Tag: Vernal equinox

Blossom Peeping in Yakima

My Regular Pagan Holiday post–Ostara

Each spring, near the Vernal Equinox, my family practiced a ritual that felt both ordinary and divine. We piled into the car and drove the back roads, wandering through orchards to admire the blossoming trees. In an agricultural town in the 1950s, perhaps many families did something similar. To us it marked the true arrival of Spring.

Yakima, Washington is on the dry eastern side of the Cascade mountain range, and from certain places in the valley you can glimpse two great peaks rising in white brilliance above the brown, sagebrushy foothills. The Indigenous peoples named the mountain we call Rainier Tahoma, which means “the mother of waters.” The Native name for Mt. Adams is Pahto. Closer in, foothill ridges encircle the valley: Ahtanum Ridge, Rattlesnake Hills, Horse Heaven Hills. 

Our annual blossom pilgrimages would take us south to the Lower Valley where the trees bloomed earlier. To reach it from the town of Yakima, you drive through a narrow gap in the Rattlesnake Hills at Union Gap, where a massive basalt landslide is now slowly creeping south at a foot and a half per week. Drive fast and don’t look up. 

From there, the road winds along the Yakima River past Wapato, Toppenish, and Buena—locally pronounced Byoo-enna. I didn’t realize until adulthood that the word is Spanish. Originally, the place had been called Konewock, a Native word meaning a lush, green marshy place. But when the railroad needed a station name, it became Buena.

The Yakama Indian Reservation borders the Lower Valley towns and stretches west toward Mount Adams. On the reservation stand the remains of Fort Simcoe, where U.S. soldiers were stationed during the Indian wars of the 1850s—a quiet, uneasy reminder of deeper histories layered beneath the orchards.

Yakima was home to vast orchards of apples and pears, along with stone fruits—peaches, cherries, apricots. In the spring the valley was a quilt of flowering trees, fragrant and luminous. But, in my childhood, change was already underway. Like the orchards here in Sonoma County today, many of Yakima’s were already being razed to make room for postwar housing developments and, later, vineyards.

The new ranch-style house we moved into in 1951 stood on land that had been a cherry orchard. The developers left one tall cherry tree in the front yard of each house on the block. I climbed every one of them. Across the street, an apple orchard remained, and bi-planes flew overhead, trailing clouds of DDT and other pesticides. 

There is the row of cherry trees behind me (R), brother Don and a neighbor. I couldn’t find any blossom pictures and at Easter in 1955 the cherries hadn’t yet bloomed.

When I was a kid, Yakima was a town of about 40,000, with a lively downtown. Women wore hats and gloves to go shopping. Store windows gleamed, sidewalks buzzed, and the town felt cohesive, self-contained. Then, in the 1970s, the first shopping mall arrived, and everything shifted. Downtown slowly hollowed out.

Behind me is the across-the-street apple orchard.

Now the population of Yakima is getting close to 100,000. Farmers still grow hops, and there are still fruit trees—mostly apples—but vineyards have been steadily taking over. There is less blossom-peeping now; grapes, after all, have no blossoms.

Me (R) and friend. From the back yard we can see development encroaching and a few trees left.

But we still participate in the ritual of spring blossom peeping. Holly and I have planted a little orchard of cherry, plum and peach trees in our back yard. We have a magical orange, and lemon and apple trees hang over our neighbors’ fences. Plus, in our town of Santa Rosa there are magnolias, redbuds, dogwood and ornamental fruit trees, enough to inspire a months’-long Spring ritual right in our neighborhood.

On March 28 we will be marching with our neighbors in the No Kings march and rally here in Santa Rosa, but every little town in Sonoma County will be hosting a No Kings event. We haven’t yet seen a big uptick in ICE arrests here, but the government’s anti-immigrant project is nevertheless creating chaos in the agricultural community. Our sheriff still has not responded to community demands that he not work with ICE and people feel that they are under siege. We are determined to protect and defend our immigrant neighbors.

My No Kings sign posted in our front yard
Four women in my neighborhood had these signs made, with quotes from luminaries that promote kindness and justice. Now they are posted in front yards all over town.

Happy Spring blossom peeping and protesting to all!

