A few years back, soon after we moved up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, I woke up one January morning just before the sun came up, and something was different. There was a strange blue-white glow coming from the windows. I sat up.

“What is it?” Eric asked sleepily.

“Its snow,” I said, gaping out the window. “Its a whole lot of snow.” Snow! In California! Snow! Whole big heaps of it! Snow! On the lawn, in the trees, still coming down from the grey sky in the grey dawn in enormous powwdery flakes.

Snow!

Its SNOW!

It SNOWED!

I bolted out of bed and immediately began throwing on clothes: long underwear, jeans, sweaters. Where are my gloves? Where is my hat? There’s no time! There was SNOW out there, and I had to get out into it. I could not stay inside a minute longer because it had SNOWED!

I grew up in Boston, the heart of New England, where it snows six months out of the year. When I left Boston for the Bay Area everyone I knew joked, well, you’ll never have to shovel a driveway again. And yes, I am thankful for that. I am thankful for the lack of cold toes, runny noses and icy patches on the sidewalk. I am thankful there are no more frigid dirty March days where the big piles of snow and ice sand and dirt on the sides of the road where the plows put them in Decemeber are still sitting, sitting and rotting away like the dirty corpses of Winter.

When I moved out here to the Bay Area, California winters seemed very bland. November comes along, and it rains some. There are cold days, and there are nice days. Then spring comes, it gets a little warmer, and the rains stop. The bay area has more of a quiet slide from the wet season to the dry season, from Summer to Winter without really a Fall or a Spring in between. Sometimes there’s not much of a Winter at all, and I wonder, where did it go?

I’m told there’s a term for this, for us displaced cold-weather folk who miss winter: seasonal deprivation. We miss the turning of the seasons, the clear borders between Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall. We miss the dramatic fall colors, the snows, the first crocus that comes up through the snow in the springtime. And the snow. Always the snow. I told Eric once that you can tell that summer has turned to fall because there is a smell to it. That snow has a smell to it. Eric, who grew up in California, thought I was nuts.

There are some ex-cold-weather folk I know who think I am nuts. If you miss snow, they say, go to Tahoe. All the snow you need, and you can leave it again at the end of the weekend. But its not the same. Going to the snow is not the same has having the snow come to you. It is not the same as waking up in the morning and discovering that the snow has fallen overnight, those heavy wet snowstorms we used to call white christmas storms, that coat the entire landscape with fondant icing and that leave the air cold and still and silent except for a very quiet whump as a clump of snow falls from a branch somewhere nearby. It is always a wonder to me when it happens. Each and every time I wake up in the morning surprised — my god, it SNOWED — and then the excitement – Oh my god, it SNOWED. Each and every time it is like I am eight years old again, school has been cancelled, and there is nothing to do all day but get the sled out of the garage and go out and PLAY.

We get these snows in the Santa Cruz mountains. Not often, just once or twice a year. But the best part of California snow: three, sometimes four days go by, the weather changes, warms up, and the snow melts and its gone. No lingering slush or piles of dirt. No icy driveways or sidewalks. Just enough snow to be a joy for a few hours in the early morning, just enough to satisfy seasonal deprivation for a displaced New Englander, but not enough to be an annoyance. Not enough to require shovelling out the driveway.

This morning I woke up to another snowstorm, four inches of it. I found my hat and gloves and went out and made a snow angel. It started snowing again as I wrote this, so now I must go out and spend some time catching snowflakes on my tongue. Later on I have a snowman scheduled, and I must call the neighbor kids and see if I can make an appointment for a snowball fight.

I wonder where in the Bay Area I can find myself a sled.

Explanation: I have a friend who works for a startup in the valley. One day a mandatory all hands meeting was called at this company so that HR could give every single employee copies of the book “Who Moved My Cheese.” You will read this book, it was explained to my friend and his co-workers, and discuss it in your workgroups. You will do little reports on it. Apparently all work at said company ground to a halt while everyone was very busy doing their little cheese reports. And you wonder why we are in a recession.

My friend was kind enough to give the book to me so that I could properly savage it.

* * * *

OK, I finally got around to reading Who Moved my Cheese. It took me about 45 minutes this morning, and that included a lot of time being disgusted and stopping to read the net instead.

Laura’s capsule review: what a massive pile of steaming horseshit this is.

Understand: I have read business books. I have read self-help books. I understand that the point is to take an idea that would be blatantly obvious to anyone with the intelligence of a radish, and spell it out in really small words and breezy language so that the whole book can be read in less than an hour. Business people and people who need help are busy people, after all. They don’t want to have to spend a lot of time puzzling over the point, because if that was what they wanted, they could spend $19.95 on Faulkner instead.

But jeez. As I posted earlier, the book is 94 pages, in extremely large type, and a number of those pages are taken up with large pictures of cheese with various important points on them. This is presumably so that you as a busy business person or self-help-type does not have to waste a valuable post-it-note marking the important parts.

