in Southern California, before the heat comes on. And it's even more fleeting in a drought year.

Here is our nearby hillside, bright with blooming wild mustard, in early March.

Wild mustard is an invasive weed, but during the short time it blooms, it can color our hillsides beautifully. Now, a month after I took these photos, it's going to seed and going brown and dry. Soon it will be gone, and our hills will take on a more tawny tone.

Pines

The weather is very mercurial here in Southern California. The weekend was crystal clear and cool, but by Tuesday, the clouds blew in, speckling the sky with piebald shreds like a torn-apart blanket. Yesterday on my commute home, big fat drops of rain spattered on my windshield as I drove along the coast.

Today, the Santa Ana winds are up, hot fierce wind from the deserts pouring through our canyon to the ocean, a harbinger of record heat that's expected by Sunday. When I went out this morning to walk Jack, it tossed my hair into my eyes. Walking on the street, I could hear the wind rush through the trees, high overhead.

Pinus sabiniana, also called the gray pine or the digger pine, are tall open trees with long needles and large cones that, when they drop onto our flat rooftop, you can hear them fall. The seeds were once prized as food by the Native people who lived here. My neighbor has three tall pine trees, growing in the strip between his driveway and ours. When the wind is high, it rushes through the pine boughs and sounds like ocean waves.

Here in Topanga, though our hills are thickly forested with coast live oaks, and volatile, non-native eucalyptus, it's the pine trees that speak the wind to us.

Above it all

Yes, its the same place as the title photo

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day in Southern California, perfect for a hike up Tuna Canyon.

There was a stiff offshore breeze tossing the chaparral and oak leaves.  It was almost crystal clear, just a slight haze over the city. We could see the snow-covered peaks of Mt. Baldy.

Castilleja affinis, or Indian paint brush

This is a steep trail, but it's good to walk because it's partially shaded. The verges of the trail were touched with wildflowers in bloom.

Here, a hillside is covered with golden California poppies in bloom.

Just beautiful.

At the top of the trail, there's a broad flat overlook where you can see from the beaches of Santa Monica to the San Gabriel Mountains, with the skyscrapers of Westwood, Century City, and downtown Los Angeles between.

Click to "embiggen"

And also here is a stone mandala/maze. So Topanga!

Wild cucumber

 

Soon after the rains, the landscape here in the Santa Monica mountains begins to green up. One of the first winter plants to emerge is the wild cucumber, Marah macrocarpa. It springs vigorously up, stems seeking something to hoist itself up on by its coiling tendrils. The plant can climb twenty or more feet high.

Wild cucumbers have pretty, palm-shaped leaves, and white flowers that appear almost as soon as it springs from the ground. The plant is monoecious, bearing both male and female flowers on the same plant, and it can self-fertilize. The male flowers grow in clusters, while the female flowers grow singly.

The fruit is a round, prickly ball that swells up to the size of a fist, then yellows as it ripens, finally drying and splitting open to spread large seeds.

It's tendrils are fascinating, twisting like little green springs.

Here, a plant has hoisted itself up a wire fence, spangling it with white flowers like a bridal veil.

Another common name is manroot, for the plant's huge tuberous root, which makes it a remarkably drought-tolerant perennial.

Marah macrocarpa is not inedible, but it's very bitter, hence the genus name Marah, which books tell me is Hebrew for "bitter," though google-translate doesn't recognize it. Its juices and a paste made from its seeds can be used to treat pimples or other skin sores.

For me, though, wild cucumber's fresh green shoots and white flowers are a signal that spring is coming.

Tree trimmers

 

Perched, like bright birds, green weskits and orange hats flashing, they call and respond in high pitched staccato Spanish. Bright yellow ropes hang and loop like vine tendrils over the oak's twisting branches, and clip back to belt harnesses as, scabbards strapped to leg, the climbers straddle the tree’s limbs.

Tethered orange chainsaws dangle when idle, bar-down, like jagged plumb bobs. The men brandish long-handled pruners to lop and snip, pulling, pushing, sweeping. Another shout, and the saw growls, pulsing low then howling out in exultation. Cut green wood tweaks the nose like menthol, and a leafy branch jangles down. The tracery opens and sunlight pours in.