Chapter 1
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Of the three apartments within her price range, escalating in price by their proximity to the municipal beach, the
only thing Juliet Pasquale could clearly remember was that they all smelled badly of leaking natural gas with the pilots turned
off while unoccupied to keep out the transients who clung on the periphery of the bridge and its summer rental units. This
one was the furthest to walk from her new job, but the closest to the beach once she finished her shift. 'Of course, once
she had a car it wouldn't make that big a difference'. She bit her lower lip in uncertainty. Here too she was closest
to the new tenants at the duplex at the center of the block, people close to her own age did work for a living in town,
since she didn't think of Rhonda’s job at the cookie kiosk at the Plaza counted as 'a career' the way her best friend
did, and might be persuaded to allow them to join them on the first rung of the ladder toward independence and maturity; but
the other apartment over the Mexican Cantina restaurant appealed to her too, even though she had to be quiet on the weekends
while their patrons could get as loud and obnoxious as they wanted to be in the parking lot under her window....there was
too much chance some hippie guy might try picking her up just because he needed a place to stay for the night since the
apartment house was only a block away, and she didn't want to have to be suspicious every time some cute guy tried to strike
up a conversation with her!
Sensing
that her daughter was losing courage and the last nine days of angst and slammed doors might have been for nothing, her mother
touched her lightly on her arm and whispered confidentially, “ General Hospital is on in forty minutes and your brother
has to get to work, do what you need to get done while you still have a car, Honey. “
Pulling back and smiling to allow her daughter to look wise and snap up the lease before the landlord’s impatience
with them cost them this freedom on both their parts.
Juliet
frowned unhappily and bit down till it hurt but expelling a sigh with force she nodded and said ‘yes’; not expecting
the relief on her mother’s face as much as her new landlords.
“ Good! I do not want to have to come back over that hill! “
It was a warning she could do nothing about as she signed the mimeographed rental agreement with his pen, suddenly
seeing visions of an absent landlord who’d get angry at her for demanding her drive back from Los Gatos and fix anything,
but as Juliet
put
the green and beige plastic television set on its stand that had been her brother’s advance housewarming gift for whatever
apartment she chose, and the key to the lock her mother reminded her to check and make sure worked, there was an odd sense
of being filled from the inside out, as if she were a waiting mold carved by a master craftsman but then split apart and filled
by workmen pouring in raw cement, she was suddenly frightened of what flaws would be revealed as the two haves were pulled
free!
Her mother’s hug was as warm as if she were parting
with one of her older friends, and it flushed away the fear momentarily, then her brother’s hug, so final and frightening
as he promised to come at the first of the month to carry all her groceries home in the Magic Chariot but that he expected
her to save her money and get a car of her own before winter; as if it snowed in California and she might lose her life in
some momentous snowdrift! There were only three channels available on “the Flats” where the city proper lay in
serpentine respite along the shallow coastline, and she had to wiggle the rabbit ears antennas until the image came in as
clear as possible from the tower on the top of the hill near the University, but all three revealed a slight fuzzy image and
clear sound so she shut the machine off, conscious that she was paying for her own electricity now, and hesitantly walked
to her front door and opened it with a weight of joy and fear mixing through her like tie dye colors in a vat. She would never
have this moment again, no matter how many times she stepped out the crimson shaded door and she clung to it with a sense
of looking back from some great distance when she was a gray haired woman in a vast, two story house, along with her typewriter
and her cats remembering back across the decades to when she was young and so uncertain about what was to come. A part of
her longed desperately to be there, while another part held back, making her want to retrieve her Huggy Bear and bring him
to see the startling vivid and sharply etched vista over the Eucalyptus Trees planted in the previous century to provide shade
for the upscale railroad patrons escaping the noise and the cold of San Francisco in their private playground by the sea.
“ I’m here. “ She whispered to Fate, ready to embrace him and
a shadow moved, startling her with the depth of fear at the shocking vulnerability of being alone, then giving her room for
a soft mocking laugh at her own expense. It wasn’t as if she was in the middle of the Yukon! Making sure she put the
door key in her purse, she simply closed the door in case she lost the key before he could catch the bus to the Mall and get
the key duplicated at the locksmith kiosk; profoundly surprised at the tremulous nature of the next breath she drew into her
lungs. Because her feet were sweating so badly, causing her feet to slide in the inexpensive sandals, possibly
causing them to rip before she could get enough money to replace them, Juliet slipped them off her feet, staying on the grass
of her neighbor’s lawn until she could walk parallel to the trail left in the shadows beneath the mighty trees at the
darkly colored track, she gingerly pranced across the empty street, watching for stones and acorns while she tip toed her
way to the nearest trunk to support her weight while she put them back on. She’d intended to go down the steep hill
barefoot but the gravel was sharper against the tender soles of her feet than she anticipated.
