"Penititencia Creek. Alum Rock Park, San Jose, California," photographed for Ten Years in Paradise by Mary Bowden Carroll, 1903. Larger.
Each year, the dryness of California summer transforms the lush and verdant countryside into a sunburned landscape of brown. But if you know where to look, you can find a place that's a little different.
In a 1943 short story "Picnic," Janet Lewis describes just such a place, one that's perfect for a family picnic in summer.
"Hordeum murinum, Foxtails." photographed by André Karwath, 2005. Larger.
In California the creeks run full in the spring and dwindle through the summer months to a few pools or a few damp places in the sand. All the torrent-tossed rubble of the winter is left in the gullies. The secret conformations of the stream bed are exposed to the sunlight, and the children stand on the dry bottoms and look up to the high-water marks and remember or imagine how violent and fresh and lavish the stream was the winter before. The stream which the Leontovich family called theirs was better than most. Now, in early July, it still had some deep pools ... some shallows where the water ran with an audible ripple, and also some rocky islands and shoals, suitable for picnics, if you were not fussy about sitting upon rocks or upon the grassless earth. In the woods at this season there was poison oak, and in the fields there were foxtails, a diabolical kind of little dry, wheatlike sticker, so that, taking it all in all, a stream bed was by far the nicest place for a picnic.
"Picnic" was included in Lewis' 1946 collection Good-bye, Son and Other Stories.
"Dahlia coccinea, Scarlet-flowered dahlia," drawn by Sansum S. Edwards, 1903. Larger.
"Bradley almond orchard, Santa Clara Valley," photographed for Ten Years in Paradise by Mary Bowden Carroll, 1903. Larger.
The pace of Californian life—even rural life—sometimes blurs our perspectives on the pleasures of quiet, deliberate tasks. Not so for poet and novelist Janet Lewis, for whom California life was fulfilled in her work, in her family, and in the pleasure she found in her Los Altos home.
Though an accomplished poet, Lewis is best known for her fiction, and many of her stories are set in California. In her 1943 novel Against a Darkening Sky, Lewis explores how place affects human beings, in this case, the not-quite-fully-settled Santa Clara Valley of the depression era. Here, at the edge of war and a new rush of technological development, two friends share the peace of a quiet moment.
[Mary Perault] had put down the plums and was cutting dahlias as she spoke, admiring the rich autumnal colors and fluted petals, and holding them up for Mrs. Hardy's admiration. Mrs. Hardy, from the slight rise of ground, looked across the ditch and the uncultivated fields to a small house deserted now for several years and surrounded by bleached foxtail and wild oats which grew up against its walls like waves, and back to the dusty richness of her friend's trees and gardens. They continued to speak of trivial things, two women who knew each other so well that there was no need of their talk's being important, or even consecutive. They took a deep and quiet pleasure in each other's presence, and in the serenity of the day, and in the bounty of the small arid garden.
Janet Lewis continued to publish fictionbut she never abandoned verse; she was chosen to write and present a poem at the 1971 John Muir Celebration at Yosemite.
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