Reinventing Bonnie, or Parts Thereof...

Hello after an almost two month hiatus. The photo below displays the huge Japanese maple out my new bedroom window. Today finds me only partially settled in my Santa Rosa digs. Oakmont is advertised as an active adult community of over three thousand homes. Its beautiful, safe, and perhaps a bit boring, at least this writer finds it so, as I see on tv the dramatic winter sunsets I am used to overlooking San Francisco Bay. Just now we are experiencing the second of three contiguous rain storms and my mind keeps going to Cathy Lane. Tsk, Bonnie, stop it. "Did the new owners remember to clean the drains in the driveway and close the windows on the greenhouse?" "Is the water level rising in the patio?" "Are they checking for downed limbs?" It becomes more and more clear, like the master of Downton Abbey,  how seriously I took my role as caretaker of that land for 51 years, and how I can't quite shed the mantle of love and responsibility.
Reason tell me  it is time to transfer my concerns to my small plot on Oakmont Drive as I try to reconstruct a life and make new friends, while still treasuring the old. The neighbors here (so close) have been wonderful. A big task awaits as I embrace new doctors, new stores, new dog walkers, a new gym, new gardeners and new handy men. Meanwhile, recovering from a fractured hip (doing well, thank you) and replacing the furniture damaged in a flood in my storage locker in Oakland (going slowly).. Some days I cringe at the stacks of unpacked boxes strewed around my living room and shudder at the stacks of insurance papers to process, but I try to do a little each day before I collapse with a book.
Kodi is having a hard time with the adjustment, too. I try to balance his stress with more TLC. He adores being rubbed down with dry towels after a rainy hike in Arundel State Park which he did this morning. This house has one great room with dark hardwood floors, called Tiger Eye.  They are quite beautiful but of course highlight every wet doggie foot print. The house seems very dark to one being used to a house flooded with light. Wish me illumination!

Monday I am having four solar tube lights installed here to try to bring more light into my life.  More on reinventing Bonnie next week.

SABBATICAL

For a short time, my world is defined by the number of pees and poops, rather than comas and semi colons.

I had a fall on October 10th and broke my hip. I am getting better day by day. I will be back online soon.

(Written for Bonnie, by Sheila Fimreite)

Empty Places At the Table

Here sits the empty table in my Cathy Lane patio artfully staged to tweak the imagination of prospective buyers. Note that even Kodi (in the background) rejects it.
Lasts week's buyers, the ones who loved the property so much they promised, in their letter of intent, they would treasure the land forever and never move a single plant. They dropped off on day 4: "Just too much work." This theme is echoed by so many. Meanwhile I juggle my life between two addresses, grieving one and trying hard to embrace the other.
This week's buyers were reported to have cried when they were told they got it, and promised in their letter of intent that the land was so extensive there would always be room here for my spirit to roam around. I'm not sure I want it to.

Meanwhile in spite of my juggling back and forth between Oakland and Santa Rosa every few days they garden here continues to bloom. The roses are frowning at the hole where the septic tank is exposed for legal inspection, the persimmons are beginning to show color, the camellias are starting and the arbutelon are hanging loose.

In Contract

This week on Mars the Rover is finding more documented evidence that there was once water on the red planet.  As of yesterday here on the home front  I am officially in contract on the sale of Cathy Lane. I'm wondering what historic clues the various inspectors will find as they peruse the cracks and crannies, for this land was certainly once redwood forests inhabited by Ohlone Indians, I believe, as well as early Spanish settlers and loggers. The most native treasures I've found here in 51 years are some very old deer antlers however much of the land is unexplored. But its fun to spin the clock forward and imagine what will be found in another 50 years. Lee and I were always rock hounds hauling home specimens from all over the west to build rockeries and line paths and personal memory banks. The yard is full of rocks out of place, that's for sure, confusing future generations of geologists. As I look around  I contemplate which ones will be moved with me? The back of Lee's old pickup is already full of little rock treasures awaiting their new nesting places in my Sonoma County yard. Others are being perused for consideration, like the big crystal hunk we hauled from the rattlesnake infested lavender pit in Bisbee, Arizona, the geodes from Grizzly Peak in Berkeley, and the conglomerates from Dr. Jane's cabin on Mayacama Creek near Calistoga where we spent so many happy hours. Even little agates from Mexico and Alaska shine up from the gravel paths.  I hope future generations of rock hounds will find them and take the same delight as I have.

Layer Upon Layer

Soon from my living room picture window I shall watch the dusky fog creep in through the Golden Gate for the last time in fifty-one years as I make the sometimes gentle sometime jerking transition to Sonoma County.
Kodi seems to be ahead of me in the process of adaptation having already made friends with a new pack of dogs ("They just smell each other, as dogs do," Juan the new dog walker says. Wouldn't it be fascinating if people did the same, I chuckle to myself?  Kodi has already found a nice niche in his new yard, squashing a bed of white daisies so it is soft and molded to his furry 90 pound husky shape.  
I'm much slower to shape my own niche, but I am already registered to be in an art show at the community center Oct. 11 and last Saturday I engaged in one of the joys of my new community: the library. It is a large collection of books, tapes, magazines, etc. available to community members on the honor system, that is residents just take what they want, in any quantity, and return them whenever they wish: no signing out required. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all libraries could do the same?
At my new home the sky view from the great room looking east is the sunrise, as seen here.  I'm not sure it will ever match the glories of the sunsets I am used to embracing.

Each day now, even as new friends and experiences surround me, it seems I experience a new level of loneliness and loss. When a realtor in Oakland presented a client's offer to buy Cathy Lane last week she spoke of the serenity of the view with such eloquence that the tears welled up involuntarily deep within me.  Making such a dramatic change is a big deal for this old dame. Dear Lee, I sure miss you in this process, but I think I'm going to encompass it. Maybe with grace? Maybe not.  

Transition

Heading North this morning for another four days of camping out at my new home in Santa Rosa while the realtors down here do their stuff matching Cathy Lane with some new client who will love it as I do. The fog over the bay is just thick enough that the tops of the San Mateo hills emerge and pale pink streaks soft as satin are beginning to swipe the fog. Looking out the study window I see Kodi has just stretched from his current favorite sleeping spot on top of the red bricks in the rose garden covering the septic tank.  The best house tour on line is at Trulia.com for it contains some photos I have taken over the years of the magical sunsets here as well as the fog on Skyline.
When I say camping out it is because all I have in Santa Rosa is a blow up air mattress,
one chair, a few dishes, a dog bed and the four footer who sometimes occupies it.  Tomorrow morning at 8 he will experience his first hike with his new dog walker, Juan, and three other big dogs in Arundel State Park. I hope he passes the test of good behavior.

So far the neighbors, nursery and store owners in Santa Rosa have been patient with this Alameda County transplant to Sonoma County who knows not yet where anything is, or what she is doing, or what plants will or wont grow up there. I find the soil in my new back yard hard as a rock; amendments are in order soon.  Oh, I need to put garden pick on my list of what to pack today! The photo above is my new back deck.  Soon I hope it will be filled with Bonnie plants and trivia. Wish me happy digging.

Trying to Understand

First Lee went away, the one who always held me and gave me bites off her plate, and  called so tenderly "Where's my puppy?" and then Bill and Dean who sometimes baby sat me and were forever taking my picture disappeared, and then the tall blonde hiker they called Debbie vanished and they had a dog party called a memorial but she wasn't there, and now the one Bonnie calls Debbie #2 is saying how much she will miss me while holding back salty tears.  I just don't understand.  Have I been bad or something?