We Survive Another Disaster

Celebrating Ostara, the Vernal Equinox

My regular pagan holiday post

Holly keeps saying the water is rising but I am watching a movie. She says its rising really fast. She’s running around trying to find rubber boots. Oh man, the movie is almost done. But you don’t see how fast it’s rising she says. I look out the window and see that rain is pouring down and the street in front of our house is a lake. Ok where did I put my rubber boots? They have a zebra design (bought at Sebastopol hardware) so they shouldn’t be too hard to find in the mess that is our garage.

Our garage has been a mess for a long time. Goddess, how long has it been since we could actually park our Bolt in the car garage? Years, it’s been years. It’s always something. Lately it’s that Holly’s mom died and Holly had to clean out her stuff from Mom’s room at the assisted living place where she had lived for five years. Amazing how much stuff you can fit into one room. Now it’s in our garage, what’s left over after giving away what we could.

The boots are tucked in a corner of the garage, which is already flooding. Out in the driveway the water comes halfway up to the top of my boots. Holly has already soaked her short boots and has moved on to water shoes.

We think the problem is a blocked drain somewhere in the system. Neighbors are all out on the street and their nearby driveways are flooding too, but ours is the only house whose garage is flooding. Holly and I quickly move cardboard boxes out of the way of the water. Most of our stuff is stored in plastic boxes, but Mom’s stuff is not.

We stand in the open garage and watch as the fire department tries to free the drains. One of the firefighters is a woman! Our neighbor Chuck trots back and forth through the muck trying to explain how the drainage system works in the neighborhood. Chuck was here 20 years ago when this happened. The story goes that his car floated away, or maybe his car was just engulfed in water and the city paid to fix it. I move our car up further as far into the garage as the junk stored there will allow.

Out in the street in front of our house the firefighters are up to their knees in water and they are working to find the plugged drain. The water keeps rising. One young firefighter joins us in the garage to check on and calm us old ladies. We are a lot calmer that he is. He keeps saying how sorry he is. We keep saying it’s not his fault that our street is flooding.

Our sump pump turns itself on, the first time we’ve ever seen this happen. We usually have to help it along, pulling the bulb up by hand to make it work. That means the water under the house in the crawl space is rising too. The pump works hard to pump the water out of the crawl space and onto the flooded driveway. Then the water flows back under the house again. Futile. We worry that the crawl space water will rise up to the floor boards and come up through the wood floor. We imagine ourselves sloshing around the house in a foot of water. I mentally tally the cost of replacing the oak flooring. This could be a real disaster. We run around the house picking things up from the floor—computers, furniture, air filters. Holly folds up the colorful quilt our friend Linda just made for her and puts it up high in a closet.

It gets dark. Then the city arrives with a vacuum truck. The water begins to recede. They are still on the street the next day looking for the blockage. They tell me this magical truck also can blow out the blockage and that’s what they’re trying to do.

One of our neighbors, an engineer, meets with the city people to work on a solution. I say we need a drawing so we understand where the water goes. He says you can find it online but it is incorrect. The system was designed to drain the water in the opposite direction than it is draining! He is pressuring the city to fix the drainage system so flooding does not become a neighborhood ritual.

In the six years we’ve lived here we’ve survived fire (the neighborhood was evacuated in the Tubbs fire in 2017 and we self-evacuated in 2019 and 2020), and an earthquake on the Rogers Creek fault which runs very near our house, if not under it. But we never thought we’d have to worry about flooding. We live on a hill! Come to find out there’s a dip at the top of the hill right where our house sits. 

Now we are calling ourselves the Dips on the Hill.

We fervently hope that flooding does not become a routine disaster on our block and with that in mind we are not inventing any associated rituals. But we did partake in an annual spring ritual especially festive in the gay community–watching the Oscars. Sonoma County’s party takes place at the Rialto theater in Sebastopol. It’s a benefit for Food for Thought, a food bank started in 1988 to serve people with AIDS. Lesbians, like our friend Jude Mariah, were the early organizers. Still going strong, it’s a free service that depends on volunteers to deliver healthy meals to all community members with serious illnesses, more than 4000 people last year.

The vernal equinox this year is March 19, the astronomical beginning of the spring season in the northern hemisphere. Pagans call it Ostara, a word that comes from the Anglo-Saxon goddess name, Eostre. Also the root of the word Easter.

