TRAVEL: Sonoma Springtime

Almond Orchard

The spring in Berkeley and Sonoma is warm and sunny this year.  It's the week of flowering trees glorious and profligate, their innocence spending endless vulnerable largesse.  The white flowers  are most difficult to turn away from, to drive on to forever lesser glories.

The old mission church in Sonoma Square - the mission furthest north of the chain. The square  is  unpolished by visible material concerns, though they are there - the gourmet movement in the United States seems to have one of its hearts here in Napa/Sonoma and Berkeley. Cheese and wine tasting, charcuterie, afternoon pastry and coffee, all there.  And then there's the beauty of the vineyards all about. 

Mustard, brought to California by Junipero Serra, now grows everywhere in the California springtime, the most beautiful  invasive species - he thought it symbolized the spread of the word of God.  Ironically, to be sure, the missionaries' Christianity monstrously transformed the Americas.

But the vineyards are the new latticework crown of thorns of California hillsides. Then the mustard  springs up between the bare vines, begotten by much desired rains.  The scaffolding, bare vines, and golden billows satisfy the urgent need to see structure softened, as snow rounds any form that stands up to its inevitable sculpting.

In Sonoma square we visited a photographer's sales studio - Lisa Kristine.  She is a humanist National Geographic hybrid, roaming the world making images of the exotic, the remote, the forgotten.  Above are the fishermens' boats of Essaouira, Morocco, and the Taureg nomads of the interior Sahara desert.