Bringing it up to date, we could ask, have you ever seen mustard walk? No, we're not about to revert to childhood. My purpose here is to urge attendance at the third annual Mustard Walk, sponsored by the Saratoga Heritage Preservation Commission and the city of Saratoga.

It will be Sunday, Feb. 8, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and it's an opportunity for Saratogans and others to get up close and personal with the Heritage Orchard at Saratoga and Fruitvale avenues. The gathering place will be the Warner Hutton House in the civic center at 13777 Fruitvale Ave. There will be docent-led tours of the orchard and donkey-cart rides for the children. At the Warner Hutton House, local artists will have their works on display and for sale, and maybe there will be an antiques section. Other attractions include musical entertainment by several groups, wine tasting and culinary demonstrations of mustard.

As to the mustard itself, you could say it's at the hopeful stage, with some plants blooming. Last year, there was a preponderance of oxalis, or sour grass, but the blooms were yellow and the discrepancy didn't dampen any spirits. My own favorite mustard memory goes back some 75 years when my family lived at the end of Marion Avenue (there's that Road again) with orchards bordering the house, and, at this time of year, they were thick with mustard. That's when my brother and I would crawl on hands and knees, pressing the stalks down to the ground and creating what we liked to think of as "tunnels."

Naturally, scheduling an outdoor event in early February is a real roll of the dice. After all, we are in what is generally referred to as the rainy season. This calls to mind another major celebration that has been a frequent subject of these columns, the Saratoga Blossom Festival. I have come to think of the Mustard Walk as a first cousin to the Blossom Festival, since both involved an agricultural focus.

Back in the 1900­1941 era of festivals that were complete with blossoms, the problem was not simply outguessing the weather. Mainly it was calculating just when the height of the orchard-blooming season would be, and that depended on several factors. The festival entertainment was a major element, but the thousands of visitors were also counting on being able to drive or ride through the Valley's garden-like setting at its floral best. And these festival programs weren't just spur-of-the-moment ideas; sometimes they were pretty elaborate.

One key example of this was in 1925, when the program was put on by the San Francisco Symphony, under the direction of Alfred Hertz. Needless to say, this didn't come about from a local dignitary getting on the horn and saying something like, "Say, Al, we're having a bit of a bash down here in a couple of weeks, if it doesn't rain, and we'd like it if you could bring your gang."

What will go down in Saratoga history as the most weather-impacted of all Blossom Festivals occurred, or didn't occur, in 1915, as described in Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years. That was the year of the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and also a year in which the war in Europe was on its way to becoming World War I. And, it was when James D. Phelan, of Montalvo fame, was starting his term in the U.S. Senate.

Putting all these together, and throwing in a heavy rainstorm, we have President Woodrow Wilson declining an invitation to attend the San Francisco fair because of the worsening situation in Europe; Wilson sending Vice President Thomas R. Marshall in his stead, along with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt; Phelan inviting Marshall to be speaker at the Saratoga Blossom Festival, along with Roosevelt; Marshall declining to come because of a heavy rain that put the kibosh on the festival; and Roosevelt coming for the weekend anyway, along with other distinguished guests. Later, in an interview, Roosevelt, who was mightily impressed with the Saratoga surroundings, said, "The time is closer than we think when every one of these hillsides will be dotted with houses."

Roosevelt probably would have enjoyed the Mustard Walk, where he could look up and see some of those houses.