Teachers

Charlie doesn’t know that we’ll be leaving Pleasant Hill in just three weeks.  I haven’t had the heart to tell him that we’ll be heading back to country where the snow gets so deep that he has to be carried.  He loved Sunnyhill for most of the year, but he didn’t love the winters.  Projecting, perhaps, I think that what he will miss most is our daily walks along the canal trail.  He’ll miss his canine pals, Kayla, Dash, Louie, Ben, Ruby, and the two pups who moved into the house along the trail where they keep chickens. Charlie’s friendliness helped me make friends, mostly dog owners, but also Pete who we’d see on the trail, who always has a pocket full of dog treats and who knows everyone and who often gathers a little group to chat on the trail.  Like Pete, Charlie invited people to stop and chat. He created community for us.

2057 Hoover went on the market Friday, with open houses Saturday and Sunday.  It looks beautiful, cleaned, spruced up, painted and staged.  In that very desirable neighborhood, it will probably sell quickly, as there are so few places for sale.  It’s small, but cozy, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could be enlarged.  Jack, and then Jay, kept it in good condition, and it was solidly built to begin with in 1947.  The house next door looks to be a very similar design, almost certainly built at the same time.  It was a time of such hope, with the war over, with the baby boom started.  It was the world I was born into just a year later, a continent away.  

The Contra Costa Canal network, which had been started in 1937 and then delayed by the war, was finished the year after the house on Hoover was built.  It provided municipal water for what were then small towns, but mainly it provided water for agriculture, for the farms and orchards that once filled Contra Costa County.  Now it provides urban oases for ducks, geese, egrets and the occasional otter, and relief and recreation for the humans, a place to bike, a place to push a baby in a stroller, a place to exercise and gab with a friend, a place for a careful daily walk for an old man using a walker.  Charlie and I will miss the friends we’ve made along the canal.

Our two trips around the sun here have passed quickly. We arrived in long summer days and will leave in the same light. We are all two years older, our joints a little stiffer. Only Hazel shows no sign of stiffening. We knew that this move was temporary, but I’ve never felt that I was just marking time.  It’s been lovely to reconnect with dear friends and family, and for me to connect with some of Jay’s past. We’ve had a chance to watch two years of Kortney’s growth and see her graduate from fifth grade, an athlete in the making, and maybe a future gym teacher.  We were here for the birth of the first great grandchild, beautiful Ashlee Sapphire, and to see Felicia grow into a wonderful mom. We were here to see Liz and Sean and the boys leave California for Pittsburgh, PA, a big change in their lives and the life of the family that gathered for burger nights on Thomas Drive. 

When we leave Pleasant Hill neither of us will own property in California, and 2023 is the last year we’ll pay California taxes. We’ll come back as visitors and guests.  I will certainly miss people, and I will miss the wonderful weather.  But I am ready to live in a town with one traffic light, a town where I can’t hear a freeway or a BART train. We are so lucky to be able to choose where we want to live. And we’re lucky to be returning to our east coast family and friends. In the time we’ve been away Mike and Bea have married and blended their families, and despite the distance we’ve come to feel so close to them, with visits and phone calls, and for me, with joining Bea’s wonderful Word Thursday community on Zoom.  Zoom has also let me stay in touch with Molly, the Rabbi who was a big part of our life in Otsego County.  I’ve been taking Zoom classes with her and my lovely classmates, studying the Psalms. She’ll probably come to Cooperstown for a weekend of study in August and it will be a joy to see her in person again.

I started this blog when we moved to Sunnyhill.  It was a way of staying connected with California friends and family, a way of digesting new experiences, a way of telling my grandchildren, if they ever wonder, what it was like for me to uproot myself in the year I would turn 70 to start life in a new setting. And now, in the summer I’ll turn 75, we will be picking up the thread of that rural life again, leaving California with no expectation of ever living here again. The blog has helped me think through the first half of my seventies, a time of reshaping our lives to a slower pace and quieter surroundings, to priorities outside of work, to the pleasures of rural life and dark skies.

I had guessed that coming back to California for these two years would have significant value for Jay, for me, and for us together. But looking back over the two years, the value is deeper and richer than I had imagined. Living on Hoover Avenue temporarily only clarified how temporary everything is, how all I ever have is the day itself.  And it brought what we love about Otsego County into sharp focus.  It has given us a chance to close out our California lives – for Jay, his whole life before January 2018, for me, most of my adult life. I’ve thought a lot about the link between place and memory, about what I carry with me and what I leave behind. I can no longer make new memories on Thomas Drive, but I carry all the wonderful and painful ones I’ve made. I leave the Japanese Maple tree in the yard to its growth and decline, but I carry the memory of grandchildren climbing it.

I haven’t told Hazel we’ll be leaving either. She lives her feline life indoors – although she had pretty spectacular outdoor adventures when we first moved to Hoover Avenue. She’ll have birds to watch in Otsego County, and she won’t be bothered by the snow.  She’ll have our laps to curl in and Charlie to chase when she feels frisky. Hazel and Charlie are my best teachers for living in the present, for keeping it simple, for paying attention to the love that matters no matter where we are.