Journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall reports from the the second half of life -- on books, writing . . . her husband, house, aging relatives and grown-up kids.
Wind poppies.
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
A primrose.
That’s because I grew up in Michigan, where March is the most unnerving month of the year. One day it’s warmish and the world smells like spring. The next day the thermometer drops, it’s winter again and odors vanish in the cold. [Read more...]
Apparently, it snowed last night on our little hill in Oakland. There was still snow all over the place at 11 a.m. — on cars, on the lawn around a hilltop swimming pool, on Mt. Diablo to the East, and dripping and plopping off the trees.
There was even some on the roof of our house and sprinkled around our garden — a first for us. In the thirty-plus years Jon and I have lived on this hill, I’ve never seen this much snow in our neighborhood.
Behold:
There are two people in that swimming pool, and another three in the hot tub beyond.
That's Contra Costa County's Mt. Diablo -- snowy, steamy, and tucked up under the clouds to the left. You're seeing it from the top of our hill in Oakland. Photos C 2009 B.F. Newhall
The snow still hadn't melted by noon in our front yard, which is shady in winter when the days are short. Will our sun-loving, California-born plants survive?
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
I don’t like the snapdragons growing in my front yard. Their color, somewhere between scarlet and maroon, gets on my nerves. I don’t like scarlet. I like maroon even less.
The snapdragons are innocent. They are doing what they are supposed to do. They’re sending down roots, sucking up water, opening up blossoms. If I rip them out of the ground – now or just before they go to seed – am I an assassin? They may be ugly, but they are alive.
When I spotted the six-packs of baby snapdragons at the nursery, all I could see were a few creamy buds. And something pinkish. They looked good to me. But now they are taking over my garden.
Their dark, aggressive coloring shouts in my face, leaving the more modest blossoms in the yard, the lavender and the bacopa, to go unnoticed.
My mother, who turned 92 on Wednesday, has shelves and tables of potted plants growing with fervor out on her patio. One plant, philodendron, is not doing so well. It has only a few leaves, most of them dead or yellowing.
“Do I throw it out?” she asks. “It doesn’t look very good.”
I think of my snapdragons. And my cypress tree.
When Peter was little, we found out he was allergic to cypress. “Hmm,” I said to the pediatrician. “We have a cypress tree growing in our back yard a few feet from the house – and Peter’s bedroom.”
”Cut it down,” the doctor said.
Jon and I conferred. Our cypress was massive — five stories tall — and older than both of us put together. It was a magnificent tree, timeless, a 
steady presence at our house. Its branches had grown over and around our deck, so that you could go out there at any time, day or night, stand inside that tree and forget where you were in time and space.
No way were Jon and I going to get rid of that cypress tree. Peter would have to take antihistamines. Or grow out of his allergies. We’d move to another house.
Peter outgrew the allergies. The cypress tree, as stately and self-sufficient as ever, lives on.
But the awful snapdragons? The scraggly, deadish philodendron in the pot on my mother’s patio? 
They’ve got to go. Somehow.
© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall
Photos © 2009 B.F. Newhall
