Winters in Bolinas

Photo by Filip Zrnzević on Unsplash

In my memory, winter wasn’t a distinct season in Bolinas. It was more of a long blurry period between fall and summer when rain fell more often than at other times, and a grey morning was less likely to clear to a sunny afternoon.

Winter was when the grass grew tall and tangled in the garden, a mass of green that could hide anything until the rainy season ended and it could be mowed again.

I remember one year, when I was eight or nine, I lost my watch, a little analog Timex, at the beginning of winter. Several months later we mowed, and I found it under my feet beside the deck where I slept outside most nights. I picked it up, wound it using the little knob on the side, and it instantly started ticking again.

That struck me as magical: the thick grass that guarded its treasure, the watch that had survived being guarded. I think that I attributed some of the watch’s resilience to myself: I took pride in being the sort of person who would have the sort of watch that could lie in the tall grass through an entire rainy season and then start up again as though nothing had happened.

That Timex, which I think had cost $10, was my first watch. It worked well for decades after that.¹

The rainy months involved different clothes, as well. In summer my shoes were flip-flops, or black cloth shoes with thin plastic soles that one bought in San Francisco, or else Birkenstocks or tennis shoes. In winter, though, I mostly wore rain boots or — if my memory is correct — hiking boots, though that seems unlikely now. Surely we could not have worn hiking boots every day? But that is how I remember it: rain boots for jumping in puddles, and hiking boots the rest of the time, along with Lee’s blue jeans from the shelf in the hardware store in Pt. Reyes and a dark blue down jacket ordered each year from the L.L. Bean catalog.

Winters were chilly, but not cold like winters in novels. I’d spend the days reading on the floor in my bedroom, huddled in front of my space heater, in the tiny circle of warmth it created, and in the sound of the rain if it rained. The roof leaked in my room, so there would always be one or two metal pots from the kitchen strategically placed to catch the plonk, plonk, plonk of the falling raindrops. I’d move them around as needed.

Another way to get warm was to go into the house and make a fire in the fireplace in the living room, if someone else hadn’t done so already. Sometimes we’d wrap potatoes in tin foil and put them in among the coals, to bake slowly and be done just as the fire itself was dying out, when they were easy to pluck out again and eat with butter and salt.

We always had three cords of firewood outside: two of split lightweight wood, to start the fire with; and one of heavier hardwood logs that would burn for a long time once caught. The little roly poly bugs in the garden especially liked to take shelter in the hardwood logs, so one had to remember to strike each log hard against the steps a number of times before bringing it indoors, in order to shake the roly polys off and save them from a terrible outcome.

It made me happy to have all of that knowledge: that wood came in cords, unlike any other object; that hardwood burned more slowly; that bugs could be rescued if one worked hard at it.

I loved the rain itself, too. The sound of it, like the sound of the sea, made me happy.

I’d grab my rain poncho and rain boots as soon as it began and go for a long walk along the dirt roads: jumping into puddles if I felt like it, but more often bending down to inspect the water in each puddle as it changed colour, and to look at the leaves in it, and any little insects that might be visible. I discovered that if one picked a certain kind of reedy grass that grew by the roadsides one could bend it to a circle and run it through a puddle, capturing a single drop of water stretched out inside the circle the way a drop of soapy water is stretched out in the wand of a bottle of blowing bubbles. I loved that: the green of the reed, with a tiny bit of brown at the end; the water stretched out inside its margins.

The only thing about a Bolinas winter that resembled the winters of the books I read was that occasionally — perhaps once a year — the temperature would dip below freezing in the night, and the rain-filled potholes that were a constant on the dirt roads would have the thinnest, finest layer of ice on top early in the morning. This felt wonderfully romantic, and I’d gently tap the surface with the toe of my rain boot to see if I could crack it without breaking it, just to see what cracks in ice looked like.

To live in California then was to live in a world that did not match the world of English-language books. Our seasons were different, our weather was different, our plants were different from the ones taken for granted in most of what I read.

Decades later, as an adult, I heard or read Jamaica Kincaid (I think it was) talking about being assigned Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem in school in Antigua, and being enraged that the assignment did not match her geographic reality. She experienced it as the oppression of colonialism, though she later reconciled herself to both the poem and the beauty of daffodils.

I’ve read other writers in former British colonies speak about how much their notions of normality were formed by British children’s books as well: the food in Enid Blyton picnics, the understanding of the seasons, all of it completely different from the worlds they were growing up in.