Here in Sonoma County we are celebrating the last of the atmospheric rivers and the beginning of warm weather.

Happy Ostara!

Molly (and Holly)

Hope for a New Day

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

Dear Friends, 

Happy Ostara, the celebration of the vernal equinox, which takes place this year today, March 20. Searching for spring festivals and hoping for inspiration, I found one from Iran.

“In Iran, the festival of NowRuz begins shortly before the vernal equinox. The phrase “NowRuz” actually means “new day,” and this is a time of hope and rebirth.

Boy, am I feeling the need for hope and rebirth right now.

“The Iranian new year begins on the day of the equinox, and typically people celebrate by getting outside for a picnic or other activity with their loved ones. No Ruz is deeply rooted in the beliefs of Zoroastrianism, which was the predominant religion in ancient Persia before Islam came along.”

Getting outside—yes! The vernal equinox must be celebrated outdoors.

Another inspiration comes from my neighbors, many of whom are my age, in their 70s. In Santa Rosa people take their gardens and landscaping seriously. When I walk down the street and see Dan and Karen tending their gardens or Howie down on the ground pulling weeds, or Pam planting natives in her front yard, or Susan wielding digging tools I think yeah I can do that too!

Gardening and planting plants—what a great way to celebrate spring!

I’ve always seen myself as a big strong woman and I’ve spent my adult life telling other women working in the construction trades “We Can Do It!” Admitting that I can’t do something is still hard for me, even though I’ve been practicing it for a decade now. At 72 I discover new limits to my ability constantly.

So, after Holly and I acknowledged to each other that there are some garden chores we just can’t do anymore, we hired a laborer to dig out crab grass, matilija poppy roots and a couple of stumps.

There is also this: I don’t want to do it. I might have felt like I had to in the past, or I was required to show that I could meet some physical challenge. Now I no longer have to make a point.

Or that’s what I thought before Maximo, the laborer, weighed in on my ability. He was digging out the poppy roots with an adz. I said to him, “that’s such hard work.” I knew this because I had dug out the roots a couple years before and found the job taxing.

“Yes,” he said, “you couldn’t do this.”

My hackles went up immediately. What do you mean I can’t do it! I thought to myself. He had said that as he worked without even looking at me. What was it about me that made him think I couldn’t do the work? Gray hair? My gender? To me them’s fightin’ words.

So of course after that I had to do it to prove I still could. I decided to start celebrating spring a little early, on the Ides of March. I know the last day of frost in Santa Rosa is April 15 but I can never wait that long and I figure global warming has moved it up at least a couple of weeks. And I was willing to take a chance. If my seedlings froze I’d just have to start over.

Holly had ordered seedlings from Annie’s Annuals and we set out to plant them in the front yard, which required squatting for long periods.

Look, I’m not decrepit and I’m proud that I can still pee in the woods and get up off my haunches (except for that one time after a back operation when my quads were so weak I needed help from a tree). But peeing is a short operation and planting takes longer. Especially since I get obsessed with pulling out the bermuda grass roots, an unending task (I do know we will never be rid of them).

After working at it for a while and feeling pretty good about my athletic ability, my neck and my hands started sending pain signals. Then suddenly the muscles in my legs objected, seizing up and screaming for me to move, but I was stuck in the position. Oh My Goddess I can’t get up!

I remembered the episode of Grace and Frankie where both Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda fell and couldn’t get up. They both raced for the phone by swimming across the floor on their backs. And the episode when Jane pulls a MacGyver, lassoing a sculpture to pull herself up off the toilet. If only my elderly exploits could be so funny!

I rolled over to get up the way they teach old people to do and I finished the job on hands and knees.

I did it! Not very gracefully, but I did it.

In the meantime Holly had finished her part of the planting without mishap, but she is a decade younger than I.

Acknowledging that I might not be so good at planting seedlings, I can still throw seeds around the garden and rake them into the dirt while standing up. And that’s what I did last fall for cover crops of mustard, red clover, calendula and fava beans. Now they are flowering and I’m appreciating the fruits of my labor.

Maybe next year I’ll find a new way to celebrate the advent of spring, something I can do while standing upright.

In the meantime I wish you all NowRuz Mobarak–Happy New Year. May this be the start of a new day.

Sending love to you all,

Molly