Breezy tone? Oh yeah. It was any breezier it would blow over the lawn furniture. Throughout this book the tone of the writing kept giving me chilling flashbacks to Romper Room, to that horrible woman who spoke in a sort of bubbly friendly soothing voice to all us pre-schoolers, trying to lure us into staring into the magic mirror….. this always terrified me. I always wanted to scream DON’T LOOK INTO THE MIRROR!!!! WHO KNOWS WHAT HORRORS ARE IN THE MIRROR!!! IT’LL SUCK YOU IN AND YOU’LL NEVER GET OUT AGAIN!!!

Who Moved My Cheese is like that. It seems simple enough. They even spell out the point in the beginning, just in case the metaphor is too tough to grasp: cheese is whatever you want in life, comfort, wealth, a good job, a best-selling business book. You may expect the cheese to be in one point in the maze, but one day the cheese will get moved. And you can sit and complain and fail or you can go off looking for new cheese. And those who do go looking for new cheese will be the ones who succeed and be happy. So go! Succeed and be happy! Go! Go!

Yes, boys and girls, this is a 94 page, $19.95 version of the bumper sticker that says “Shit Happens.”

But that’s just the middle part of the book, the core cheese story. There’s a surrounding story at the beginning and end, and this is the part that has the subtle propaganda in it. In the meta-story, we have a group of ex-classmates, getting together at a class reunion to talk about how their lives have progressed since they graduated school, and of course the subject turns to change, and how they all manage change in their lives (funny, when I get together with old friends we all talk about that stupid thing so-and-so did back in ’85 after drinking nineteen shots of tequila, but I guess this is why I don’t write business books). And one of them says they have this great story about cheese, and how in their company when they told they cheese story, it CHANGED EVERYONE’S LIVES.

Everyone? the group asks in awe.

Well, not everyone, the classmate says sadly. There was one guy at our company who heard the cheese story, and he thought it was stupid and a complete waste of time. But then, he was one of those types who refuses to look for new cheese. And we eventually had to let him go.

Ahhh. You will read the cheese book, and you will like the cheese book. It will change your life. Or we will fire your ass.

No wonder HR departments love this book. No wonder they give it to all their employees and make them read it and do little reports in their groups. Its a weeding tool.

I will counsel my friend, should he run across any HR while at work, to memorize the following phrases, culled from the book, which should satisfy Them that he has been indoctrinated into the cult.

• If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct.
• Smell the Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
• When Your Move Beyond Your Fear, You Feel Free
• Move With The Cheese, And Enjoy It!

With these phrases and a quick duck into the coffee room, I imagine that even the most terrifying of HR demons can be quickly vanquished. These days, worker peons need all the help they can get.

The other day I was awakened in the middle of the night to a banging and clanging noise. I rolled over. All the lights were on. The living room lights, the outside lights. Eric was out of bed. Then, a shouting from the kitchen: “Hey! You! What are you doing! Get out of there!” More banging and rattling, doors slamming, glass breaking.

I lay quietly in bed. Was I going to be murdered in my bed if I stayed here? Were we being invaded my martians? What was going on? Should I get up?

A scraping noise. More doors slamming. Eric stomped back into the room. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“We have raccoons,” Said Eric, visibly fuming. “Big, fat, ARROGANT raccoons.”

We store birdseed in a big plastic container on the porch right by the kitchen door. We’re not dumb, the birdseed is in an airtight, latched container. But the raccoons are smarter than we are; they managed to get the latches open and crawl inside the container. But this time they made enough noise to wake Eric up. Eric went over, turned on the lights, and caught one raccoon butt-outward in the container and the other raccoon guiltily waiting his turn. He rapped on the door. The raccoons just casually stared at him. He opened the door. The raccoons just moved back a few feet and waited for Eric to go away, looking totally unthreatened. Raccoons are not like deer; they don’t scare easily.

It was then Eric got mad. You realize, of course, this means war. He went back into the kitchen, picked up the recycling, went back outside and lobbed an empty can of black beans right at the nearest sneering black-masked bushy-tailed seed-eater.

I should have gotten up and investigated the noise: I missed the spectacle of a naked man chasing raccoons across the lawn at three in the morning and pelting them with beer bottles.

And they say life in the country is boring.

The birdseed was moved inside for the night. It was my job that next day to put the birdseed into the closet on the porch. “But the closet isn’t locked,” I said, dubiously.

“If raccoons can open doorknobs,” said Eric, “We’re going to have much bigger problems than losing a little birdseed.”

No sign of the raccoons since putting away their immediate source of goodies. But sometimes when I go out into the garden I get the feeling I’m being….watched.

We first moved into the house in November, when the yard was grey and damp and The Weed wasn’t growing. We had no idea what horrors were yet to befall us.

The Weed started to sprout in February, and within a matter of weeks took over the entire property. It grew up and over everything, in and out, over and under, twining around and through and over itself, four feet high where it had no support and twelve feet high where it did. And it grew fast, feet a day, sometimes if you turned around for a second it seemed like it had grown another couple feet. Cutting it, pulling it out, spraying it with chemicals only seemed to encourage it. It sprouted more leaves at the ends, and took over another part of the yard.

