Hot Town, Summer in the City

While parts of the country have been dealing with triple-digit temps and cranking up the air conditioning, we who have chosen to live where 70 is a heat wave are asked to conserve. So we dutifully live in the dark while others luxuriate in their pools or in front of the air-conditioning. I've lived in the heat and have returned to my senses, thank you very much.

I grew up in a middle class neighborhood, built mostly in the early 60's. Nothing fancy but we did have curbs. No sidewalks; those were for the rich people on the next, newer street. We also did not have swimming pools. That, too, was for the fancy people above us. We had sprinklers and we had a Water Wiggle. For those of you not fortunate enough to have owned one of these entertaining devices, the attached commercial might refresh your memory. Looking at that commercial through the litigious eyes of a person who would, say, spill hot coffee in their lap then sue the restaurant that sold them the coffee, I see dollar signs. Through the eyes of a child, it was a blast. Oh sure, there were times it would THUNK you on the head or, better yet, wrap around your ankle then continue to ensnarl you like a boa constrictor until you could free yourself. Of course, as the hose got shorter and shorter, that put that vicious little smiling head ever so close to your face. You'd reach out and grab the hose trying to prevent it from smacking your face. Now THAT is a good time cooling off.

Wake Up Little Suzy

I have found social networking sites to be helpful in so many situations but unnerving when death comes calling. I learned of my nephew's death when his sister posted in shock on her myspace. It was eerie to read his earlier posts knowing he had written them and his friends had responded not knowing they would not see each other again. Then to read the 'wall' posts as those same friends became aware of his passing and grieved publicly on the platform of myspace.

This week, I learned of the passing of a family friend, Sue (Eisele) May. Though we weren't best buds, we were classmates, friends, neighbors - it wasn't until she was in the hospital birthing her first baby that I learned from the OB nurse that her name wasn't even Sue, and I learned that only because they didn't have anyone there named Sue. Turned out her name was Carol. Her dad told me that he used to sing "Wake Up Little Suzy" to her when she was a baby and the name stuck. She was the niece of Mark's best friend. We were neighbors when we both rented from her parents in Santa Cruz. She moved (along with a whole caravan of us from Santa Cruz including her parents) to Nevada and wound up as our school secretary. Again, I remember asking one day when I was at school where Sue had run off to and they said, "Sue? You mean Carol?" Guess it never really worked for her because we met up again on FACEBOOK and, once again, she was Sue.

I knew she had a cancer diagnosis and would periodically fall silent on the chatter of FB then I'd spot a posting where "Sue May has become a fan of ....." and I knew she must been feeling a little better.

This week we learned from her Uncle that she lost her battle with cancer. Yet there she is on Facebook ... smiling in a photo with her husband, looking so good and deceptively healthy. I see photos of her. Comments she made. But on her "wall", the comments come in from friends who are finding out she is gone. Facebook, as Facebook is wont to do, beckons me from the right margin to "say hello to Sue". Hey Facebook...I'd love to BUT I CAN'T! Scrolling down her page, her comments remain to remind us of her so I suppose it's all good. It's like she's still out there. We talk to her as though she has computer access wherever she is and reads how much she is missed.

Hopefully she's feeling better, laughing with her dad, Don Eisele, and brother Eric, both of who went before her in the last couple years. Maybe there will be a heavenly social network that will allow her to "friend me" and be in touch again someday.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy

Wasn't it just last week I was hanging up my harvest garland and placing pumpkins, real and faux, around my house? Wreaths and mantel were decorated with leaves of gold and bronze...and crows. I just wrapped my banister in autumn garland and now it's time to transition the fall into winter. Down will come the ears of dried corn to be replaced with sprigs of pine and rosemary. The warm earthy brown and rust candles will be replaced with pillars of white and silver (very Martha, no?)

The fall went so fast. Our Indian Summer was so brief and frantic - I've not been out for a paddle in ages. I'm not fond of cold anyway but it seems like the days I've had free time, my water time has been spent spectating at the crashing waves. It's a favorite pastime but does not translate to paddling conditions for me.

