Working Dogs...

...not working.

Two outings in as many days! Despite all the dire warnings in the newspaper things seem fairly stable in Sonoma county and our favorite nursery was open. This is a slow week everywhere and we needed to buy some bare root fruit.trees to replace all  some of the foliage in the brown wall that has been cut down.

We had an apple tree in Berkeley which we planted on the occasion of Tim's first birthday. Since Tim and his wife gave us a gift certificate for Christmas an apple tree seemed appropriate. We also got a persimmon and a Bartlett pear. John's grandparents had a pear orchard in Redwood Valley north of here and we still have the label from the end of a crate*.
I think there are other better varieties of pear, but John was insistent on Bartlett and I understand why.

We plan to put Ozzie's ashes under the apple tree. Full confession: we still have the ashes of Ozzie's predecessor, Lucy, which we will put under another tree. At least we found an appropriate spot for John's mother near the Russian River. Her ashes were in a cardboard box on the shelf in John's office in Berkeley for years. 

Dana spent the afternoon helping John  plant the trees and hauling large rocks from the field to the new space by our bedroom. The dog at the top of the collage comes to the nursery with his owner who works there. You are by now very familiar with the dog at the bottom who made himself useful by getting in the way! I made a collage because they both seem to be drawn to clumps of grass.

*extra. I suspect this label is no longer politically correct but it has faded sufficiently that it is difficult to make out the details. I wouldn't use it today, but the anthropologist in me says that it is an artifact of a bygone age that is worth preserving.