We tried to cut it back. It only laughed. We made do with just keeping the main pathways clear, so we could get up and out of the driveway without it trailing out and snagging the car on the way down.

In June, The Weed sprouted all over with beautiful purple pink and white flowers. The ocean of horrible weeds that blanketed everything in the yard was now covered in pink. So it wasn’t all bad, then. The flowers were almost worth it. Almost.

We didn’t know what this stuff was. I couldn’t find it in any of my books. I had a book, Flora of the Santa Cruz Mountains, but I had a hard time understanding it because it was written for botanists and I could not tell my inflorescences from my lemmas. This was a vine, it had flat leaves and purple flowers, and it went bloody everywhere.

I asked on the net, and everyone said, “Oh, you have the Dreaded Bindweed. You are doomed.”

I said, great, we are doomed. But I looked up bindweed (leaves pubescent, rarely glabrous), and found a picture of it, and discovered that while yes, we do also have bindweed, The Weed is not bindweed.

So what was it? Sometime in fall after the pretty pink flowers were gone The Weed sprouted seed pods. Seed pods that looked suspiciously like…. peas.

“Do you think maybe its sweet pea?” I asked Eric. But sweet pea has such a nice, sweet quiet reputation. An annual, sweet pea comes in zillions of colors, the result of easy hybridization and medieval fun with genetics. It didn’t seem to bear much relationship to the aggressive pink monster in our garden.

Sunset Western Garden Book to the rescue. There are two sweet peas, Lathrys Odorata, common annual sweet pea, and Lathrys Latifolius, perennial sweet pea. Comparing notes between the Sunset book and the Flora book (looking up all the words I didn’t understand, which was most of them), I was able to confirm that The Weed is, indeed, perennial sweet pea (the flora book calls it everlasting sweet pea. Ahahah). The Sunset book has an amusing description of the latter when kept in perspective with The Weed, and I quote: “Strong growing vine up to 9 ft. … Plants grow with little care. May escape and become naturalized. Use as a bank cover.” Ahahaha.

Knowing what The Weed was gave us little consolation. For the last few years I have tried to ignore the existence of The Weed, mostly trying to keep it under control. One of the nice things about the The Weed is that it is very green, it holds a lot of water, and its easy to uproot because its a long vine that doesn’t really grab on to stuff very hard. So you can harvest a ton of it in the late summer, shred it all, and have just enormous amounts of really great compost ready to rot over the winter. And the flowers were really nice for my bees. Whenever I went out into the yard when The Weed was in flower the bees would be out in droves, rooting around in the pink and purple flowers, digging down into the petals for the nectar inside.

This year, however, sweet pea is apparently having a cultural renaissance. It has suddenly come into style. I first started seeing pots of sweet pea in reds and blacks and light blues in the garden center in early spring, little delicate l.odoratas, really pretty plants. I laughed. While light blue sweet pea is really pretty, I really didn’t need any more sweet pea in my life.

And then Martha Stewart Living did an article about how cool sweet pea was in bunches, when displayed in antique silver urns on linen tablecloths, etc, etc. Oh my.

Then, finally, I started seeing bunches of sweet pea in the farmer’s market every week. Not even good sweet pea, just the same same pinks and purples we had, for $3 a bunch, and not even very big bunches! And they were selling out!

It had never even really occurred to me to pick the flowers. They were everywhere, the sweet pea was The Weed! And now it was selling for $3 a bunch! Whoa!

So of course, I went out and picked some.

I can pick a big bunch of sweet pea, say, $15 worth, in about half an hour. I’ll need more time if the sweet pea is twined in with poison oak, and a lot more time if there is a big stinging nettle hidden in the middle of it that I don’t see until its too late (note to self: do not pick sweet pea in shorts). The bees still like sweet pea a lot, and when one is holding a mass of sweet pea in one’s hands, the bees will really like one. Work quickly.

It occurred to me after I was done picking that I had never actually smelled sweet pea. It didn’t seem to have much of scent on the vine, I had never actually noticed anything exceptionally fragrant about it, so, Ferdinand-the-bull-like, I stuffed my nose down into the mass of flowers, and inhaled.

Ah. They smell wonderful. A very light, nectar smell, not at all objectionable, not at all strong. You have to get very close to smell them. But they are lovely. Just lovely.

Back at home, I found a glass to put the flowers in. Sweet pea is a comfortable, disorganized flower. It isn’t a regal flower like a rose, or a structurally beautiful flower like an orchid. It isn’t even a friendly happy flower like a sunflower or a marigold. Its a messy rumpled bed flower, an overstuffed chair flower, a muddy wet dog flower. It is not a flower that is arranged so much as fluffed. But the result is extremely pretty.

Not bad for a noxious weed.

