Seasons at Thimbleberry Cabin

Bloglandia Ball!

Here in Sonoma County we've been preparing for a fabulous internet ball at the enchanting Cyberspace Palace...

Two of our blogalicious friends and neighbors Lea (www.lealabyrinth.typepad.com) and Ulla (www.ullam.typepad.com) helped the girls and I get ready.  We made dresses outdoors on Lea's porch one lazy September Saturday afternoon, and tonight we raced to get ourselves ready in time.  Trixie and Gigi each made themselves several choices.  I've kept to just one look, in basic but oh-so-satisfying black. Now if we only had a little paper pumpkin carriage and some virtual mice...

Christmas wishes...

Winter solstice has come and gone... time to send out a heartfelt holiday greeting to all of our friends and guests.  Over the years we've wised up enough to print up New Year's greetings rather than Christmas cards.  If you've stayed at Thimbleberry this past year, look for our first "annual report" in your snail mail, along with handy little calendars from Snapfish.  Personally, I like Italian Christmas best of all on January 6... That's the morning Italian children look for gifts brought by La Befana... Some say her origins stem from when the local witch realized her mistake in not accompanying the wise men to the manger.  Imagine -- a whole celebration predicated on reflection, regret and the grace of second chances!  What's not to love about that?

Yes, snowflakes have been sighted on our front porch!.. Sshhh... don't tell anyone we found them on a long chain at Target... If you look at them sideways with your eyes scrunched together they really do look real, in an Olive, the Other Reindeer sort of way.  (And, yes, in the future the girls and I might want to limit how many times we let Paul watch that Elf DVD...)

Until next year... gingerbread wishes and a dollhouse full of dreams from our family to yours.

The Scolari's

ShinyBrite Christmas...

When I last posted about our Mendocino National Forest tree cutting adventure I was too caught up in our 'Silver Tip' Christmas tree's physical idionsyncracies to recognize its archetypal beauty...

Sort of reminds me of Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face: the quirky bookstore bohemian transformed into international cover girl.  Our tree is looking very Oh Tannenbaumesque all of a sudden, glimpsed here in our bay window through the Victorian-trim pocket doorway...

On our tree the old and new mingle comfortably.  I have my grandmother's complete collection of dimestore ShinyBrites from the year she married & set up her own first Christmas tree in 1938, and every year since our marriage in 1989 we've added a few new ones.

The Unicorn in Ashland, OR is our favorite source for wonderful silvered glass designs we never seem to see anywhere else.  This year's ornament is a gorgeously detailed hammered copper craftsman-style lantern with bas-relief pinecones.  The tinsel is true, vintage tin... I found a cache at a local thrift store still in the original boxes with Rosenberg's Department Store price tags! 

The ShinyBrites are hard to photograph... I always seem to catch them out of focus.  Doesn't it look as if these were shot out in the rain?  My ShinyBrites are slowly dying; their pigments fading, glitter sloughing away like the dust from butterfly wings.  Every year at least one implodes in my careful hands leaving only a small pile of brilliant, jagged confetti... I tell myself this will be their last Christmas in the window, but by the next year I concede "just one more..."  I have already lost so much -- the key people and places of my childhood are irretrievably gone.  Can I really stand to lose these too?

I've decided not to assume an art conservator's role with my ShinyBrites.  I'd rather treat them like the people and places they evoke... beloved and celebrated each in their moment, mourned and released each in their passing.  Slowly, inexorably old favorites give way to new.  The ornament collection my girls will receive in their adulthood may differ in content from what I have today, but hopefully the neural pathways illuminated into our family's past will beckon just as brightly as with the torches cast by these delicate, glittering ShinyBrites...

Christmas tree hunting in the Mendocino National Forest

Visiting our cabin in the Cascades has really changed the way we think about Christmas trees. Back in the day when we were relative newlyweds living in a tiny San Francisco flat, making the trip north to Sonoma county to cut a tree at one of Sebastopol's charming tree farms was a really big deal.  Fast forward a dozen years or so to Thimbleberry, where virtually all of the trees in the surrounding Fremont & Winema National Forest look like they're auditioning for the role of "White House Christmas Tree" and suddenly we're a couple of jaded tree snobs... 

