New Beginnings

 

I love this week before the New Year. Well, I love this year. I don't think I was too wild about the beginning of last year. This year I can say with a happy heart. " Nothing in meaningless. Nothing, for the Christian, is a dead end. All endings are beginnings." ( From All That Was Ever Ours, p. 64)

Rain this year helps so much. Seeing green again does fill me with hope. Just this morning, I had to take these pictures.

 

Last year, and the year before, there was no green like this. It makes me so happy to see this today.

I started reading yesterday. East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I had to share this little gem, on California. ( I wish I knew this last year.)

" I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put terror on the valley. The water came in thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."

 

I am also listening to" My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir" by LibriVox. My favorite reader, Adrian Praetzellis.
We have a cold storm on its way and the deserts might get snow. It feels so nice to have cold winter.
The oranges and grapefruit and lemons need this. We won't be as freezing as some places. Our blood oranges are getting that lovely color of red on them
.

blood oranges

I do wish when they were naming this orange they might have called it something pretty. It has the nicest oranges and looks so pretty when it is almost purple inside. Such good flavor too.

pink grapefruit

The pink grapefruit hasn't started changing yet. It will now with the cold. Our other oranges and lemons are starting to turn. I never worry about the Valencia oranges. Our Meyer lemons are little this year but so filled with juice. After last summer, I am so thankful for this crop. To see that they made it fills me with such relief. I was so afraid, that the drought might have caused us to have to turn off the water to the trees. I think it is a good thing to be aware of the gift of rain. I am sure I needed such a wake up call. Living in town, I never worried to much about weather. Living out here, though, I am so aware of the storms and rain and drought.
So I think this new year is already off to a good start.

Have a lovely Monday, as this is the last one of 2014

~Kim~

 

" Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."
---Angelique Arnauld---