I had business to do in San Francisco the other day, so like thousands of other people do every morning I got in my car and fought my way up the peninsula, fought my way through the smog and the traffic from one freeway to the next, from one dirty city intersection to the next, and then fought my way into a parking space. I didn’t have much business to do, not even worth the trip, actually, but it had to be done, and once it was done by midmorning I found myself feeling tired and worn and beaten.

I was sitting in my car at the intersection of Geary and Fillmore, waiting to turn left. Left back to Van Ness and then back to 101, back to Silicon Valley, back to work again to finish my day and meet my deadlines. It was a bright May day, the sort of beautiful temperate late spring day in the city where the weather is actually not too cold and not too hot, no fog to cloud the sky, just blue blue blue and and light and warmth and yellow sun.

Cars were stacking up on the left side of the intersection, to the left on Geary where I was going to be turning. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to go down to Van Ness and 101 and back to work. More fighting to be done, I sighed, more driving, more push push push and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

I looked out the right side, out to the West, toward the coast, where there was no traffic at all.

What do deadlines mean, really? a little voice said. It seemed to be coming from my car. The work gets done, eventually, doesn’t it? What’s a few hours? I found myself suddenly smiling, no, grinning, as something inside me went plink and I abruptly shifted into reverse, backed out of the left turn lane, and turned right.

West on Geary went away from the freeway, toward the coast and the beaches, and toward Highway 1, twisty twisty Highway 1, the very long way home. I felt like I was running away, I felt like I was skipping school, I felt wicked and I FELT GREAT.

Four lights down Geary: One to unlatch the car top, one to put the back window down, one to find my hat and my sunglasses in the glovebox, and the final one to fold the car top down. The woman behind me in the nice sedan gave me a look of dismay as the top came down. Oh. You have a convertible. Yes. I have a convertible. And this is what it wants.

On the beach side of the city the sky was still clear but I was not the only one who was playing hooky; the road was crowded and it took a few miles of southward travel before the traffic opened up, before everything — the road and the air and and the sky and the car — all came together. From then on there was little traffic as I drove south, and what few cars I encountered I easily passed.

Do people who are not car people get this? This sense of the perfect day, the perfect road, the perfect place, an almost glorious joy of driving where there are no missed shifts, no hesitations, where every tight corner is executed perfectly and there are no slow RVs hiding around the bend?

For miles I kept the ocean on my right, cliffs and scrubby brush and rolling hills on my left. Once I turned a sweeping left-hander near Pacifica and the whole hillside around the turn was flung wide with splashes of wildflowers, bright California poppies and wild lupines, the magnificent orange and blue mix that only occurs for a few weeks at this time of year. There was a light wind, a warm wind, not enough to be annoying, and it passed in waves over the flowers, stirring them this way and that as I passed on.

Three times I had to make a decision, to turn back from the coast, to go back over the mountains, to go back home. There were three roads that would take me there. Each time I assumed I would run into fog, into cooler weather, that I would become bored of the drive, that I would encounter slow drivers that would ruin the mood. It didn’t happen in Half Moon bay at Highway 92; it didn’t happen at Highway 84 at Pescadero, and it didn’t happen at the nearly unmarked Bonny Doon road. I drove all the way to Santa Cruz, with the weather and the road and the perfect sense of well-being still on my side, stopped in town for a late lunch at a little cafe, and then drove back up the mountain freeway home, arriving in mid-afternoon just as the sun was setting, just in time to crack open a beer and sit out on the porch listening to the bees hum.

If I want to get any work done in the future on bright warm spring days I will have to put my guard up and not listen to little voices coming from my car. If there are more days like that and more drives like the glorious California coastline my car can make an awfully convincing argument.

Pretty much everyone knows that Silicon Valley used to be called the Valley of Heart’s Delight, used to be full of orchards, and that the farmers all slowly vanished once the computers came in. There are still vestiges of the old Valley left, though, still a few old family farms left here and there in amongst the office buildings the billboards and the freeways. It hasn’t all disappeared.

I used to buy strawberries and cherries from an orchard in Saratoga. Actually, it wasn’t really an orchard, it was just an older gentleman with a few cherry trees who, as I understood it, used to have a much larger farm but sold off most of the land over the years as land values went up and farming became less profitable. He kept the acre or so around his house because he just really liked being a farmer. In May he would sell strawberries from Gilroy, and in June he sold cherries from his own trees, all from a little roadside stand. I would drive by, park along the white fence alongside his property, chat for a bit and buy a quart or two of berries for eating or for jam, or cherries for snacking. The prices were good, and the fruit was incredibly fresh and flavorful (far more than it ever got at the grocery store).

I read in the local paper late last year that my friend the old farmer had died, and his family was trying to decide what to do with the orchard. I hoped they would find a way to keep it open, but I knew that with housing prices what they were in the Valley, and especially in Saratoga, that the little cherry orchard would be sold. And sure enough, I drove by there just a little while ago, and there was a FOR SALE sign up on the white fence next to the roadside stand where I used to park my car.

I was very quiet for the next mile down the road.