Maybe because we went out of town for Thanksgiving which left us without our traditional family hike, family photo and frig full of leftovers, the season hasn't transitioned correctly. I'm determined to remedy that this weekend. I will get down the Christmas bins and fill the air with the sounds of Christmas and the smells of the holidays. I will wrap up gifts so they can be shipped on time. By Sunday, my house, and with it my mind, will evolve into a holiday spirit that I hope will carry me through the season, blissfully ignoring the materialistic hubbub, angry Christian rhetoric and inflatable lawn Santas. I am a lapsed Catholic but not so lapsed that I don't equate Christmas with a kind and benevolent God. I also appreciate the solstice celebrations and the joy and peace that comes with them.

No matter my beliefs or yours, I hope we all get through this season with love and peace and that feeling of wonder we all felt as we prepared for Santa. And, as always, Gloria can enjoy hearing Josh Groban singing her name in long, expansive notes....and she will smile.

SAME OL' TRAILER TRASH IN NEW SHOES

1995 - the Topping Trailer Trash years. Actually just two months but it felt like years. After spending eleven years in Minden, Nevada, enduring the heat and the cold and the wind and the dirt and the....cranky Californians who brought their cranky asses with them to screw up life in a whole NEW place....we packed up our lives and returned to the coast. It was fourteen years ago today.

The move started in August with the travel trailer and the rental of a space at the KOA . We came back the next weekend, towing my old Volvo on a trailer surrounded with boxes of thing we thought we might need but had to be left in a mini-storage. Mark leveled the trailer, hooked up the propane and poop pipe and returned to Nevada to pack up the house and close up his business. Monica and Hope were to start school on Monday and the next two months would be the stuff memories (and nightmares) are made of.

The alarm would sound, I'd grab the "shower bag" containing soap, shampoo and conditioner, along with a towel and flashlight and head out into the dark morning. Making my way up the tree-lined road (there were still trees at the KOA at that point), flashlight darting left and right to illuminate skunks and raccoons scavenging through park trash cans, I was generally the first inside the cold shower house. I'd turn on the lights and get the heater running and wait for the warm water to run through the pipes. Wash, dry... brrrrr, I'd scuff back to the trailer and wake Monica and Hope. They would, in turn, take the bag and grab their towels and venture in my footsteps back to the showers where, hopefully no one had left the door open and it was a bit warmer.

While they showered, I would fold up Monica's bed which doubled as the dining room. I'd wake Glo, who was just three at the time, and get her moving so as not to be in the way when her sisters returned. The tiny trailer bathroom held the mirror so timing was everything to get everyone dressed for school. An ill-timed opening of the refrigerator would block an exit from the bathroom....bickering and impatience and we're off to school. Hope had come from a year-round school so already had a month of second grade under her belt when I dropped her at Marshall that first day but Monica was starting Eureka High as a sophomore - that's a tale for her to tell. We had a few extra minutes that first day and drove by the house we were buying - 'our house'. We would do that regularly, cruising slowly past, nervous until that "SOLD" sign was hung over the realtor's picket.

Some days, Glo and I would head back to the park where I would keep track of her by the squeaky tricycle she peddled around the park. We would pick berries and bake cobblers and cookies in our tiny little trailer oven. A couple days a week, we would kill time waiting for stores to open, sometimes at the Del Norte pier watching jellyfish and otters wind their ways up the channel. Then we'd go about discovering Food Mart and the Fresh Guys, finding Winco and doing a wee bit of shopping which was all we had room for in our trailer house. Late afternoon, we'd hop in the car to collect the girls from school. Sometimes we'd eat and relax in the park hot tub.... nothing like tubbing with strangers for childhood memories.

The initial plan was for Mark to drive over on the weekends and bring loads of our stuff with each trip but it took only a couple of those long drives before the novelty of THAT wore off. It was decided he could get more done if he just stayed there and packed. He rounded up a friend to help ("do you know how many f#*king serving dishes you have?!") while I was a single-mom in the trailer park for the entire month of September.