“ Frank promised he wouldn’t rent to any Hippies! I warned you, Clark! “
A female voice said angrily, and she turned around to apologize for walking on their freshly mowed land and to introduce
herself to make real the fantasy of going over to the near neighbors for a bar-b-que and vaguely envisions ‘drinks’
only to be confronted with a too thin, too perfect, and perfectly predatory female standing beside the rental house’s
main draw in a proprietary stance! Her face was thin and angry but so exquisitely made up Juliet‘s heart sank.
Even if some miracle saw them casually invited over, she’d be so busy comparing herself unfavorably with this
leopard-lean femme fatal` whose taunt curves screamed Stair-Stepper at home and lifetime Exercise Gym membership
with every pore, that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy herself, or any man’s friendship when she didn’t have
a chance in twelve lifetimes to be as thin and powerful as this vision in gold lame and tight black pants! Yet,
oddly, she felt the illusion shed from her like down, allowing her to see herself as a fledgling no longer, whatever color
her flight feathers might contain! Waving to them cheerfully, as if the distance had dulled the words, she smiled in genuine
happiness and simply concentrated on scrapping the oddly sticky film from the bottom of her feet as she put on her sandals
and stopped at the empty track to look for miles in both ways; giving them time to turn and enter their car or their house,
wherever they had to go when they chanced to come out at the same time as she was crossing their street. “Her
street” her heart amended and for the first time, she felt like she belonged somewhere! She didn’t have to worry
about her dad having an argument with his new boss, or having the utilities turn off because a promised payment hadn’t
been made and food was chosen over comfort, this was her life now, and she didn’t have to move until she had enough
saved up to buy dependable transportation, and then the entire mountainside would become available to her and she
could have a ‘real’ home of her own! Pausing where the land and sky met in a thin line between
the stately tree trunks she looked back, wanting to memorize this first view as well, only to see the man from the duplex
standing at the top of the hill with his hand leaned against one of the trunks with peeling bark watching her as she slipped
and slid her way down the surfer’s trail. Her heart leaped into her throat at the sense of predatory threat. All of
her mother’s dire warnings about strangers and abductions shook her viscerally. Then he waved.
She turned her head quickly, pretending not to see. She didn’t risk looking back a second time as her slippery
descent through the succulent Ice plant mat holding back the cliff face demanded her full attention, but just as the sweep
of the blue green waters distracted her, she tripped and couldn’t catch her balance of the featureless water-filled
slope until she stumbled against the bricks of the discrete sewage plant wall at the very bottom of the hill.
She endured the glare from the uniformed maintenance man, who’d endured years of futility attempting to deny
the local kids the same access downhill he took advantage of as a raw youth intent on reaching town as soon as possible,
but her hands were shaking with excitement again as she used the pole tower showers set up for the tourists who wanted to
go show at the clustered village on the other side of the carefully maintain strip of sand that gave them life four months
out of the year. She belonged here! She’d spent every meaningful summer of her life here, usually
arriving on the first bus in the morning and not leaving until the absolute last minute of missing the bus and risking have
her inebriated father being the one to drive the family car up the hill from their home in Santa Clara! His regretful and
‘sloshed’ attempts at apology and conversation was easier to bear than her mother’s stony silence at the
amount of gas used up getting up the highway, and neither she nor Rhonda had been able to stay at the adjacent beach to enjoy
the sunset or the cold that drove fires to be lit on the beach while stick figures in black they could only envy put sweaters
over their swim suits and roasted tiny mounds of marshmallows while the brine smelling logs caught hold of the fire and the
young girl’s imaginations. Her mother made sure they ‘paid’ for their demands on her busy life to ‘make
sure;’ they didn’t ‘use’ her as she allowed her sons to do with slavish delight. Tonight, she could
stay until nothing was visible but the red and yellow of the flames, no matter how cold she got because she forgot to bring
her sweater, then she’d simply have to walk up the hill and follow the sidewalk to her new ‘house’ and turn
on the lights. It was a heady kind of freedom, pushing back the sudden fears of being so totally isolated for the first time
in her life. What if she had a fever and couldn’t call for help? What if she fell? What if she was attacked by one of
the scruffy loungers she and Rhonda had archly ignored with such childish distain?