Saratoga is a very rich neighborhood, a town of sweeping driveways paved in brick leading up to enormous faux-Tudor and faux-Tuscan mansions. You could fit at least three or four of those houses on a sad little worn out cherry orchard once you scraped all the trees off of it, sell those houses for a couple mil apiece, make quite a profit on your investment. And that’s what the Valley is all about, right? Return on Investment?

I was thinking of my friend and his cherry orchard when I heard recently that Mariani, the last dried fruit packer in Santa Clara County, is shutting down and moving to the Central Valley. Last year Del Monte closed its last fruit cannery here. A couple of years back Olson Cherries, who had huge orchards out in Sunnyvale and a big roadside stand on El Camino Real, sold most of its land to a developer. There are apartments there now. They’re called the Cherry Orchard Apartments. Ha ha ha.

All we’ve got left now as far as actual commercial fruit production in the Valley is a tomato packer owned by a company in New York, and a small maraschino cherry manufacturer. Both are planning to leave the Valley in the next few years. Soon all the fruit will be gone.

Does it really matter? Computers are more profitable. The economy in the area is certainly better with high tech that it would be in farming. The jump in land values is great if you own land. And you could argue that a lot of these farmers have been here for long enough that they can sell out for a lot of money, retire altogether or just buy more land in a cheaper area and keep farming. They don’t have to farm in this particular neighborhood. We don’t need farming here.

But I don’t know. In San Francisco they complain that when the dotcommers came in they drove out all the artists and the musicians and the people who make San Francisco interesting — that all that high tech money turned the city into a town of loft condos and cell phones and SUVs. In the Valley we’ve been over-teched for a long time and the change been much more gradual, much less dramatic. But the problem is the same: its good to have diversity. Its good to have industry in an area that is not all chips and networks and software. Its good to be able to talk to people who have different interests, different backgrounds, different ways of looking at the very neighborhood you live in and the streets you walk and drive every day. When an industry dies, particularly an industry that was once so important to this area, you lose all of that. I think its hard to understand how much that will be missed until its gone…and until it is far too late to get it back. But then, for the Valley of Heart’s Delight, it probably already is.

In both an attempt to A. get out of the house more often, and B. be one those cool arty bohemian types, I have been recently going down to my local coffeehouse and trying to write there.

I adore my local cafe. Its very local — not a chain — and its been around for a gazillion years so its a very serious institution in town. On weekends you cannot even get in the door, so many people are lining up and hanging out and stalking other people’s tables. Its in one of the older buildings in town, with exposed brick and wide-plank flooring and baker’s lights and antique ceiling fans. The regular clientele ranges from older guys who play chess against one wall to high school kids on recess to rockabilly hairdressers from next door to dotcommer movers and shakers gibbering away on cell phones. They have the coffee bean roaster RIGHT THERE on the floor, so from a table by the window you can watch the master roaster at work, and when the beans spill out you can practically see a wave of Columbian french roast smell as it rushes out from the roaster, explosively fills the room and washes over you. There is always a moment in my cafe when the beans spill that all conversation in the room stops, there is a collective group inhale, and then a long, quiet, “ahhhhh.”

I initially thought nothing could be so wonderful as sitting and writing in a cafe. But so far, I’m not having a lot of luck. For one thing, I had not realized how much I rely on quiet for writing. Between the general nattering of people all around and the whish whish WHACK WHACK WHACK of the espresso machine, cafes are not exactly cones of silence. I am continually distracted. I get very little done.

In particular, though, it seems recently that there is a cafe god who is fucking with me. The other day I went into the coffeehouse, got my usual double latte, and found a table in the lower half of the cafe, where it was surprisingly quiet. Other than one other couple, I was the only one there.

But not for long. I was only there a few minutes, just long enough to take off my jacket and pull out my book, when suddenly a horde of small children with insufficient adult chaperonage swept down the stairs into my little corner of the cafe, and began to madly rearrange the furniture.

I furiously attempted to concentrate on my writing as iron chairs and tables were screeched repeatedly across tile and the two presumed mommies shouted instructions to the various Jasons and Heathers and Ashleys present. Maybe they would settle down. Maybe things would be quiet. Maybe I would be able to get some work done.

It was not to be. I looked up a few moments later and my mouth fell open in horror. The children had been seated at the tables with a snack. Each of them had been given a brownie. A brownie! A huge, sticky, fudge brownie! “Are you completely out of your minds?!” I wanted to shout at the mommies who were in charge of this horde. “Don’t you have any conception what happens to a small child under the influence of that much sugar?! And there are only two of you!!”

I remained silent, but considered making a break for the door while I still had a chance. Maybe the mommies knew what they were doing. Maybe I would be proven wrong.

But you could hear a slight rumbling in the air as the brownies were consumed. I began to feel uneasy. The tension began to build. I felt like a trailer park in Kansas with the skies darkening and the rain beginning to fall. I scribbled madly, hoping I would not get caught up in the collateral damage. There was a short moment when I thought perhaps I was wrong. But then it started. The children finished their brownies, got down from their seats, and then Jason, Ashley, Heather, etc, proceeded to methodically destroy the cafe, while the mommies did little other than fret and wring their hands.

