Really, Really Here

Cinco de Mayo in the cherry orchard

The Most Beautiful, Most Uncertain Month of the Year?

May has arrived, right on time, and never have I watched the buds of fruit trees as closely as I’m watching them this year. My interest is personal, social, and community-minded. 

My two little apple trees, after several years of bountiful harvest, succumbed to codling moths in 2024 and a late freeze in 2025. I’ve taken proactive measures against the codling moths but can do nothing about the weather. That’s personal. Fingers crossed!

Will there be apples this year?

The social aspect of my interest has to do with friends and neighbors who want to get together when the orchard is in bloom. When will that be? they ask. Twenty days from Stage 2, an online guru says, and yet what looks like Stage 2 to me seems as if it’s been going on for a week already. Please tell me the buds have not been killed by cold overnight temperatures, as so many were last year!

As for community, in a farming neighborhood such as mine it matters to most of us that our farmer neighbors have good harvests. Few of us are invested financially, but we want their success. 

Of course, you know I’ve been keeping track of wildflowers in the woods, too. For such a long time, it seemed that Dutchman’s breeches were the only ephemerals daring to bloom. Spring beauties, usually the season’s first, had popped above the forest litter but were hesitant to open their faces to grey skies and cold winds. (I had similar feelings.) Trillium, like the spring beauties, kept their flowers shut up tight, waiting. Then finally I spotted a bellwort, one of my favorite spring flowers with its shy, gracefully drooping habit, and two days later, after warmer temperatures and sunshine, there were crowds of trillium and bellwort, along with bracken fern fiddleheads, and spring seemed truly to have arrived at last. One day, a single trout lily, a.k.a. dogtooth violet! 

Defense of John Steinbeck

Everyone, it seems, wants to “reassess” the last published book of John Steinbeck’s career, his bestseller Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I'll begin with the AI overview served up by Google, because it's the first thing most people will see when they do an online search: 

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) is not a strictly true story and is considered a heavily fabricated or "fictionalized" non-fiction book. While John Steinbeck did take a road trip with his dog in 1960, he created fake characters, invented conversations, and falsified where he slept.

Other critics are more specific, sniffing haughtily that he may have driven a truck with a camper but that he stayed in motor courts. Well, sometimes he did, and he says so right in the book, at least three times that I recall without looking for citations. Or that it wasn’t a completely solo trip, as his wife met him on more than one occasion, times together in Chicago and with her relatives in Texas that he also recounted in the book itself. Did these critics read Steinbeck's book at all? 

A more general criticism (see above) is that he invented characters and conversations. I wonder how they would know. Right at the outset he said that he was not a note-taker. And Travels with Charley was not a diary, after all, not a day-by-day, hour-by-hour account. That the author came to no very definite conclusions is something else he admitted himself, more than once. He could not distill the United States down to a single personality with universal coast-to-coast characteristics. I should hope not! 

I wonder what Steinbeck would think if he could take his cross-country trip again in 2026. He wrote this of the Monterey Peninsula, a place he had known well in earlier years:

…The beaches are clean where once they festered with fish guts and flies. The canneries which once put up a sickening stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they are not likely to wipe out. And Carmel, begun by starveling writers and unwanted painters, is now a community of the well-to-do and the retired. If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there….

The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it. In my memory it stood as it once did and its outward appearance confused and angered me.

- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

That was in 1960, when the population explosion he saw, staggering as it seemed at the time, in retrospect has nothing on today’s California crowded and expensive real estate.

I was disappointed that Steinbeck hurried through Arizona in a single paragraph, but it was his trip, not mine, and he admitted he was tired of traveling by then and headed for the barn, planning immersions only in Texas and the South farther east, focusing on New Orleans. That South in his time was the South of early forced desegregation, angry, bullying local crowds, and what he calls “the breath of fear” everywhere. No wonder he felt his trip was over by the time he reached Abingdon, Virginia. 

As for fabrications, however, according to Steinbeck,

Up to Abingdon, Virginia, I can reel back the trip like film. I have almost total recall, every face is there, every hill and tree and color, and sound of speech and small scenes ready to replay themselves in my memory.

Well, then, are some of the people in this book fictional characters? I am willing to accept that the author may have presented composites and that his “almost total recall” would not have been word-for-word of every conversation, but I’m also willing to believe that his trip was basically the trip he recounts in his book. He could have invented more dramatic scenes and more outrageous characters, had he wanted to do so. He was, after all, John Steinbeck.

The Girl Who Doesn't Read

Every morning's companion

Not fair to say that of Sunny Juliet, is it? She reads me pretty well, and I don't do too badly reading her, either. We were happy to see her dog friends two days in a row on Sunday and Monday, and we're happy every day to spend time out in our yard at home and in the meadow and in the woods. 

Reading her dog momma's face

Bookstore Schedule for May

In general, hours for May will be Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; however, the shop will be closed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, May 19, 20, 21 while I’m out of town, then open again Friday and Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. 

Memorial Day! At last or already? How do you feel about it? Are you ready?

We are happy to be into porch season at last.