Friday, April 8, 2011

Vignette 8 April 2011

A mile up Minturn Road from the freeway that runs the length of the San Joaquin Valley we come to the Buchanan Hollow Nut Company. We pull into a small yard with a warehouse on one side, an organic certification sign over its closed door. There is a store on the other, and row upon row of nut trees out the back.

Inside, a small round lady is bagging pisotacios into 1 lb bags, and bowls of free samples are set out for us: ordinary pistacios, garlic pistacios, hot chili pistacious, choclate covered almods, apricot bits, cashews and so on. A rakish fellow dressed in a hat that never comes off encourages us to interrupt him if we needed anything, and says we are welcome to wander the orchards if we wish.

Outside, the pistachio trees are just beginning to leaf out, barely a leaf showing, each tree only about 8 feet high. Jumping across an irrigatrion ditch I find the almonds are the trees fully in leaf, with small fuzzy pouches growing on them. Kate loads her arms with bags of cahsews and almonds and pistachios and finds that pistachios are only about $6 a pound.

The boys and I use the rest room, where two enormous stuffed heads of wild boar are mounted with weirdly taxidermic expressions on their faces. In the office, the man is excited to find we are from Canada: Canadian mining stocks are going to enable him to retire, he says.

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