One of these explosive bundles of ADD descended on the recycling bin and began to fling cans about the room, tasting each one for its appetizing qualities before rejecting it (Mommy One: “Heather, that’s dirty. Heather, come out of there. Heather, don’t eat that. Heather, stop that.”) Two others did laps around the perimeter of the cafe, diving in amongst the tables and upsetting a chess game in progress (“Jason, stop running. Jason, don’t chase your sister. Ashley, please stop screaming like that.”) A fourth, less mobile, practiced her oratory skills at ten decibels (“LOOK MOMMY DOGGIE!! DOGGIE! LOOK! LOOK! LOOOK!!!”)

One of the mommies found it prudent to finish up the lunch, probably having sighted the irritated looks the various patrons were giving her and her friend, and bundled the can connoisseur, the road racers and the orator off to the bathroom, at least to contain them for a while. The only remaining child was a toddler, who was chewing on a chair (“Britney, don’t put that in your mouth…”) Another customer who had witnessed this carnage caught the remaining mommy’s eye and and sympathized, “they’re difficult at that age, aren’t they.” The mommy agreed. Particularly when you feed them SO MUCH SUGAR, I wanted to point out.

* * * *

Today I went to my local cafe and intentionally surrounded myself with adults. I got a table in the main room, with an older gentleman with a beard behind me, a dotcommer in front of me, and two Los Gatos Housewives beside me. I suppose I should explain the phenomenon of the Los Gatos Housewife. Los Gatos is a very rich town, and it is adjacent to Saratoga and Monte Sereno, even richer towns. These are the towns for the older money, the more tasteful money, the money made in things other than tech. If you are a 30-something dotcommer gazillionaire, you buy a house in Woodside or Palo Alto, the hipper towns in the Valley. If you are a 60-something gazillionaire and you made your money in antiques or bond trading or commercial real estate, or you inherited it all, you live in Los Gatos or Saratoga. If you like asian fusion cuisine and go to Tahoe for the weekend, you live in Palo Alto. If you prefer French continental cuisine and go to France for the weekend, you live in Saratoga. If you are still on your first wife, you live in Palo Alto.

The Los Gatos Housewives are the second or third wives. They are younger, thirties or sometimes even forties. Usually blonde. They are always immaculately dressed, always coiffed and spa’ed in lipo’ed and polished. They lunch a lot. Wander downtown in Los Gatos at lunch and you see zillions of them. Listen to their conversations, and you get a view on a very surreal world indeed. They don’t have jobs, because their husbands either don’t want them to work or they see no point (they’re rich, after all). They keep busy by constant redecorating of the house in Los Gatos or Saratoga or Monte Sereno, or constant redecorating of the summer house in Belize or Hong Kong or Nice. Sometimes they open boutiques or art galleries in Los Gatos, funded by their husbands (we have more bad art galleries per block than any other town I have ever been in, except perhaps Carmel). And they have many opinions about the right sort of people who belong in Los Gatos and Saratoga and Monte Sereno. None of these icky nouveau dotcommer gazillionaires. No one who might be, to put it delicately, of a more ethnic socioeconomic class (or *any* ethnic socioeconomic class, actually). They want more people just like them.

Given an opportunity I will always eavesdrop on Los Gatos Housewives, because they are a lot of fun in a strange did-these-people-just-get-off- the-boat-from-Mars-or-what way. So I admit that I was pleased when I arrived at my Cafe to have positioned myself not only in a group of adults, but a group that included Los Gatos Housewives. This, for a writer, was a major score. I hid behind a newspaper that had been sitting on my chair. The Los Gatos Housewives did not disappoint me for long. They were talking about handbags. I wish I had had the foresight to take notes on this conversation, because my own handbag experience is limited, and this was one intense conversation. They argued about handbag styles. They argued about handbag designers. They argued about the best shops for handbags. You would have thought they were negotiating middle east peace accords.

And then it happened. “SHIT!” shouted the older man with the beard behind me, and I choked on my latte in surprise. “Fuck! Cocksucker!” The Los Gatos Housewives had become very quiet. “FUCKfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” continued the man, muttering, his tempo rising and falling as he went on. I didn’t want to turn around and look. Instead I looked over to the Housewives, who were exchanging nervous glances. One of them attempted to continue the conversation, but the man behind me was not done. He continued to mutter a bebop of expletives and half finished phrases. For over three minutes he muttered nothing but variations on the name of the town: “Los Gatos. Looooooos Gatos. losgatos. gatosgatosogatosgatos GAAAAAAAAAAAtos. LOS! GAT! OS! LOSGATOOOOOS!” and so on. And then back to the expletives.