“ What if? What if? What if? “ She scolded
herself under her breath, watching the slow rock of the fishing boats already settled back into the sheltered cove after a
long morning’s work. Then she laughed out loud, startling herself as much as the longhaired boy who’d
wedged himself between two of the municipally placed boulders to find a place to sleep. But she didn’t reach out to
him as she would have done only a week ago.
Could the whole world have evolved so greatly just since she helped Rhonda and her mother move the few
cardboard boxes that made up her willful daughter’s life? Or had it just been her? She’d deeply resented her father’s
remark about a ‘bud’ just ready to open and blossom and yet, as the firmness and chill of the sand littered sidewalk
rose up to meet and support her, it suddenly seemed such an apt description of what she was feeling at this moment!
Her legs suddenly became too weak to hold her and she walked another four steps with her knuckles pressed against the
low-slung cement wall until she reached the break in the cement barricade at the entrance to the small beach. She found herself
smiling in the simple-minded fashion but she couldn’t help herself. It was as though she’d been pulled into a
painting she’d long admired from a distance and watching the Sandpipers skimming the edges of the low waves that rolled
in relentlessly, hissing and foaming, even the raucous cries of the greedy Gulls as they lifted their wings and threatened
one another seemed to be an extension of the rapid beating of her heart. The placid flow of ‘the river’ where
it was funnel inland for over a mile, to raise the value of the expensive summer homes built on either side of it’s
dredged ‘shore’ became the growing knowledge and wholeness seeping into her bones, strengthening them, and intimately
her. She planned to go to the center of town in Santa Cruz and get a library card to put in her wallet. Staking out yet another
piece of independence and proof of belonging. But she had to wait until Rhonda got off work so they could go together.
It would mean having to listen to her chum malign the people she worked with in an endless tirade of petty grievances,
but since she’d expect Rhonda to listen to her when she let off steam after next week….she’d be working!
Just like her folks! The thought shocked her into silence, even inwardly and she simply sat there shivering, wishing she’d
brought her sweater as she absorbed the sounds and the smells around her so she could remember them just as clearly at sixty
nine as she did at nineteen! Working with old people wouldn’t be as hard as standing behind the check
out counter having to smile no matter how grumpy or rude the customers were, or bearing the insults of the pimply faced Assistant
Manager at the hamburger place. Just the smell of heated oil made her physically ill! All that was behind her now.
She had a ‘real’ job now, and in August, she’d have a car, start classes at the Junior college on the hill
and be so settled into life, and getting old, and paying bills and dealing with child rearing problems and tantrums, the way
her mother had threatened her since she turned nine, that she suddenly ached that life was passing her by so swiftly! She
closed her eyes to hide the tears but finally she was just too cold and too lonely to just sit there. Standing up, she left
a large part of herself behind and began to shuffle toward the empty parking spaces in front of the “Seaside Garden
Apartments” that they’d looked into first and then rejected. There were too many old people with nothing to do
but to sit around on kitchen table chairs at the bottom of their staircases and point out the flaws and foibles of ‘the
young’. She got enough of that at home from her mother and her mother’s friends who seemed
shocked she’d ‘wasted’ a whole year of her life ‘living off of her mother’. The
fact that her mother demanded rent as soon as her check was cashed was as lost on them as her new found independence would
have been on these uncharitable old geezers, so she’d gone with the duplex on the hill, with the understanding
that she’d begin to look for a roommate because Rhonda had found a tiny sliver of an apartment of her own and wasn’t
going to move in with her like they’d planned for the last four years! Her rent here was nearly double the portion she’d
paid to her mother, but she’d be working for sixty-eight cents an hour for a full eight-hour shift rather than forty-five
cents for three-hour shifts after school. Postponing the joy of exploring the new shops that were opening
for the summer season until she could enjoy it, and be able to describe it in detail for her journal
that she figured would be the basis for her first
book since Papa Hemmingway was her prime source for ‘write what you know’ experiences, Juliet stopped at the back
parking lot of the bowling alley, not even allowing her gaze to trace the slow movement of cars. Simply locals anyhow, this
early in the morning. The Tourists, of which she was no longer a part, wouldn’t come ‘over the hill’ from
San Jose, Santa Clara, or the Silicon Valley until ten o’clock at the earliest and then these small lots would be full
and the empty streets jammed with people in bathing suits and flip-flops whether they actually entered the still seasonally
chill waters or not.
