Although a plethora of people wished me the merriest of Christmases, their wishes were in vain. We did not have a completely satisfactory Christmas because we did not have our usual complement of folks and friends.

The Justin Dooley family did not make it to the ranch this year for Christmas. What happened?

Maralyn, our youngest daughter, her husband Justin, and their boys Wyatt and Cole, were about to go to the airport and fly to the ranch from their home in the south when their plumbing blew up in some fashion and engulfed their whole house in many inches of water. As no plumber was available, they had to cancel their flight to the ranch.

Anyhow, we missed that part of our extended family but had otherwise adequate companionship and presents galore. With an otherwise bountiful life, we have it very good indeed. However, 3,100 airplane flights were canceled on Christmas day… and the telly showed long lines of would-be flyers stranded in airports all around the country… so maybe our no-shows were just a drop in the bucket .. and not all that unique .

***

Don’t spend two dollars to have your shirt dry-cleaned. Just give it to the Salvation Army. They will have it cleaned and put on a rack for sale and you can buy it for 75 cents.

***

As a sidebar, the DN is full of articles about folks not so fortunate as ourselves who have been provided food, drink, clothing and presents and being looked after by service clubs and the like. Years ago, B. Cornelius, one of our fellow columnists, was bereft of an apparent feckless father… but benefitted from an industrious mother who waited tables in the old Tremont Hotel and managed to have, for her brood, a Christmas package or two and some food on their table.

***

About this time of the year I reprint my father’s account of a Christmas back in New Jersey on the snowy Minch Farm years ago…and his industrious not-to-be-denied mother.

“1915 was a bad winter in New Jersey; Roads closed for a good part of the time with snow drifts and water pipes frozen most of the time. About two weeks before Christmas my father came down with “La Grippe” which, as usual, turned into pneumonia. A day or two later the first of us six children broke out with the measles.

Mother had been able to go to town just before father was taken sick, and had purchased our Christmas presents, that is, one apiece, also some brazil nuts and California navel oranges to fill the stockings that we hung up under the mantelpiece Christmas eve.

But until Christmas day itself, no one could get a tree for her. By then all of us were down either getting over or breaking out with the measles. The hired man who did the chores didn’t feel so good and didn’t want to get her a tree. Mother was keeping house with no outside help and with cooking and nursing us children sick her time was well taken up. However, she never gave up and if she could not have gotten a tree any other way, she would have taken a hammer and nails and built one.

As it was, she put on boots and heavy clothes and went out into the swirling snow. She walked to the house of an (African-American) family and finally, by offering him a dollar, persuaded him to get us a tree. He cut a small cedar about six feet high and dragged it back to the house. While we sat or lay around, we watched our mother saw off the base of the tree to make it square, and trimmed off the bottom limbs. She stood the tree up in a specially constructed box that after two weeks of holding up the Christmas tree, which was consigned to a loft over the wagon shed until the next Christmas. For imitation snow, she got rolls of cotton batting that was saved year after year along with the boxes of fragile Christmas ornaments.

Then, taking long strings of freshly popped and strung popcorn, she wound them around and around the tree. After carefully placing the ornaments, the last touch was the miniature candy animals that were made of yellow and red candy, each one tied to the end of a bough. Next morning, when we were allowed to get up, it was still snowing and the outdoors looked dark and dreamy. But inside, the tree in the light of the kerosene lamps looked beautiful, and the packages of games spread out at its feet, and the mantle with the full stockings completed the picture of another happy Christmas for us children.”

Dave Minch 1900-1964

***

Worth a repeat:

A guy has a talking parrot with strings on both ankles. A visitor asks, “What happens if I pull one string?” The owner says, “He will sing the Star Spangled Banner.

The visitor says, “ Really? What if I pull the other string? The owner says, “He will recite the Boy Scout Oath.” “Really? And if I pull both strings at once?”

The parrot squawks and says, “I will fall on my ass!”

The post Plumbing difficulty denies my daughter a go to to the ranch appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Although a plethora of people wished me the merriest of Christmases, their wishes were in vain. We did not have a completely satisfactory Christmas because we did not have our usual complement of folks and friends.

The Justin Dooley family did not make it to the ranch this year for Christmas. What happened?

Maralyn, our youngest daughter, her husband Justin, and their boys Wyatt and Cole, were about to go to the airport and fly to the ranch from their home in the south when their plumbing blew up in some fashion and engulfed their whole house in many inches of water. As no plumber was available, they had to cancel their flight to the ranch.

Anyhow, we missed that part of our extended family but had otherwise adequate companionship and presents galore. With an otherwise bountiful life, we have it very good indeed. However, 3,100 airplane flights were canceled on Christmas day… and the telly showed long lines of would-be flyers stranded in airports all around the country… so maybe our no-shows were just a drop in the bucket .. and not all that unique .

***

Don’t spend two dollars to have your shirt dry-cleaned. Just give it to the Salvation Army. They will have it cleaned and put on a rack for sale and you can buy it for 75 cents.

