Walnuts

I continue on the California theme but I reflect.  I lived the first 27 years of my life in California,  The Golden State.  But I've lived 35 years here in Washington, The Evergreen State.  So why do I feel like a California girl at heart?  I've lived here longer in the beautiful Puget Sound area, been an adult, worked, raised a family of 4 kids.  Rich images must abound.  And they do.

It's a different beauty here; darker, the light even in the summer much more diffuse, bluer.  Today, Labor Day Weekend, the weather has cooled, kinda rainy, cool, temp currently 66 degrees.  In Sacramento and Chico, temp is close to 90 degrees and going up.  Very normal for the Sacramento Valley for this time of year.

As you grow older, if you are fortunate to avoid trauma, things don't stick in your mind so much.  Images that seem so crucial when you are young, barely make an impression.  Maybe we all searched more ... or maybe we have less brain cells, who knows?

I've found some great California images the last few days.  This one came from somewhere on Flickr, not sure where.  To me, this looks like the orchards around Chico where we lived for a few years before we moved to Seattle.  The northern Sacramento Valley.  Besides the semi-arid pastureland, the seaesonally flooded rice fields abounded and, up around Chico, beautiful orchards.  Most grew almonds (pronounced aaaaah-muns, like the 'a' in asked).  This picture looks more like winter, the bare trees, the warm clothes, the rough earth.  This persons holds walnuts, we can assume a walnut orchard?  We had a huge black walnut tree in our front yard of our modest Chico home.  I can't quite make it out on Google Earth, there's no images of our little end of W 17th Street.

This picture gives me the feel of living in the northern Sacramento Valley in the late 1970s; don't know that it's much changed.