The Los Gatos Housewives had managed to restart their conversation, about how difficult it is to find remodeling contractors in the valley. But they were distracted and nervous. You could see the conversation they wanted to have: what is this NUT doing here? This is a NICE town. We don’t WANT people like this here. This is WRONG. Why doesn’t someone DO something. We should not have PEOPLE like this HERE this is why we pay TAXES so that we can feel SAFE in our own TOWN and not have to run away from SCARY people in coffeehouses. They were conflicted. Should they tell the man to hush? But that would be impolite. And Los Gatos Housewives are nothing if not polite.

Finally, the Los Gatos Housewives had had enough. One of them put her palms down on the table, and said brightly “well, I had better get back,” as if she had anywhere to go. The other said “Oh, yes, me too,” and they leapt up from their chairs, gathered their handbags and their jackets, and practically knocked down a younger couple in their haste to get away from the crazy nut by the window.

The crazy nut in question fell silent for a few moments. And then he began to laugh.

Throughout all of this one else at any other table was even raising an eyebrow. The dotcommer who had been talking on a cell phone and typing on a laptop at the table in front of me didn’t even glance up when my bearded friend began his routine. The chess people continued playing. The cafe workers just wandered right by, showing no concern. My friend the nut was obviously a regular, obviously did this regularly, and you either got used to it or you ran away. I kind of like a cafe that embraces its nuts. I just have to remember not to sit next to them if I want to get any work done.

Because I aspire to be Just Like Martha, and because doing embarrassing things and then writing about them but not making any money at it is what I am all about these days, today I made the homemade marshmallow peeps recipe in this month’s Martha Stewart Living.

Its an easy recipe. All it involves is cooking sugar syrup for a while, adding unflavored gelatin, whipping the whole mess until it turns into marshmallow, and then piping it out into shapes with a pastry bag. Dead easy, actually, assuming that you have a kitchenaid mixer, a candy thermometer, a pastry bag with an assortment of tips, and a high tolerance for goo.

I have all these things, and it was a rainy friday afternoon, my blood sugar was low, I figured, why not?

Early on I did decide not to attempt forming little chicks or bunnies or eggs out of the marshmallow, partially because I don’t have a #12 tip for my pastry bag (I know, I know, how DO I get by?), and mostly because my decorating skills are not quite up to par (I am not yet Martha). I figured that I could use my pastry bag without a tip and just create small egg-like shapes. Egg-like. Yeah, that was the intent.

Marshmallow, it seems, hardens up quickly, and I have a small pastry bag, so my pastry bag extrusions became rapidly less egg-like as time went on, and more, uh, oblong, shaped much less like a single mass and more, um, curled-up…..

Oh, let me be blunt. I made marshmallow poops.

But I was successful at that. After cooking up the sugar and whipping it all in the mixer, I spooned the marshmallow into my pastry bag, and piped my shapes out onto a tray. The tray had been spread with a layer of sugar beforehand. Once I was done piping I sprinkled more sugar on top. You can buy colored sugar; I used plain sugar on the bottom and the sprinked a mix of plain and colored sugar on top because the colored sugar was expensive. I used pink.

The result? OK, they look funny. But they taste pretty great, and the texture is amazing. They are totally soft to the touch, but not sticky, and they melt right away in your mouth. I will not let these guys get stale.

Misc Notes:

• Be prepared for odd questions from bewildered spouses (“why is there a tray full of pink turds in the kitchen?”)
• Marshmallow is really, really sticky, and you are really, really doomed. When its warm and freshly whipped, lying in the bottom of the mixing bowl, looks white and creamy and friendly and harmless. But then when you try to scoop it up and stuff it into the pastry bag and pipe it out onto a tray, suddenly next thing you know you will have marshmallow all over the counter, on the floor, in your hair, up to your elbows, and anything you put down on the counter will have to be peeled back up again. Drop cloths are strongly recommended. Rental of a pressure washer might be advised. Put the cat away in another room.
• Be sure to moderate your sugar high through the use of judicious carbohydrate and water consumption, to avoid a nasty crash.

Cheers!

(were you looking for the actual Martha Stewart peeps recipe when you found this page? I hope you were amused by my story. Here’s a link to the recipe as your reward for reading this page. Thanks! -Laura)

It was an enormous black steamer trunk, bound in leather, with big brass corners, leather handles on either end and a lock that could not be picked. It smelled of sawdust on the inside, sawdust and books. It was big enough to hold a body, two if they were small, big enough to hold the entire worldly possessions of a young lady or gentleman off to college.

That had been the intent of my father when he bought it in the 1950′s, and he stencilled his name, Arthur E. Lemay, in red gothic letters on the top. By the time I got it it was already beaten and worn, with scratches and small dents on the outside, but the red letters were still there. It was still a strong trunk and I like my father before me packed it with everything I owned and took it off to college.