Feeling
as though she was stepping in the footsteps of her older shadow self, Juliet delicately picked her way across the sand littered
street to the furthest lawn with its white picket fence that was reserved for pricey summer rentals, she drifted toward the
oddly plain bowling alley building, drawn as much by the clang of pens being knocked over which promised she wasn’t
in a deserted town after all, and the enticing odors of fries cooking in grease, pulling her backwards to the times when her
Dad still lived at home with them and they went to the local McDonald’s hamburger joint after Church every week. A ritual
event so integral to her youth that she’d forgotten in the ensuing years of alcoholic stupors and long angry nights
of silence. The darkness of the block length building and the smells of alcohol and old shoes overwhelmed her as soon as she
pushed open the internal double doors but she stepped forward into the plush dampness with a feeling of having been reborn,
an exciting sense of newness and maturity resting on her shoulders even as she was poised to flee back into the cold at the
first hint of alarm. A deep masculine voice called out happily, answered by two younger ones, and she looked
down at the swath of bright lights at the lower half of the elongated building pleased to see it was a happy family celebrating
their togetherness. When she thought to seek out the lunch counter and the heated grills facing the counter where she and
Rhonda had spent endless hours flirting with whoever the part time cook was for that summer, she was rewarded with a smile
of recognition from the tall slender youth with dark hair whose name she couldn’t remember. Only that Rhonda had her
first ‘serious’ crush on him and had gone out with him twice, getting a ride back to her parent’s house
down the street. But never speaking about him again, as if he were a gem beyond any mere child’s understanding. He was
obviously struggling to remember her name too. Then his lips parted in a happy smile.
“ Julie! Hi! It’s kind of early in the season isn’t it? The Regular?
“
“ Sure! “ She agreed. Her knees suddenly too weak
to hold her as she sat down abruptly on one of the new backless stools that didn’t have duct tape holding it together.
She heard her mother’s voice warning her sarcastically that he was ‘one of those men’ who had sex with young
girls freely because a ‘real woman’ intimidated him, and while she loyally disputed this behind her smile it made
her realize that for the first time in her life she had a choice in matters of this sort, and seeing his easy grin of possession
she politely pushed it aside. There was plenty of time for that after she was a little more sure about what her new kind of
life might hold for her. It was exciting to have his hand brush against hers a little too casually but as she turned to one
side on the soda fountain chair to watch the family as they jostled and played, taking turns at tossing the small ball down
the highly polished lane, with the kids having the same rights to time and attention as the adults, something took root in
her that she didn’t quite understand. A tentative reaching out to what she wanted in her life, not necessarily what
she had experienced in the years leading up to this moment and she smiled deeply.
Ignoring his frown pronouncing her ‘uncool, she sucked on the end of the straw until the last bit of liquid had
been drained from between the partially melted ice cubes, prolonging this moment despite its obvious moment of ending while
Johnny brought over her change, attempting to make small talk. She had no way of explaining her distancing from him as the
cold pit suddenly formed in her stomach as she looked at the change he placed in her hand that slid down her suddenly trembling
legs to pool at her feet in a spreading stain of vulnerability. Having that twenty-dollar bill in her wallet
had empowered her, made her feel as rich as Midas, but all he gave her back was a ten and some ones. She’d splurged
and ordered extra fries that were now sodden lumps on the ceramic plate and a larger sized drink because she’d been
hungry and thirsty coming down the hill without having stopped for breakfast. Just a dollar extra each hadn’t seemed
that big a deal but it meant the difference between getting a ten and a five back, along with nearly a dollar in change. There
wasn’t any way to replace it since she had to work two weeks before she got her first paycheck! She’d been offered
an extra dollar fifty a week if she’d agree to getting paid only twice a month, since most of the new kids quit the
difficult job on a Friday after they picked up their paycheck, but that’d seemed insignificant as she sat in the formal
‘parlor’ of the nursing home with her future boss. Now, looking at the empty space in her hand, she desperately
wished she had that dollar and fifty cents there now as a buffer! She didn’t even notice the contemplative
look the young, part time cook gave her before he turned with a shrug and walked over to the wooden stool behind the counter
to pick up a textbook. Then a young girl pushed her way past Juliet, shouldering her roughly without apologizing, even though
she could think of any thing she’d said to make the local girl angry at her. Maybe she just assumed she was still ‘
a tourist’. Because oddly, as the girl’s voice reached her on the way out the side door, it was creamy and soft,
like the feel of well made velvet was to the touch, and the sudden insight made her blush hotly; grateful that the glass and
wood door she faced was empty of anything but bricks and paint!
