Orchards Brimming With Ripeness

There has been a lot going on lately in Santa Cruz. I've been busy here with my new band Orchards, playing shows, recording, writing new songs, and excited about it. Our songs feel fresh and ripe, and we love playing them.
Harmony is quickly growing and talking more each day, it's been really fun to hear all the additional vocabulary. I look forward to taking her sledding at Lake Tahoe in late December for the first time!! It's like reliving all these experiences over again from my own childhood when I get to see her reactions to new things daily. She's never woken up to run in new snow or built a snowman. She keeps talking about snowmen from books she reads. She saw Charlie Brown's Christmas tonight and said "I want to play in snow." I said soon. I remember this really good Zooey Deschanel movie called "Winter Passing" had a scene in which I thought "that snow on barren trees, with that grey sky, I know how that feels, I lived that for 20 years, but some people don't know that feeling, that 6 month winter deadness."
Sometimes, when I briefly glance out the window of my California home, I think I see snow, but then remember that it's my imagination or wishful thinking and it's really just a white reflection on a car.  
I miss the childhood feeling of that fresh layer of shimmering dust on the top of everything when I awaken in the morning.
I love the snow, I hate the cold.
It gets cold here in Santa Cruz often, and when I say cold I mean under 50 degrees.
Yes this ex-north-easterner has gotten soft when it comes to temperature, just because I lived in Florida for 2 years before California. But the truth is it's rather mild here year round and I was just spoiled by being able to swim all year in Florida.
I haven't swum in the ocean of Santa Cruz since we moved here 1.5 years ago. The summer before I moved out of Boston, I swam in the ocean once a week, in Maine, New Hampshire, north shore MA. I love ocean swimming. I need a wetsuit to swim here which defeats the whole purpose of the healing salt water running over my body and feeling the rush of the waves and gritty sand on my skin.
I have terrible circulation and fear I may freeze into an icicle if I live in the northeast ever again. But I do miss Boston, those cobblestone streets, familiar everything, wonderful Italian food, the different air in my home state, the distinct change of seasons.
Oh the seasons!!! The other day Hubs said "you know that feeling when that long winter changes to spring and the smell of taking a walk through town, I just don't get that here." I knew exactly what he meant. It's when the cherry blossoms start blooming all over the city and you take a walk through public gardens over that bridge by the swans just to smell their scent, picking up fallen petals to rub on your skin, and sticking branches of the pinkness in your hair. Then the petals fall looking like pink snow, but it's warm out. I love snow.