***

As a sidebar, the DN is full of articles about folks not so fortunate as ourselves who have been provided food, drink, clothing and presents and being looked after by service clubs and the like. Years ago, B. Cornelius, one of our fellow columnists, was bereft of an apparent feckless father… but benefitted from an industrious mother who waited tables in the old Tremont Hotel and managed to have, for her brood, a Christmas package or two and some food on their table.

***

About this time of the year I reprint my father’s account of a Christmas back in New Jersey on the snowy Minch Farm years ago…and his industrious not-to-be-denied mother.

“1915 was a bad winter in New Jersey; Roads closed for a good part of the time with snow drifts and water pipes frozen most of the time. About two weeks before Christmas my father came down with “La Grippe” which, as usual, turned into pneumonia. A day or two later the first of us six children broke out with the measles.

Mother had been able to go to town just before father was taken sick, and had purchased our Christmas presents, that is, one apiece, also some brazil nuts and California navel oranges to fill the stockings that we hung up under the mantelpiece Christmas eve.

But until Christmas day itself, no one could get a tree for her. By then all of us were down either getting over or breaking out with the measles. The hired man who did the chores didn’t feel so good and didn’t want to get her a tree. Mother was keeping house with no outside help and with cooking and nursing us children sick her time was well taken up. However, she never gave up and if she could not have gotten a tree any other way, she would have taken a hammer and nails and built one.

As it was, she put on boots and heavy clothes and went out into the swirling snow. She walked to the house of an (African-American) family and finally, by offering him a dollar, persuaded him to get us a tree. He cut a small cedar about six feet high and dragged it back to the house. While we sat or lay around, we watched our mother saw off the base of the tree to make it square, and trimmed off the bottom limbs. She stood the tree up in a specially constructed box that after two weeks of holding up the Christmas tree, which was consigned to a loft over the wagon shed until the next Christmas. For imitation snow, she got rolls of cotton batting that was saved year after year along with the boxes of fragile Christmas ornaments.

Then, taking long strings of freshly popped and strung popcorn, she wound them around and around the tree. After carefully placing the ornaments, the last touch was the miniature candy animals that were made of yellow and red candy, each one tied to the end of a bough. Next morning, when we were allowed to get up, it was still snowing and the outdoors looked dark and dreamy. But inside, the tree in the light of the kerosene lamps looked beautiful, and the packages of games spread out at its feet, and the mantle with the full stockings completed the picture of another happy Christmas for us children.”

Dave Minch 1900-1964

***

Worth a repeat:

A guy has a talking parrot with strings on both ankles. A visitor asks, “What happens if I pull one string?” The owner says, “He will sing the Star Spangled Banner.

The visitor says, “ Really? What if I pull the other string? The owner says, “He will recite the Boy Scout Oath.” “Really? And if I pull both strings at once?”

The parrot squawks and says, “I will fall on my ass!”

The post Plumbing subject denies my daughter a go to to the ranch appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Just before the Hood Mountain Regional Park parking lot, a narrow road barely big enough for a car climbs into the forest. Paved in parts, the road twists and rises until it reaches a mountain meadow that has served as a family’s gathering place for five generations.

Offering sweeping views of Sonoma County, the 289-acre property, called El Recreo, burned in both the 2017 and 2020 wildfires.

But it has recovered slowly, and all the while shaped the lives of its caretakers in the Perrin, Bucklin, Tilt and English families. Now, in a deal with the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, El Recreo is set to remain preserved as conservation land.

The district is in the homestretch of purchasing a $898,000 conservation easement for the property – a complicated process that has taken about nine years, needing buy-in from all of the property’s 13 owners. The easement will extinguish future development rights on the land, meaning it would be permanently protected even if sold.

“It just seemed like the natural thing to do,” said Arden Bucklin-Sporer, whose family owns the property.

It borders Hood Mountain on the north side, overlooking Oakmont. The property will not be opened to the public and will remain available for the family’s private use.

But the benefits of preserving land like El Recreo as a conservation area extend beyond public recreation, said Lauren Alpert, a community relations assistant for the open space district.

“When you’re protecting areas like this you’re protecting watershed, clean air,” Alpert said. Wildlife habitat – the property takes in headwaters for both the Santa Rosa and Sonoma creek drainages – and scenic viewsheds are other conservation benefits.

Alpert added that El Recreo will also serve as an important wildland buffer for its neighboring developed communities including Oakmont and Kenwood.

This is not the family’s first foray into conservation. Bucklin-Sporer’s mother and stepfather were Anne and Otto Teller, local land stewardship visionaries who helped found the Sonoma Land Trust.

It was Bucklin-Sporer’s grandmother, Adelaid Perrin, who began that family legacy, when she purchased El Recreo for around $48,000 in the 1950s.

Born in Guatemala, Perrin spent her early childhood on a coffee farm until the family moved back to California following her father’s death from malaria, Bucklin-Sporer said.

An “ardent admirer” of nature, independent and with “energy off the wall,” Perrin turned her attention to finding a family retreat once her three daughters were grown. It was El Recreo’s wild meadow nestled near the top of the mountain that sealed the deal, Bucklin-Sporer said.

