But let me indulge in a little. My particular nostalgia today has to do with my uncle's farm, or, as he called it, ranch.

It was approximately 120 acres. Half of it was in prune orchard; the other half was mostly pasture and hayfields. But I am not telling you why it sticks in my memory.

One reason is it was the last place I knew well where horses brought in crops. My uncle had two horses used for pulling a hay wagon in the fall and odd little two-wheeled vehicles with wooden-tined forks that lifted piles of hay and moved them to the hay baler.

I remember the horses because we got to ride them when the hay wagon came back with a load of hay. At the time, I never thought the horses had enough to do pulling the wagon, but I was young and foolish and didn't know the difference.

I also am not making clear to you how magical the ranch seemed to be. Its main house was built by my uncle's grandfather, a man who came to California in 1844 and who met the Donner party coming west on his way east back to Wisconsin.

Several years later, in his fifties, he guided a wagon train to Oregon, met and married a minister's daughter, came to California and settled down on the ranch, and raised five children—four of whom died of scarlet fever, one of whom survived to be my uncle's mother. Under the stairs to the second floor was a gun rack, and in the rack was a Hawken rifle my uncle's grandfather had carried from Kentucky westward twice.

My uncle lived in this house surrounded by all that a western ranch should be: a creamery where milk taken from the ranch cows was separated, a tank house, a cider press for making cider and vinegar, a barn filled with hay where mangers were used to feed the cows, a blacksmith shop with a forge and an anvil, a water trough green with algae and with a "dipper" and a dry yard where the prunes were processed and dried in the sun.

There also was a berry patch and a vegetable garden. My aunt made her own bread and for a time churned her own butter.

In front of the house under a long row of eucalyptus trees was the horseshoe pitching court, and there my uncles gathered on family holidays to pitch horseshoes and to josh one another in the insulting, joking way that American men do.

We children sat at long tables under the trees eating homemade ice cream, the best ice cream I ever tasted after potato salad, hot dogs and an array of foods no longer available because they weren't processed. They were made from scratch.

I did not live on the ranch, although I sometimes wished I did. I lived in a small town nearby. But it was a common trip to drive to the ranch from town in the early afternoon. Our elders would spend their time visiting, sitting in the shade of the trees or on a cool kind of veranda. I no longer can remember much about what they said to one another, but it often seemed to me their conversation was mostly about people in the valley where they lived and who was related to whom.

Looking back, as one does, I am sure none of it really glistened as brightly as I thought it did. Much of the time was in the depths of the Depression, when even on ranches people had little money.

But if they were poor, they were wealthy in spirit and resources. There was always enough to eat, sometimes a surplus. They managed to buy enough gasoline (then 25 cents a gallon or less) to power the ranch's John Deere tractor, and most of the presents at Christmas time were handmade: things like fudge and sugared walnuts, hand-sewn shirts and hand-knitted socks and sweaters.

And although it must not have been so for my uncle, for me it was a magic time, a wonderful way in which to grow, a set of memories, which are as bright today as they were when they happened. Or at least that's the way I remember them.

For my uncle, the memories must have been bittersweet. Before World War II came he could no longer make the payments on the mortgage, the bank foreclosed on the ranch and he had to move to a smaller, less grand place across the valley.

The bank subdivided the orchard and pasture, cut it to pieces with streets, and built houses where the trees once stood, and eventually it became a part of the city.

But the house remains, the house built by my uncle's ancestor. It is a private residence now, but it ought to be a museum, for its walls encompass the beginning of California as a state, and they surround the ultimate fate of a mountain man who came eventually to settle on the land and to make it his.

As for me, it reminds me of a golden time when I was young, when the world seemed far more assured than it does now and when I saw for the first and last time horses pulling a hay wagon to the hay baler.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Campbell Reporter. He can be reached at carlheintze@juno.com.