Land of Seven Seasons In the Sun
I'm now living in one of the regions of the world that is more difficult to describe. Perhaps because we took out most of the natural trees over a century ago, families are losing their farms in these parts. You can walk out one of our country roads and see abandoned farm after abandoned acreage, most still displaying a former year's faded yellow crop.
Yes, northeastern New Mexico is the southwest. But actually, we're also a lot like Oklahoma, without the Broadway hype. We are plain, much older even than we look, but our winds don't come sweeping off that romantic plain, although they are a predominant fact of our life. In fact, though they are regularly stronger than the ones in Oklahoma, here the winds only manage to stir up the dust and then drop it somewhere else. I wonder sometimes about the effect on the local climate of losing all of those trees in our former juniper & pinon pine forests. Certainly we would have less wind with which to contend.
More importantly, we're not "raisins in the sun." Yeah, we've got grapes, but they're Flash or Flame, not Thompson seedless. I suspect Flash - or even Flame - is a better comic book than a grape, but I suppose it all depends upon marketing. Flame is tough enough to make it through the winter when that mean season reminds other buds that it was only fooling with that Indian spring. Flame, like other grapes, doesn't last long on super and non-super market shelves. And raisins, whether they are in the sun or not, do.
So, we grow a tasty, longer lasting apple. But it ain't overly pretty like those orchards in Washington produce. Ever notice nobody talks about a pretty raisin? Maybe we should market our apples in boxes. I figure if we get a woman with a nice figure, perhaps a native, to hold a tray of our apples on the cover of a box, we might be able to sell our "Thompson seedless apples."
Even if we aren't four hours between San Franciso and Los Angeles; even if it's more than ninety minutes to the Giant Sequoias or to the coast.
Perhaps I'm dreaming. But we've got seven seasons instead of Fresno's three. Perhaps their Indian spring summers lead more often into the actual kind. Perhaps their Indian falls come more often from their summers and lead more often to their springs.
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