Even though she’d just eaten and had plenty of pasta and canned foods on the shelves at her apartment she found
herself overwhelmed by the need to go to the corner grocery store and buy something special she might need for the next two
and a half weeks while she still had some money left to spend! Blinking rapidly at the shocking amount of light filtering
between the two buildings once she stepped out of the timeless twilight maintained in the cavernous room. But at the door
to the hundred year old store she paused at the threshold and merely smiled at the short haired clerk behind the cash register,
relieved when an elderly customer walked up to distract the friendly woman so she could escape, despite the sudden feeling
of being impoverished, even destitute. She started the long walk toward the end of the street where the road took a sharp
turn up the side of the mountain, not even risking looking at the two storefronts that had been opened over the weekend in
anticipation of the influx of summer tourists. That would have to wait for another day, when the magic of being free and open
only to her own whims returned…if it ever would! She felt forty years old, as if she’d been doing this for half
her life and had nothing to show for it! The secret fear that had nagged her since her mother sat out in the car waiting for
the job interview to end. At least she hadn’t insisted on coming in and interviewing the interviewer like she did on
the in-home babysitting jobs she first applied for! No wonder she didn’t get those jobs! Yet, when
she reached the end of the nearly deserted street, as empty as she was feeling inside after this morning’s elation,
she found herself pushing open the door to the Saint Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop, with its dark shadows and tint walls cluttered
with odds and ends of several generations.
The lady Volunteer she’d hoped to share her good news with wasn’t on duty
and the stout matron who sat behind the cash register pretending to read the old fashioned paperback seemed ready to pounce
on her and shout “thief!” just because she came into the shop!
The lace curtains were still there, folded neatly in
one of the bens in the back shop. After a low conversation on the telephone, the woman’s middle-aged nephew came downstairs
to the shop and seemed to find everything intensely appealing that allowed him to be where he could see her hands and purse.
As much as she ached to have the slightly yellowed lace bundle, which had been marked down to three dollars and fifty cents,
she simply couldn’t give the lemon-puckered woman the satisfaction of earning money on her shift! But at least
she wasn’t subjected to the lengthy monologue she gave to anyone who’d enter about how ‘kids and tourists
robbed them blind’. She shut the door behind her more firmly than she needed too and missed one light cycle as she struggled
with going back in and purchasing the drapes before somebody else saw the bargain of the cut price and snatched them away
from her. She felt rather than saw someone pressing too close behind her and walking away quickly, she
simply walked half way up the hill and cut across at the end of the two-way lane since there weren’t any cars on the
steep hill.
She found herself shivering in the warmth as her aloneness seeped past her childhood defenses, but as she trailed her
fingers along the rock wall of petrified calm shells dredged up from the harbor bottom over a hundred years before, she felt
a sense of being enveloped by the Community’s spirit, welcomed and made safe because she was a part of something now
larger than herself, and her smile returned as she raced her shadow to the ornamental depot waiting quietly at the top of
the hill. She left her arms skyward and danced around in victory, since her shallow lengthened and tried to pull away once
she reached the flat land, then settling down within her own spirit, she cautiously stepped over the shining rails and walked
up to the head of the street where she now lived.
The
room echoed hollowly as she slipped the key out of the door and shut it behind her, but the colors and the sight of her personal
belongings scattered around the rental gave her a sense of possession and belonging that she’d never experienced before.
“ I’m hungry. “ She told her shadow and she drifted toward
the kitchen after dropping the key in her purse so she wouldn’t have to panic the next time she went looking for it.
