Before leaving Kapaau, Hawaii Island for brief winter travels, I took the shovel's sharp end to dig a four foot wide and two feet deep space for planting. Drizzly rain gifted the soil first watering and a dwarf tangerine tree snuggled in the nurtured design. New to the tree planting endeavor, I have been imagining what future prune cuts will be. The tree is located thirty feet or so from our living room window. One hope is that eventually walking from the house interior to harvest oranges for breakfast will be easy. Planting food goes so well when factoring in proximity, settling roots close as possible to where family dwells.

What I had not expected was that a 2,700 mile plane voyage would demonstrate how well to prune the Hawaiian orange tree based on a central Californian model discovered in the garden outside the doors to the San Juan Bautista Mission. Immersion in travels nearly always provides hybrid knowledge, blending what is known with the new and continuing to wonder further.

The orange tree in San Juan Bautista thrives so well based on pruning that brings the tree limbs sturdy and horizontal thus producing abundance in oranges, easy to harvest for anyone standing five feet or taller. The tree's height only soars fifteen feet or shorter perhaps, the growth being directed all to the reachable tree arms rather than out of reach foliage. In the San Juan Bautista Mission's garden several other citrus trees—thriving lemons and more oranges—are guided to health through these focused selective prunings. Walking throughout the town many other citrus trees thrive based on pruning a tree this way.

San Juan Bautista enjoys a quiet moment after New Year’s Day 2024 gathering.

When my teenager son and I appreciated a brief sojourn as tourists in a historical town a short thirty minute drive from Monterey where our family has been thankful for owing a home purchased in 1972, I realized that future days simply include immersion wherever I go. At heart is the human experience to make sense of local environments as perceived through frameworks built from wherever we were and wherever we have arrived, a continual blending.

For example, on the main boulevard in San Juan Bautista—an avenue bustling in the early 1800s with myriad travelers voyaging from Southern California to Northern California via horse and buggy at first then on locomotive trains and eventually automobiles—I paused to consider what the lunch menu might be. Relying on the tried and true BLT always makes sense from my point of view. Thick slices of bacon charred just right, a wedge of tomato, crisp leafs of lettuce stacking even on slabs of sourdough bread can only equate to savory fullness. In this afternoon adventure, the blend of familiar with the new arrived via garlic aioli, an innovative addition to traditional sandwich.

One perspective suggests that aioli reduces to advanced language for mayonnaise, a wonderful flavor add that makes so easy from six scratch ingredients: avocado oil (light neutral flavor best), salt, squeezed lemon, dijon mustard, whole eggs, and vinegar. Take an immersion blender (a stick blender that immerses in the ingredients) and whip briefly, maybe thirty seconds—and so diverse add-ins emulsify. Voila, homemade mayonnaise convincing enough to seldom, if ever, purchase store bought again. The dining results are fantastic.

Portal entry into Lolla sandwich land, a savory universe.

The classic BLT infused with garlic aioli we discovered on Third Street, inside a street corner culinary space called Lolla (http://www.lollasjb.com = gentle nudge: go there on a first free day). And so our family arrived to San Juan Bautista with one set of food knowledge and departed the vacation day having blended new knowledge, a savory success.

Taking unlikely substances—or even people—and emulsifying them creates a new version of what the ingredients were before. San Juan Bautista exudes this principle. In the 1880s we learn that Jim Jack arrives from China to work on the Flint-Bixby Ranch and begins gathering wild mustard seed in San Juan Bautista fields to earn later profits and the name The Mustard King. Jasper Twitchell is a Mormon who develops in 1850 the first commercial limestone kiln in San Juan Canyon. Arriving from Spain's Basque region, Rafael Pico in 1836 builds an adobe that decades later the Native Daughters of the Golden West purchase in 1934; these women host functions in the active parlor today.

El Teatro Campesino (ETC) thrives still as a theatrical troupe since starting in 1965. In 2015, President Obama awards ETC's Director and Founder, Luis Valdez, the National Medal of Arts. One bakery that opens in 1857, the Alexander Bowie Bakery, keeps original ovens intact in the building's back wall. Traveling from Chile, Bartoleme Samit builds Rozas house that Ambrosio Rozas buys in the early 1900s, a home that provides nurture for 12 children being raised inside, the mother Emelda Erasma Lugo y Rozas living there for 75 years, retiring her earthly life at 104 years old.

Diverse peoples immersed in new lives in new geography in that emulsifying method to blend what was known with what is known as lives unfold. One note on the San Juan Bautista map (research source for life anecdotes I am sharing) that is available for free on Third Street, once called Orchard, and trees are still thriving on this calle today, describes a locale known as San Juan Bautista's Japantown. These origins begin in 1870 and continue until 1937 when Bertha Cole opens la Casa Rosa Tearoom, as she welcomes patrons for tea respite over the next 80 years.

A modern shop to sell history’s folk art.

Today's central California town has complex, often difficult, life histories of original peoples. The Mutsun, Yokut, and Miwok Native American Indians build families and lives that later blend well, and not so well, as colonizing through American and Spanish settlers must mean agreement and yet conflict. Over the decades the assimilation mixes so many: Protestant, Catholic, Japanese, Chinese, Hispanic, Chilean and multitudes more of difference that this simple sketch misses.

Sitting in the San Juan Bautista Mission as the Catholic priest offers a hundred or so parishioners who wrap sweaters and jackets for cozy comfort in a cold drafty church on New Year's day, my curiosity feels like she has a sincere hug. Places built on spirit (including ones with convoluted history) are simply reassuring (I won't even start on the mosque in Istanbul). I am a white lesbian Mama occupying a church pew where I am not of the faith yet discern a real welcome that gives me optimism. Perhaps I attend the church of curiosity?

This is a new year 2024 and so far I am learning still. A simple day of travel has immersed me in so much I did not know a few hours before. Prayers and musical chants and strangers share reciprocal smiles in proximity to where we sit, then stand in a church pew. San Juan Bautista Mission, one of the 21 California missions, an edifice built complete in 1812, means so much to me these 212 years later—even as on paper me and the we being here now have little in common. Somehow in the moment we all got the immersion just right. Grateful for that and so to celebrate I bought a classic woven hat fully colorful in LGBT pride colors, from a Guatemalan store (theguatemalanboutique.com) on the main avenue in San Juan Bautista. Where else?