Over the years the family left much of the land untouched, but built two homes and a swimming pool near the meadow. It was there that Anne Teller would bring her four children from their home in San Francisco during the weekends, and for weeks during the summer. She used it to teach them self-sufficiency, economy and an appreciation for the natural world.

“I think all of us are the way we are because of this place,” Bucklin-Sporer said.

Growing up, Bucklin-Sporer and her siblings would ride horses, care for injured birds they found including owls and a vulture, and acquired skills including identifying animal tracks.

Many have since pursued careers connected to land stewardship and ecology, including farming, restoration and nonprofit work, Bucklin Sporer said.

Supervisor Susan Gorin, who represents the area encompassing El Recreo, praised the family’s “extraordinary legacy they have, and continue to leave.”

“You need to take responsibility and manage the land,” Gorin said. “Especially in threat of fire.”

The family is both city and country, Bucklin-Sporer joked as she walked a grassy path to a knoll on a recent sunny morning.

Strolling along in Birkenstocks, undaunted by the prickly underbrush and ever-present threat of rattlesnakes, Bucklin-Sporer chewed on a blade of grass and led the way to a knoll overlooking Hood Mountain. Her rescue dog Xochi followed behind.

The destination held special meaning. It is where Bucklin-Sporer’s brother got married, and where their grandmother, mother and aunts’ ashes now rest.

“They burned twice so that’s good,” Bucklin-Sporer said, sharing some of her dry humor as she referenced the 2017 and 2020 wildfires

The wildfires ripped through El Recreo, leaving behind scorched trees and taking the family’s two homes.

The foundation and chimney of the house that Bucklin-Sporer’s parents built stood still. A partial brick wall also remains, holding a rusted sign bearing the home’s 8000 address.

Bucklin-Sporer said she visits the site frequently to check on its status.

The loss was devastating.

Though the family’s many generations are now far flung, with members in San Francisco and beyond, El Recreo remains their heart, Bucklin-Sporer said.

The property now serves as their camp. Two tents and an Airstream trailer sit around a pool that survived the fires at the far end of the meadow. An outdoor wooden stand spruced up with string lights and complete with a sink, grill and griddle make up a kitchen of sorts.

The choice to keep the property “wild” is a reflection of Perrin’s love for all things nature, and Anne Teller’s commitment to low-impact living, Bucklin-Sporer said.

“That was my mother’s perspective,” she noted. “You want to keep it simple, you don’t want a lot of water use, you want to keep it thrifty.”

Following the wildfires, the family has watched the land grow back slowly and in some surprising ways.

Bucklin-Sporer said they have seen new types of woodpeckers on the property, as well as more quail.

Her youngest son, August Sporer, 30, observed that more wildflowers are visible in the places where trees burned.

The conservation deal allows the owners to build two homes on the property, to replace the ones that burned. Bucklin-Sporer and her siblings and cousins ​​have left that decision to the next generation.

“I’m curious and keen to know what they want to do with it,” Bucklin-Sporer said.

The rest of the property will remain as is, and much like it was decades ago.

August Sporer praised the decision.

“This was a fantastic way to make sure this stays in the family,” Sporer said.

You can reach Staff Writer Emma Murphy at 707-521-5228 or emma.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MurphReports.

The post Conservation deal reached for Sonoma County ranch adjoining Hood Mountain park appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The historic Pie Ranch farmhouse in Pescadero was destroyed by the CZU Lightning Complex, according to a Facebook post from the ranch’s co-founder.

Nancy Vail, the executive director and co-founder of the nonprofit organic education farm, posted a video on Facebook of the farmhouse chimney sticking out of a pile of rubble shrouded in red and orange flames.

“I thought we were clear, but a glow fell on the historic Pie Ranch farmhouse from 1863 and it’s gone,” Vail wrote. “May this be the beginning of the transformation, may we decide to bring back indigenous knowledge, to heal the damage caused since colonization, to bring justice to the land and people, to build resilient houses for all people, to practice everything in a climate-friendly way, people to feed, to love More. “

Vail underlined the Facebook post with a red heart emoji, followed by the hashtags “phoenixrising” and “pieranch”. She could not be reached on Friday evening to comment.

The destroyed building marks just one of dozen of buildings destroyed by the CZU Lightning Complex, which burned 57,000 acres in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties. According to Cal Fire, it was 2% included as of Friday night. The complex had destroyed 97 buildings and threatened a further 24,323 buildings as of Friday evening.

In June, Mona Urbina, Pie Ranch’s culinary program manager, told The Chronicle that the farm had weathered the coronavirus pandemic. The farm is known for its large organic farms on Highway 1 and for its youth education program.

Around 77,000 people were evacuated in response to the CZU lightning complex, Cal Fire said.

Lauren Hernández is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByLHernandez

The post Historic Pescadero Pie Ranch farmhouse, in-built 1863, incinerated in CZU Complicated fires appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.