Sitting in front of the twelve inch plastic television set that had been her older brother’s off-hand gift in
exchange for not being involved in the apartment selection or the actual moving of the boxes from her childhood bedroom, and
eating a delicious but meager meal on a metal stand she purchased for fifty cents at the thrift Store in anticipation of ‘
getting her own place some day’, she struggled with a strange duality. Missing her mother’s presence in another
part of the house, and reveling in the intoxicating joy that she was free to keep any of the decisions she impulsively made.
No one would wake her up at ten o’clock and demand she wash the ‘rinsed off’ dishes she left in the sink,
no one would nag her if the ‘dust bunnies’ got big enough and active enough on the bare wooden floor that she
had to give them names! It was haunting and lonely and exhilarating, all at the same time.
For the next two mornings she set her alarm at five o’clock the way she’d have too once she started to
work, and she herself actually get up in the cold and the dark, thinking this would make it a ‘routine’ after
the long week-end. In the afternoons she straightened up the house, harkening to her mother’s dire warnings that she
might get hit by a car and be killed before she could get back and straighten things up before strangers roamed through her
house, then she waited until Rhonda got off from work at the cookie store on the edge of the new circular bus route. The burnt
diesel gave her a throbbing headache and the smell of baking yeast and sugar clinging to her cheerful friend’s clothes
made her a little
nauseous as well as envious, but by the time Rhone threw her uniform into a corner without care for any wrinkles since her
‘Mother Nature’ roommate would pick it up and hang it while they were gone, she was secretly grateful that her
childhood chum ‘couldn’t wait’ for her to get done with the last weeks of school and had found someone else
to share a house with. It was twice the size of her tiny apartment and had a lovely wood balcony where you could glimpse blue
slats between the houses, something that had almost tugged her out of those last boring weeks and the stress of doing final
exams, but by the third afternoon when Rhonda pretended a headache so she could go join the rough looking boy and his long
haired friends she’d been talking too through the service counter, Juliet was strangely relieved, without being sure
why except that she was sky rocketing past where Rhonda remained in the joy of rebellion against her overweight, carnal mouthed
mother. They were being pulled in two different directions and she no longer wished to hold unto her adventurous
friend, though it made her a little ashamed to realize she was using Rhonda as much as the determinedly cheerful redhead had
used her to do the more difficult parts of her essays and homework. Since Rhonda didn’t mind, it seemed a waste of a
perfectly lovely day to ‘press the unwanted weight to her bosom’ like Grandma Pasquale
used to mime when her grandchildren couldn’t completely translate her use of the Old World language and idioms.
Impulsively catching the express bus to the University on the hill as she had vaguely agreed to do with Johnny ‘some
day’, she found herself poised at the edge of a three tiered parking lot, looking over a busy two lane highway with
a raised walk so the students could cross over to the lots even further down on the mountain’s side without having to
wait for the cars to slow and allow them to cross. A couple of students had been killed trying to race to class so the Community
had constructed the walkway about mid-way in the time she and Rhonda used to come up for the day. Though
the day was partially overcast, with a sea-tainted wind from the steep cliffs on the other side of the hill, there was a clarity
to the crisp air that demanded she stop and ignore the quizzical looks in her direction and breath it in deeply. She wanted
to remember this moment as clear when she was eighty years old as she was experiencing it at this moment!
As she slowly allowed it to slip from between her lips she noticed two twenty-something girls in slim skirts and neatly
tailored blouses looking in her direction and smiling as they walked toward her, their books and zippered notebooks pressed
against their chests, just below the decorative scarves knotted to one side in identical fashion. An automatic apology rose
up to block her throat as they drew near and noticed her, chatting between themselves about a class assignment due as soon
as they reached their designated building. She froze in place as they neared, pretending an interest in the three cars pulling
to a stop at the pedestrian free crosswalk below their feet, but when she was forced to look up by their proximity she found
herself drawn by their pleasant smiles directly at her. Following them at a discrete distance, Juliet marveled at the manicured
lawns that rose and fell in graceful array, as if they had formed organically from the landscape rather than having been set
in place for their utilitarian purpose. And even after the pair disappeared gracefully into the lobby of one of the masonry
and tinted glass buildings she continued to walk down the meandering cement path, pausing only when the walkway stopped abruptly,
giving way to a dirt path between century old Redwoods clothed in majestic height and still shadows, calling to mind the Native
Peoples who lived here long before the lengthy railroad was built linking San Francisco to the Coast. She belonged her! She
didn’t know how, or when, but she belonged here and she knew it to the depth of her being.
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End Chapter 1
