I retreated hurriedly, throwing down my book and rushing into the kitchen to see whether I had remembered to wash yesterday's breakfast dishes. CHAPTER TWELVE BANNING'S WEATHER COMES assorted, like a box of chocolates. Some of the tidbits are sweet, some have a bitter tang; some, wrapped in glittering tinsel, turn out to be not as nice as you expected them to be. But they are all delicious, once you have developed the taste for them. When winter is barely under way in Banning, suddenly it's spring. In mid-January, when the enclosing mountains are still shivering and huddled under their white fur coats, spring tiptoes through the Pass, breathing warmly upon the wind-swept grass and tossing handfuls of popcorn onto the branches of the almond trees. Vast orchards bloom, a paradox of nature, with the giant snow-covered mountains leaning over them. I used to worry about those first frail, brave blossoms. I worried about them, and about the possibility of a frost, as industriously as though I were a mother almond tree. One night late in January there was a shower of hail that lasted for about half an hour. The little hailstones splattered and clanked against the windows, and chattered on the little cement porch and on the door, pounding for admittance. When at last the shower subsided, we opened the door to look out, and saw that our entire driveway, even the islands of grass and the sidewalk in front of the cabins, were white with a thick layer of hail. It looked like snow. The morning after the hail storm, when the solid layer of ice the hail had formed over the ground was melting, and crackling like a huge bonfire, we found that our neon "office" sign had a tiny hole in the top of it. About the time Grant was telephoning Oian Rosco, I happened to think of the almond blossoms. If hail could do this to our sign--and presumably it had been a hailstone, a particularly aggressive one, that had done it--what might it not have done to those delicate blossoms? The next afternoon I drove to David's school, picking him up and bringing him home. Williams street, which led straight to David's school a mile away, was lined with almond trees. I looked at the trees anxiously. I was amazed to see that the branches were as fluffy as ever with their heavy load of bloom. After that, I never worried about the almond blossoms any more. If the trees the following year had begun to bloom on Christmas day, and Christmas had been followed by twenty successive days of frost, I wouldn't have given it a thought.