While sitting back this
morning, enjoying a magazine and a cup of joe, wondering what to put into this
space, I encountered a story about my boyhood hometown.
Now you might wonder why I
would think a story about my boyhood hometown would interest you (and maybe it
won’t), but give me few lines to make my case.
A couple of years ago,
while beginning a memoir, I went on Google Earth to find the place of my youth.
I hardly recognized the place; it is quite a bit bigger than when I left there
many years ago. At that time the population of Los Molinos, California was
around 500; now it’s upwards of 3,000. Quite a difference. As there is not much
by way of job opportunities in the village, I thought it might be a bedroom
community for Red Bluff, a town about 16 miles north. Then I noticed one of
those popup websites that said Red Bluff was one of the 10 most redneck towns
in California‒just
like Hornell, Bath and Penn Yan are in New York. After scanning around with the
online satellite, I began wondering why Los Molinos wasn’t designated a redneck
town. Must not have had a Walmart, which really is one of the criteria.
Anyway, I scanned south in
order to find the old homestead. It would have been mostly unrecognizable
except for the two streams running through it that flow in a recognizable
pattern. The old farmhouse was gone, burned down according to one source then
replaced with an equipment shed. The biggest difference was a half mile north
at the site of the farm buildings. Nothing there was the same; similar but
different, causing a twinge of nostalgia to pass through me, a longing for what
had been.
The item in the magazine
that seized my eye spoke of Los Molinos, now a mecca for nut growers, as the
site for a major theft of walnuts.
Los Molinos is situated on
the northern edge of California’s Central Valley, the agricultural center of
the state and one of the largest of food production areas in the United States.
The northern area, in which the old homestead rests, has been turned over to
the production of walnuts. Not entirely, of course, but mostly. Most of the
land east of US99E was in walnuts.
Tehama County, where the
village sits, has always been an agricultural community; every kind of edible
product was grown there. We had a dairy farm, next door to the north crops‒oats, barley, alfalfa‒ were grown, next it was pigs; further north were
prune orchards. The farm to the south grew peaches and grapes and pigs (An
adventure of mine on each of these places can be read in the memoir, which will
be out in the few months). A friend’s dad had honey bees. And on and on. Now it
was mostly nuts.
The way things are going
in California, I would have thought all of the nuts would be found in
Sacramento (the capital) or Beverly Hills (where the movie stars live.) This
became a paramount idea when it was announced that California was seceding from
the union. You had to know there were nuts behind that idea. Then they doubled
down by making every town a sanctuary for illegal aliens, even though the state
would lose most of its federal funding for doing so. I’m sure they were incensed
at the audacity of Republican President Trump’s making such a suggestion, but
the sages of Sacramento simply said they would raise taxes to cover the loss.
Now most of us know that California is one of the highest taxed states in the
union already. Right? But the nuts, and there are lots and lots of nuts in
California, said “Ah, go ahead and tax us some more. We’d like it!”
Whadya expect? These are
mostly Liberals, you know. Most of the state’s Conservatives have already left
the Nut State for less nutty places to live. The move became imperative when it
was divulged that the loss of federal money far exceeded the state’s GDP. But
that was only Reason Numero Uno. Numero Dos‒The legislation sanctioning sanctuary to people who
should not be allowed in the United States did not address those with criminals
records. So not only do California Nuts have to support welfare-bound illegals,
they will have to fork over more of their pay in order to punish evil-doers.
But what the heck? These
are nutty Liberals we’re talking about. You can just hear them, now: “Taxes?
More taxes? Heck, man, bring ‘em on! We’re stupid-assed Liberals. We’d enjoy
that!”
But please keep in mind, oh readers of mine, the
ones saying this are Southern Nuts. We from the North are much smarter‒although we are known to use an illegal to pick
a few nuts from time to time. And milk the cows and feed the pigs and harvest
the grapes and the apples and the
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