Californians didn’t think of ourselves as a former colony, but I recognised the experience. Most of the children’s books I read took place in the UK or on the East coast (or sometimes in the middle) of the US, where the seasons are closer to Britain’s. They offered a consistent idea of what “normal” winter was: snow on barn tops; people iceskating on frozen rivers. We, I understood, were “away”, and places that had those seasons were the center. Back then, and perhaps still now, one spoke of being “out West” in California and going for trips “back East,” even if one had lived one’s life entirely on the West coast.

When I first moved to the East coast and encountered a snow-covered barn, it felt like living inside a novel. Even today, a snow-topped landscape, or a frozen river, feels to me intensely magical, and slightly fictional, like getting to experience the landscapes of the fairy tales of my childhood.

Christmas definitely happened in Bolinas, though in its own way. I don’t remember Xmas decorations outside of houses — I doubt that I ever saw a plastic reindeer or inflatable snowman before we moved away — but we had a tree, and opened presents in our pyjamas in front of the fireplace on Christmas morning. I imagine that every other family with kids did something similar. Downtown, the owner of the liquor store would give an annual Christmas panettone cake in gorgeous red wrapping paper to (some?) customers; I loved picking ours up.

My parents would buy two round blue tins of Danish Butter Cookies every Christmas, and one red square one filled with Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies. The amaretti cookies were individually wrapped in a kind of tissue paper; if you twisted a paper in the right way, and held one end to the top of a candle or kerosene lamp, it would catch fire and rise into the air on its own, a tiny flying lantern that would burn itself out in the air above the table.

Photo by おにぎり on Unsplash

I remember one year my parents — my father, really, this was his project in the same way that the amaretti cookies were mainly his thing — put together a little family book, with stories and poems that we had written printed onto red and green construction paper that we stitched together and sent out to family and friends, both back East and there in town. The booklets were magical — I don’t have a better word to describe them.

There would sometimes be a crafts fair — a Julmarknad, for my Swedish-speaking friends — in the community center right before Christmas. It would be filled with light and what I thought were incredibly beautiful objects: hand-turned wooden boxes, dipped candles in magnificent colours, and things knitted and sewn and baked. We sang Christmas carols at school and at home and maybe at the community center (am trying to remember if that was so or not), and every year (in my memory — perhaps it only happened some years) my mother, or perhaps my mother and others, would organise a town Messiah singalong.

For me, Christmas will always be associated with belting out Handel’s “Are we like sheep? Are we like sheep?” with great glee, in the midst of a crowd, and eventually rising to sing the Hallelujah Chorus even more loudly.

I was disappointed to discover, when I was older, that the line was actually “All we, like sheep, …,” but the happy memory remains.

Because Bolinas didn’t have traditional winters, my childhood memories of winter includes trips to mountains, no matter the season, because that was the only place I ever saw snow. My school went on annual backpacking weeks where sometimes we would encounter sudden snowfalls; and I remember above all a trip that my mother and I took with Mim (I think, but am not sure, that Mim was with us) once, to spend a couple of nights camping on Mount Shasta.

As I remember it, there was snow at the top of the mountain, so I count it among my winter memories, although it was not winter. We parked the car not far from the road, and set up a tent, and a tiny camp kitchen. Over the little gas bunsen-burner-like stove we made melted cheese sandwiches of pita that we had filled with Monterey Jack cheese and fresh slices of avocado. Chipmunks sat on logs nearby and tried to communicate with us, though I’m not sure what they said.

To my mind, that trip, camping in the trees, and eating melted Monterey Jack cheese and avocado in pita bread, toasted over a camp stove, is the essence of California, in a way that I cannot entirely explain.

²

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Many thanks to

Ann Kennedy Smith

,

Mark Bramhall

,

Nick Hornby

,

Emma Hemingford

,

Deborah Vass

,

Jacqueline Saville

,

Tina Lee Forsee

,

Anna Schott

,

Jeremy Noel-Tod

,

Victoria

,

June Girvin

,

Rona Maynard

,

X. P. Callahan

, Mil Bil and

E.J. Barnes

for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.

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1. The famous Timex slogan “it takes a licking and keeps on ticking” didn’t cross my path until years later, but it brought great pleasure when it did.

2. This is a bit of a companion piece to one from last summer, both inspired by upcoming solstices: that one, the summer solstice; this one, the winter solstice. The earlier piece, along with a discussion that might apply to this as well, can be read here: