I FOLLOW THE SUN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20620, 19 July 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

I FOLLOW THE SUN.

A CALIFORNIAN SUMMER.

B7 ELSIE K. BrORTON

There on the wet pavement I stood forlornly, watching the rain swishing down on the concrete of Broadway, watching the tail-lights of my Great. South Road car swinging round the corner. Ten minutes to wait there in the rain and the cold—hungry, tired, with a searching southerly finding out all the weak spots in the seams of my coat. I gazed into the window of an undertaker's shop at some artificial floral emblems and pondered darkly on the matter of last obsequies, and my own personal taste in wreaths. People often caught fearful chills, I was sure, standing about on cold, wet nights, looking into shop windows, waiting for trams. . . A small rat brushed my leg, and, seeing it was a Mack one, my spirits took an upward jump, and I moved down to tho bright lights of the window of the fruit shop. Much more cheerful! Great golden pyra mids of oranges, shining apples, tree tomatoes, bionze pears, pineapples strung up by their top-knots, and there in the window, right in front, a chip basket filled with luscious crimson plums. It was the label that pulled me clear out of the bog of cold and gloom into which I. being very tired and hungry, had so sadly fallen. It said, " Santa Rosa Plums " And then and there my missed tram and waiting dinner and cold feet and floral emblems were forgotten, for a whole host of lovely pictures unfolded before my eyes as I began to follow the. sun in its great- inarch northward, far away from New Zealand's winter skies, out across the ocean, through the tropics, to wellremembered scenes of summer beauty in other lands. In Tropic Seas. First of all, the Islands of the Pacific, the blue of tropic seas, and the curl of surf on the coral reef outside Levuka and Suva. Groves of coconut palms waving beside the seashore, golden oranges, purple and yellow guavas, bananas ripening in great clusters, and all along the pretty littrle road running round the bay bushes of flowering wild lantana in the most gorgeous shades of red, orange, yellow and bronze.

Then, northward again from the Tropic [sles, across the equator, into days of 'Havering heat and dark, oily seas, and so to Honolulu, smiling girls dancing on the deck with hibiscus (lowers in their hair, and ropes of frangipanni and carnations to throw about the shoulders of passengers And, from the top of the Punchbowl, a v-onderful panorama of pineapple plantations, stretching for miles across the green lowlands, out to sea, and, like the bend of a silver scimitar, Waikiki Beach, with the great, crested breakers rolling in beneath Diamond Head. . . Ah! me, the warm, colourful beauty of it, after all the cold, cold winters of the veors between!

And then at last Golden California, where all the Sunkist oranges and Mount Hamilton apricots and Santa Rosa plums come from! The land whern you shut up your umbrella in April, and never open it again until October! The land where spring comes in one glorious festival of bloom, miles and miles of orchards in blossom, pink and white of cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, flowers by the wayside, flowers in forest and field. I. followed spring into the beautiful Santa Rosa and Santa Clara valleys, ns I saw them that first wonderful year in California; followed her over the fields and hills, and into the mountains, nil shrouded in a blue hazo that was the bloom of the wild lilac

In Santa Cruz I stood beneath a canopy of pink and gold mi gloiv, such as my eyes had never seen before, nor, I suppose, shall ever behold again, ;i rose busli crowned with over a thousand blooms, a Beauty of Glazenwood that had climbed twenty feet up into the arms of the- tree,, with great clusters and sprays of bloom tossing against the blue spring sky. A Rain of Butterflies. On a vi-iidy, boisterous day. early in spring, .so early that the harebells had hardly snutuWl their first tiny chime, we walked down the cliff road from Santa Cruz to Vue de I.'Rati, with the surge of the ocean and the toll of the hell on the reef in our ears, and presently we came to a 'thick, deep grove. We passed into it, and into a rain of butterflies, pale, fluttering thirds, by the miiiion, storm-driven over the bay from Monterey, so we were told. They lay dead and dying in piles on the ground; they fluttered and whirled in the air like ghostly snowflakes, poor, broken things, born to dance from flower to flower, doomed to untimely death there beneath the dark, cold pines. Next time I passed that way the sea was blue, the fields beside the road were a blaze of gold and blue, and a host of spring flowers marched beside me. Here was the bold Indian Warrior, flaunting his flaming scarlet torch, the yellow monkey-musk, little wayside pinks, and frail mauve violas. The Golden Poppy, California's Slate flower, had taken charge of all the fields, so that they were seas of gold, set with islands of lupin blue.

It was on n spring day (hat we passed through orchard lands abloom into the Santa Clara Valley, to the great cherry groves of Snn .Tose and Los Gatos, from which ronies the fruit that later would lie sold in the shops at ten cents (fivepence) a pound—great, luscious Black heart and Queen Anno cherries that come across tho ocean and cost us hulf-a-crown a pound. Tint it is in the mountains, among the great redwood forests, that you come to love spring and summer most. In April the forest is carpeted with white and yellow violets, pain mauve violas, dainty, pearl-pink harebells, and, even more beautiful, the mission bell, a plum-col-oured bloom flecked with green. In the thicket, the flowering currant fills the air with pungent odour, (he tall Solomon's Seal raises its golden spire, pink, white and red trilliums nestle beneath the ferns, and cream and blue flag-lilies bloom sweetly be.sicle the creek. Out in a clearing beneath the mighty redwoods are the huckleberries, massed in dark, shining green, covered in spring with tiny. pink, hell-shaped flowers. When Summer Comes. The sun climbs higher, the sweet spring (lowers wither, and now summer, that wonderful Califurnian summer, brings fresh beauty to the forest. Tiger lilies and golden-rod, the flaring splendour of ihe wickedly-lnoautiful poison oak and poison ivy take the place of spring-time beauty, and soon the huckleberry bushes arc laden with bloomy purple fruit. Oh, the flavour of a handful of huckleberries, sun-waj'tned, heavy with purple bloom, stripped straight from the stalk, with the shadows of tho great. redwoods lying across the lit tin clearing, across the log cabins, and the creek singing down into the green gloom of the forest! . . . The flash of a blue-jay's wing for the long slant of sunbeams piercing down through the red woods, the tap-tap of a woodpecker—these are somo of the things that belong to a Californiaii summer in the mountains.

The loud clana; of a train gong rent ;lie fabric of my dream I turned sharply from the Santa Rosa plums and the Run kist oranges, just in time to see a South Road car hound out from the safety zone, go swaying out into the rain. . . Ah, me! Vot another ten minutes, and all my own fault! But the wind did not seem nearly so cold, nor my feet so weary, as I turned again to the lighted window.