Welcome to Sunnyhill

Each shift in seasons here is full of miracles.  As the days get shorter and the temperature drops the chlorophyll dissipates in the leaves on the trees. That chlorophyll has transformed sunlight into tree food since the leaves unfurled in the spring, but it can’t keep up its work now.  Its departure reveals the yellow…
Read more

August 31 Along route 28 the sunflowers are bending their heavy heads.  Their season is nearly over.  I saw asters last week, and the leaves are turning on the earliest branches.  Summer is ending, and I’m starting my seventy fifth trip around the sun, happy, loved, and healthy. Tamar and Ryder were up for the…
Read more

Great chunks of granite and layers of shale; lakes, rivers and streams; the rise and fall of hills, the long views; the colors and textures and scents of fields and forests; the call of cardinals – we are back in Otsego County.  For me, this is a return to the landscape I grew up in. …
Read more

A long day of driving brought us from a rather grubby LaQuinta in Cheyenne, WY to a very pleasant Fairfield Inn in Des Moines.  The animals are fed, and so are we.  Everyone has had access to a bathroom – which is really the biggest deal for Hazel who has no access all day.  We…
Read more

This morning at our last breakfast in California for a few months Jay and I were reflecting on the Bay Area we were leaving, where we had each spent so much of our lives.  Jay said, it isn’t a place of abundance.  I was taken aback – there is so much stuff here – but…
Read more

You could say that the move we’ll soon be making back to Cooperstown started in 2014 when, on a visit to Peter and Aviva on Shacktown Mountain Road, we all drove to Cooperstown and Jay and I first saw what a beautiful community it was.  As we visited again, after Peter and Aviva moved there,…
Read more

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,…
Read more

Spring weather has arrived.  I sat in the sun in the front yard of Jay’s house at 2057 Hoover Avenue in Pleasant Hill.  Jay’s Dad, Jack Bosley, bought the snug two bedroom one bath house in 1967 and lived here until he died and Jay inherited it.  Jay lived here on and off, but for…
Read more

The sale won’t close until March 30th, but I signed all the paperwork on March 9th to sell the house that Joe and I bought some 29 years ago.  When we went house hunting the only guidance we gave our Realtor other than price was that Joe didn’t want an Eichler.  She dutifully showed us…
Read more

Jay and I drove to Sacramento on a clear, cool Wednesday. In a park near the capitol we met a few of my first husband’s friends, gathered at a monument to veterans to remember Terry’s life.  Chuck, who was closest to Terry, had initiated the gathering and invited me.  I hadn’t seen or communicated with…
Read more