California, As Is

While we were away at the family cabin, sitting around reading and pretending briefly that we did not own a property requiring constant intervention, Celso was back at Sexton Road cutting down trees, removing limbs, clearing brush, and generally making the land look less like it had been left to nature for several decades. Every couple of days he sent me photographs.  First there would be a pile.  Then a larger pile. Then a trailer loaded with the pile. Then the pile would disappear to the dump. This became strangely satisfying. Jesus, meanwhile, was still working on the ADU, stripping out drywall, pulling screws, removing rotten insulation, and exposing whatever the walls had been concealing. He brought in an old friend named Jaime to help. I received almost no updates directly from them. Celso became my unofficial field correspondent. “They’re doing good,” he would tell me. This was enough. Erin and I had to leave the lake early because the POD containing r...

Downtown Sebastopol remains something of a mystery to all of us. Mostly to me. It is unlike almost anywhere I have lived, except perhaps Hawaii, in that the town seems to have been scattered across the landscape rather than deliberately assembled. There is an old downtown. There is the Barlow, which is several acres of expensive but not exactly quality restaurants. There are businesses hidden along side roads. Many of which we have yet to discover. There are restaurants tucked into places that do not look like restaurants until you are already inside them. There are services, like the local pharmacy, tucked into a room inside a difficult to reach office building on a one way street. There are stretches that feel busy and alive, and still others that seem to have gone home for the evening without telling anyone. The central question is: Where exactly is downtown Sebastopol? Is the old downtown downtown? Is the Barlow downtown? Is the Barlow itself actually one place, or several small ...

We had been in our new home for exactly three weeks. In that time, we had unloaded a moving truck and a POD, filled the garage, weed-whacked most of the property, cleared the drainage ditch in front of the house, pulled out blackberry vines, and cut back some of the many, many rose bushes that attacked our arms and legs whenever we tried to walk past them. We had felled half a dozen trees, including a liquid amber that must have been more than a hundred feet tall but had committed the unfortunate offense of growing in the way of the giant sequoia. We had removed moldy wallboard, insulation, and exterior shingles from the ADU and bathroom. We had repaired various small things, abated a yellow-jacket nest in the ground, and made enough trips to the dump that the people working there were beginning to recognize us. We had, in other words, made remarkable progress. The house had not. On the one night Erin and I had the place to ourselves, we decided to celebrate by lighting a fire. Inside ...

The woman at the back fence turned out to be Adrianne, an older woman who lived up the road. She was petting the dogs and carrying a notepad. She said hello and immediately got down to business. Our names. Where had we moved from? Our ages. The children’s ages. The dogs’ names. The dogs’ ages. She wrote some of this down. I wasn’t entirely sure why. There is something mildly disconcerting about meeting a friendly stranger at your back fence and watching her make a written record of your family, but Adrianne was lovely and seemed genuinely pleased that someone new had moved into the house. Before leaving, she gave us the name of the trash company and several local recommendations. Useful information, all of it. She closed her notebook and continued up the road. It was becoming clear that our arrival had not gone unnoticed. This was understandable. In the short time we had lived there, we had hired a tree trimmer and people to clear the property. Jesús and Jaime were tearing apar...

I had imagined writing about the move once we were settled. Instead, the days kept filling up faster than I could make sense of them. I began writing down what happened while I could still remember it. 7/22 We’ve been in the house ten full days. Today I start working on the garage because I’m unsure what else to do or where else to start. More trees need removing, the ADU may need reframing, the bathroom in the yard needs more septic work and a plumber, and the greenhouse is falling down. Entire beams inside have collapsed, but somehow the greenhouse is not high on the list of things we need to get into shape before the rains come. The ADU, at least, has finally been stripped of all the wallboard and insulation. In the process we discovered that it once had a wood stove. Someone removed the stove but left the stovepipe open through the roof, providing a convenient entrance for anything interested in living in the rafters. Oddly, once all the moldy material was gone, the smell d...