The trunk stayed with me for the next four years. Even in the smallest of dorm rooms I found someplace to put the trunk. Even though it was kind of low and there was no place to put my feet I put my computer on top of it and used it as a desk (ergonomics are irrelevant when you are 17). I put it in the closet on its side, opened it up, stacked milk crates into it, and used it for shelves. For a while it made an excellent base for a small refrigerator. If I had a spare corner, space under the loft, some section of the dorm room I could shoehorn it into, the trunk went there. Over the four years, as I moved all around campus, as I changed majors and roommates and boyfriends, there was me, and there was my trunk, my big black steamer trunk with my father’s name on the lid.

My senior year I moved into a campus apartment that actually had basement storage. And after all this time of using the trunk as furniture, of carting the trunk around and creatively stuffing it into various spots in various rooms, I finally decided to put the trunk away for a while. And so with the help of some friends we carried the trunk down two flights of stairs and put it away into the big storage locker for my apartment.

And then I forgot about the trunk.

After I graduated, I went back home, and then I moved out to California to start my new life out on my own. It was several years before I realized I had forgotten about the trunk. I had forgotten about the trunk and I had left it at school.

Oh, my god. My father’s trunk. I had lost my father’s trunk.

There have been a number of times since then I have beaten my head against the wall for this. It was a great old trunk. I loved that trunk. And I put it in storage. And FORGOT ABOUT IT. I LOST MY FATHER’S TRUNK. HOW COULD I BE SO STUPID.

Even worse, I was dreading the day someone would ask me about it. Sooner or later someone in my family would ask me: “what ever happened to that big old black trunk of your father’s?” And then I would have to admit that I was a moron, I LOST MY FATHER’S TRUNK. I LEFT IT AT SCHOOL. I am a terrible, terrible daughter.

This last weekend I was at home, visiting my mother, and we spent some time wandering around antique shops. At one of the shops there was a big steamer trunk, similar to the one my father had.

It wasn’t as nice as my father’s trunk; it was brown, and the leather was torn in a number of places. It was missing the shelf inside. But still, it was a close approximation to the big old trunk I had left behind at school.

As I was looking at it, my mother wandered up. “That looks sort of like your father’s old trunk,” she said. Oh no, I thought. Now comes the question. Now I’ll have to admit my idiocy. I braced myself.

“I still have that trunk in my basement, you know,” she said.

I gaped. I boggled. “But…but…” I stuttered. “I thought I left that trunk at school!”

“No you didn’t, you brought it home.” My mother said. “Your sister took it to school with her a year later, and then she brought it home, too.”

I stared at my mother in disbelief. How was this possible? “Oh my god! I thought I had lost it! For twelve years I’ve been having nightmares about losing that trunk!”

“You didn’t lose it, its been in my basement the whole time,” my mother said, looking at me like I was out of my mind. “Do you want it? I can probably ship it to you.”

“Yes! Yes! Oh my God!”

I have no memory of bringing that trunk home, no memory of carrying it back upstairs from the storage room in the basement, of packing it up again for the trip back from school. Perhaps I didn’t; perhaps like those cat stories you hear on the news once in a while the trunk followed me home all by itself, wanting to remain in the family it had been branded with a generation before. I don’t know how it got here. But I am glad it did.

The trunk is a little older, a little more worn. Along the way the key has been lost and we’ve broken the lock so that we can get into it. But its still the same old black trunk, still has the same Arthur E. Lemay in red letters on the top, still has the worn leather handles at either end. I will have it shipped freight from my mother’s basement in New England to my house in California, and I have just the place to put it, not in a corner, or a closet, or a dark basement storage locker, but in a bright sunny window in the bedroom, overlooking the mountains.

The rain is pouring down nasty hard, but the new roof we just put on the barn is holding. Not a spot of wet on the concrete floor, and I walked it twice. Its a big barn. I’m really impressed.

The barn is over a hundred years old, and the roof we replaced was original, we think. All three of them: the original redwood shingles, the original tar shingles, the original asphalt shingles. Not to mention about a thousand pounds of antique moss. The old roof had holes in it big enough for large owls to wander through (and they did). It leaked like crazy. We got to know the dry parts of the barn and we moved stuff around depending on whether it was the wet season or not.

To fix it we tore the whole thing off, shoring up or replacing quite a lot of the underlying structure. Even redwood can rot after 100 years of misuse, although a lot of it was sound and we could use old redwood boards from pig pens and chicken coops elsewhere on the farm to replace it. The new roof is corrugated sheet; its not as rustic as the original but it is watertight and it should last a good number of years. And that was the goal: to take this old gray mare of a barn that had been around longer than any of us and make sure it would continue to be around, longer than any of us.

The rain on the old roof was silent; the only sound was the wind and perhaps the occasional drip of wet on a tractor implement we had not moved out of the way. The new roof, however, is a wild orchestra of noise: hard rain on a tin roof rattles, patters, crackles about like dry beans in a can. After I checked for leaks I stood in the center of the barn, the center that used to always be wet, and turned around and around with a grin on my face as the rain came down and the barn chattered happily at me. The barn has a voice now.

“Isn’t it loud in there?” Eric asked as I ran back through the storm into the house.

“No,” I said. “Yes,” I changed my mind. “But its wonderful.”