John and I went to Alameda, around Oakland, to visit his mother for a week. Besides catching up with family, the trip gave us a chance to put on our tourist eyes.

While this was my second trip out there and I was already looking for familiar things, testing my memory on how to get back to Dee’s townhouse from Ole’s Waffle House or the closest Safeway, I also gave attention to looking for signs that I was away from home.

When traveling in the States, it’s easy to forget you’ve left home. We all have the same McDonald’s and CVS stores. Clear Channel affiliated radio stations rule their air waves, don’t they? People drive on the same side of the road and greenbacks don’t have to be exchanged for an ultra pliable paper currency that features stiff portraits of royals. Then again, sometimes California feels like a whole country itself; subject to its own laws and local customs.

They do not offer plastic bags in California stores. You must bring your own totes for groceries.  As a driver, you really have to stop when you see a pedestrian, and not just at crosswalks either, or tickets will be issued. And then there’s the trees…It’s a whole different world in our 31^st state when it comes to foliage.

I have dedicated many blog posts to my love and appreciation for trees. Close to home, I have maple and elm and ginkgo. I am hopelessly enamored by the house on Leland that wears 18 painted wooden birdhouses in its branches like barrettes holding back braids. I was bowled over by the hundred year-old live oaks I saw in Louisiana along Plantation Row just outside of N’awlins.  But I have always had a weird reaction to palm trees, which are quite common here.

I have never seen palm trees as real trees. They have a Disneyland sort of look about them. When I have come out to the left coast before during December and have seen strings of tiny white lights lassoed around trunks of palms (if they can be called trunks) then strung upwards towards where the fruit would be (if you could call coconuts fruits), I would certainly feel justified in my pronouncement: Palms aren’t really any sort of tree. They certainly don’t cut it as Christmas trees.

For some reason, this trip, I was less inclined to think of palm trees as standard cartoon images dancing the mambo during a hurricane, or disappointingly inadequate homes for birds, or dangerously sparse jungle gyms for eight year olds. I just thought My, my my – the trees are sure different out here.

Seeing wide and bushy palms near the Embarcadero in San Francisco or their tall and gangly cousins in Sonoma County reminded me that trees are a great barometer for my awareness of being in a new environment. Noticing the palms and getting past my old associations as caricatures of trees, I began to tune in to, and appreciate, the real diversity of greenery on the coastal dessert.

I have always loved visiting Muir Woods when I’d come out here, but I thought of it as a special refuge for giant sequoias, their natural beauty confined to the park area. Now, I tuned in to all the different kinds of trees throughout the state; trees that flanked the highways, or guarded the vineyards, or even trees that filled in Dee’s yard in Alameda; redwoods, white firs, eucalyptus, cypress, elder, or juniper, and more.

Seeing so many varieties of something as familiar as a tree opened me up to appreciate all the variety, all the possibilities, that exist in so many things I see every day – and that’s no small thing.