Voices
I hear voices. I’m not losing my mind, there are just a lot of voices to hear. On our lovely trail Charlie and I often pass people chatting, or we encounter someone alone but talking animatedly (and loudly) into what I hope is a cell phone. Passing by the houses on our street I hear voices in the yard or coming from the house, from live people or a tv or radio. People drive by slowly on our narrow street that has no sidewalks, and I hear their conversations or their radios. It isn’t awful, it’s just different to be surrounded by so many of my fellow humans, each engaged in their own business. On Sunnyhill there were plenty of days when the only voices I heard were mine and Jay’s. We did sometimes hear a voice wafting across the field, but only if a parent was calling to a child or a farmer calling to a hand. We were aware of other lives, but they were mostly at a distance, and lived relatively quietly.
I got to thinking about this issue of density and did a little research. Otsego County had a population of 59,493 in 2019, in an area of 1,016 square miles. Contra Costa County had 1,154,000 people that same year in an area of 716 square miles. Dense. Nearly 28 times as dense. My neighbors here are friendly and diverse. The voices I hear are sometimes speaking in English, but often in Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, and languages I don’t recognize. The immigrants who have made it to Pleasant Hill are mostly immigrants who have made it, who came with skills, money, connections or all three, or who have been in the US for more than a generation. As far as I can tell so far, there is no bad side of town. Nearby Concord and Walnut Creek are large enough to have relatively poor neighborhoods, but Pleasant Hill is prosperous – not wealthy like Palo Alto, but prosperous. The median income for a household is just under $120K, higher than the county median of $101K, and more than twice the Otsego County median of $54K.
Just as it is never really quiet, it is never really dark. I don’t have the astounding view of the night sky that I had on Sunnyhill, but the sky I can see is pale at night with the light pollution of the entire dense Bay Area. I can see the bright planets and stars, of course, but the sky doesn’t have that deep, velvety feel, and the stars of lesser magnitude disappear, taking with them the sense of the density of the universe.
So my surroundings are different, my daily routines are different, and my relationships are different. I’m back in regular contact with parts of the family we left three and a half years ago, and with dear old friends. But I’m three time zones away from my sisters, nieces, nephews, and newer friends. Daniel moved out today, and we’ll start moving in tomorrow. The movers will come Monday to bring the furniture and household goods we left in the garage in Palo Alto, and we’ll also get them to unload the cargo trailer we brought from Sunnyhill. But even before our stuff is unpacked, starting tomorrow we’ll have a full size bathroom and kitchen. What a luxury! The RV has been an excellent interim solution for us, but it will be nice not to have to put a bowl away to make space for a plate in the tiny kitchen. And it will be a treat to have room to do real cooking.
I think about all these external changes, and I feel how little impact they have on my interior life. I don’t love my sisters less for being far away, or my daughter more for being closer. The convenience of a full sized kitchen and bathroom is only that, a convenience, not life altering. Raised in postwar America and in a post Holocaust Jewish community, I grew up with a consciousness that everything external was ephemeral, that it was only the inner self that couldn’t be taken away. It’s easy, and somehow seductive to become attached to places and things. But nearing 73, I’ve had and left behind plenty of things and homes, and it never really mattered. The people I’ve left, or worse, lost, matter a great deal, but even there, memory is a consolation. I am always home. The voice in my head that starts writing about the voices around me is the same voice I walked with in the quiet of Sunnyhill.