Mark was scheduled to start work at Harper's at the start of October so he came that weekend, towing a box trailer containing our world which Harvey allowed him to park out back of the dealership. He also brought our dog and one old cat. For the next month, the body count in that 18-1/2 foot trailer was two adults, three kids, a cranky old cat and a hundred-pound dog. We added dad to the morning shower ritual as well as a walk for Grizz and set about trying to enjoy autumn under the trees. We bought a jack o'lantern and a box of apples without consideration of our storage situation so put them on the table outside. The racoons found them all to be quite delicious, taking a bite of virtually every apple, littering our site with the remains. Arrrgh!

The end of the month held light at the end of that long, trailer-lined tunnel. We would occasionally make treks to the mini-storage to retrieve warmer clothes and, as Halloween loomed, we dug out the costumes. As the girls tried to decide on their costumes for the year, Hope's decision was made for her when she contracted chicken pox.... She was no longer contagious when she returned to school with a black pointy hat and realistic witchy complexion, complete with bumps.

Finally, the papers were signed and on the first Friday in November, Glo and I dropped the girls at school, picked up a bucket of chicken and had lunch on the floor of our new, old living room. Over the weekend, we emptied the box trailer of our dusty Nevada boxes into our musty old home.

For fourteen years, we've been here in this rickely old beast and I still love it. I always wanted a house with "character" and, as Mark tells me, "well, you got it!". I spent a little time in county records tracking the history and age of our new abode. A two-story house built by Anthony Gray early in the last century (records are sketchy due to a fire of county records) who ran a rug-cleaning business out of the garage and added a second half to the house sometime before 1920, as a home for his son and wife. Around 1953, the two units were joined, creating odd rooms and two sets of stairs leading to the same floor. We have found eleven layers of paint and wallpaper when we did the guest room and 12" planks of redwood that ran the full width of the upstairs when we replaced flooring. The odd angles and square nails are still fascinating. We finally gave up on the project list, choosing to do projects as they come, and some even get finished. But what I really want to do is move this wall........

OOH THAT SMELL

I saw an elderly man, toddling along with the help of a cane as I passed Burre Center the other day. He was near the planter box and I saw him run his hand through the flowers…petunias, best I could tell. I wondered what memories came flooding back when the scent reached his nose. I tend to do the same, though mostly with herbs I pass…. especially basil. I LOVE the smell of basil. I’m sure Monica would say that smell reminds her of my mom who always had basil growing in a pot on the front porch.

I have been planting marigolds every Mother’s Day in honor of my mom who used to install them by the flat around our yard. When I brush my hand over them in the garden, that smell brings me back to watching her with a trowel, on her knees digging hole after hole. The same thing happens when I smell pansies and petunias ... and snapdragons which was why the old man that started all this made me smile.

Those figs that showed up in my farm box a few years ago (and again this week, yippee!) reminded me of something I didn’t even KNOW I remembered. Mrs. Cleary was an old lady that lived next to us on San Juan Avenue in Santa Cruz when I was very small. She was one of those old ladies that always wore a dress with tiny floral print, perhaps with an apron over the top. Even working in the garden, she wore a dress. I’m not sure I remember her from living there since we moved out of that house when I was about three but we went over to visit her on occasion. I remember that musty smell of her house but I REALLY remember the smell of figs. They were always smooshy on the ground so I’m not sure how much we ate but that smell is unmistakable. Oh, and walnuts.

More fragrant flashbacks …. riding on the motorcycle puts you where the temperature changes and scents are “in your face”. Riding down the Avenue, through the redwoods always gets me thinking about Girl Scout camps, especially if there is a campfire. Where there’s smoke, there’s s’mores. And, far from offensive, the smell of the waterfront near Pacific Seafoods reminds me of hanging out on the wharf in Santa Cruz.

So, what smells bring back memories for you?