All the other 364 days of the year we're tree huggers.  Really.  But domestic lots just don't do it for us any more, I'm sorry to say.  Our family's sordid holiday pleasure?  We like to pull a permit and bag a wild tree.  This year early snow & cabin chores precluded an Oregon tree at Thanksgiving, so last weekend we headed off to the remote reaches of the Mendocino National Forest in search of the elusive, high elevation Abies magnifica, or "Silver Tip" red fir.  And what a day it was...

Early a.m. found us laying in carbohydrate reserves at Cafe Serafornia in downtown Calistoga.  Love their walnut studded Viennese coffee cake!  Then it was a pleasant drive over Mt. St. Helena and around the east shore of Clear Lake until we reached the Forest Service office on Middle Elk Road in Upper Lake.  From there we departed for points previously unknown to us, past Lake Pillsbury and up, up, up the side of Hull Mountain (elevation 6873'), deep in the heart of the national forest.  With the mysterious disappearance of the San Francisco Kim family in Southern Oregon very much on our minds, we made sure we had all the back country essentials packed in our vehicle, but once we got out there we found ourselves anything but alone.  Hull Mountain is a popular recreation destination, so little mud-spattered OHV Mad Max carts darted to and fro, para-gliders hung above the ridge line, deer hunters jumped from truck cabs brandishing rifles, kids with monster-tire pickups played at snow-boarding the scrubby patches accumulated by the side of the road, and several other urban tree trippers like ourselves sailed by in foliage topped SUVs.  I'm sure an illicit pot farmer or two must have completed the parade of proclivities on display, but with nothing to give them away to the untrained eye, who knows?  Just another weirdly democratic day in public lands paradise...

Cooked a picnic of hotdogs and baked beans on our campstove and almost turned back without a tree, but Paul was determined to find his "Silver Tip."  On the very last leg of the trip, just below the Hull Mountain overlook, we saw some two-wheel drive half-tons fishtailing for control in snow slurry and decided we had gone far enough.  Found a little stand of young red firs and made our selection.  This year's Christmas tree is long and lean, kinda like El Greco might render a Christmas tree conflated with one of his St. Sebastians or Christs.  I think it tells a tale of just how tough life can be on the hardscrabble margins of high elevation California.  Did I mention I love it?  Butchering a wild tree is a brutal thing; a thing not to be undertaken lightly... Standing next to our tree this morning in the half light of dawn I remind myself that many trees will die in the forest this year.  I hope this tree's month-long seasonal wake in our parlor mitigates its loss.  A wildly dark pagan streak in me delights in this tree's presence and admires its sacrifice.

 

Making the first cuts.  Who knew Paul could look so sexy with a pine needle Borat moustache??

BTC (Before Thimbleberry Cabin), we would have gone crazy at the sight of this much snow...

Full moon rising in late afternoon over Snow Mountain.

                  

      

Our porch gets its "cabin" on...

One of the things I've noticed since we began making regular trips north and south between Klamath and Sonoma counties is how ideas about "home" grow, drift, and take shape between these two very different sites... Thimbleberry may be physically remote from our everyday life, but we feel its influence here in countless little ways.

This week I was inspired to create a cabin folly on my own Santa Rosa front porch. We love the Arts & Crafts era feel and easy durability of this resin wicker from KMart, but the garishly striped cushions that came with it left a lot to be desired... Having just paid the proverbial arm-and-a-leg for some Sunbrella yardage for another project, I knew Santa would not be stuffing any custom slipcovers in my stocking this Christmas!  Trolling through the aisles of Big Lots I stumbled over a wonderful set of Adirondack print flannel sheets which I made into simple, envelope style slipcovers without even sewing; just cut them out and ironed them up with Stitch-Witchery. 

Now we can sit and daydream about points north on a porch that would look at home in the Cascades or even the Catskills... Puts me in a mind to mount a pair of snowshoes on the wall when I get the chance.

Olives, olives, and more olives

We're gradually getting used to the gypsy-like rythym of dividing our time between Sonoma and Klamath counties.  Check in here to see how these two lives intersect and often enliven one another...

Arrived home in Sonoma county dog-tired from Thanksgiving at the cabin and were greeted by the happy spectacle of jars & jars of brined olives lined up in rows in our pantry.  Just over ten quarts this year, from our four trees.  And we're not talking pampered orchard divas, no...these are real urban tree soldiers growing in the midst of garden hodge-podge on a 5,000-square-foot busy corner lot near downtown Santa Rosa.  Amazing!  I do love home-brined olives...

Wouldn't you reckon with this many olives about there's just gotta be a martini in here somewhere??