For The Love Of An Orchard
By Joan Cabral

 

My eleven siblings and I had a heck of a good time growing up on seventeen acres off Homestead Road in Santa Clara. We affectionately referred to this multi-generational piece of property as The Ranch. Six of those acres belonged to my grandparents, Ruth and Manuel Cabral. They purchased the land in 1933 for $6,000.

 

Manuel cared for his prune orchards until his death in 1940. Some years later my grandmother married her neighbor, the handsome bachelor orchardist Daniel Lippert.

 

Danny owned eleven acres bordering San Tomas Creek and Ruth’s property. Together they owned seventeen acres of prune and walnut orchards, and lived outside of town on the quiet, rural, two-lane Homestead Road.

 

It was about this time that Ruth’s son, Jack Cabral, came home from Pearl Harbor. The war was over, and the baby boom was on.  He built a house on The Ranch and started a family with his wife Veronica. My siblings and I began popping up, one a year.

 

I remember the old metal mailbox out at the road. It was nailed to the top of an old 8x8 inch post and marked the entrance down a long driveway to the farmhouse, the tank-house and the old barn. The house I grew up in was there too, along with ten other farm buildings to play in. Its address read: Route 1, Box 430, Manuel Cabral.

 

Every spring those seventeen acres would blossom into our very own “Valley of the Heart's Delight.” A carpet of yellow mustard covered the orchard floor and prune trees exploded into bonnets of sweet, fragrant, white blossoms. The honeybees were in heaven and so was I.

 

The orchard was my playground. The wet earth that oozed between my toes as I played in the irrigation ditches runs in my veins today. I could see forever under the green canopy of those huge English walnut trees. The walnut shells husks that stained my hands also stained my heart with a love of orchards. Orchards are in my blood and call to me still.

 

I love seeing the orchards when my husband and I travel through California’s Great Central Valley. He doesn’t know that I want him to stop so I can go running into the middle of one.

 

I want to be among those straight rows of perfectly spaced trees. I want to lie on the dirt and look up at those giants. I want to hear the quiet in a mature walnut grove. I want to see a jackrabbit again. Oh, how I’d love to see a jackrabbit running free. We had these four-legged speedsters in our orchards.

 

Now I wonder: Is there a jackrabbit or an orchard left in Santa Clara?

 

If Santa Clara planted a Heritage Orchard on Winchester Blvd., I’d hope for French prune, English walnut and pear.

 

Or how about some apricot trees? Apricots for sure, and peaches.

 

I’d also “plant” a jackrabbit smack dab in the middle of that orchard. I’d set him free to make his home in there. Then I’d sit in the middle of that orchard and just pray to see him whiz by. Boy, would that make me feel young again!

 

My family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents and siblings lived happily on The Ranch for several decades, surrounded by our beloved orchards. I have a picture of my grandmother cutting apricots in Santa Clara around 1910.

 

Those beautiful trees declared the seasons as their limbs transformed from bare to bountiful year after year. They stood in straight, proud rows holding a vigilant space around our little piece of heaven.

 

Like many other valley farmers, Danny sold his land during the housing boom of the 1950’s. Many orchardists feared that their wells would not be able to continue producing the amounts of water needed to irrigate their orchards. The First Presbyterian Church on Homestead Road and San Tomas Expressway was built on the land that Danny sold.

 

My grandfather also sold his beloved orchard tractor. As I watched it being hauled off The Ranch, I sensed with great sadness, “The End of an Era.”

 

By 1960, Ruth’s prune trees had reached their life expectancy for producing the famous Santa Clara Dried Prune. My grandmother lived on The Ranch until her death in 1995. She was 102 years young. Her daughter, my aunt Betsy Cabral, lived in the old farmhouse until her death in 2004.

 

The last parcel of the Cabral/Lippert property, was sold in 2006. But in my heart, our orchards will live forever.

 

Joan Cabral is a lifelong Santa Clara Resident.