March 2005


A busy few weeks left me with little time to post anything to this blog. But, it was a wonderful, yet thoughtful time.

My daughter and I have a tradition of spending time at Lake Tahoe each year during our birthday month, April. We didn't get there in 2005 because of our impending move to Georgia but we made a commitment to get there this year. And we did.

I was to fly out of Atlanta at 6 a.m and a good friend, who lives in Atlanta, suggested I come down and spend the night at her place and she would drive me to the airport. What an angel! I took her up on the offer.

I started this so long ago that I should probably just delete it and move on but I learned something on this trip that surprised me.

The trip out to Lake Tahoe was long and exhausting. I had had knee replacement surgery in October and thought I was more than ready to tackle this flight back to territory I knew so well. I was wrong. Flying isn't fun or fast anymore and it took twice as long as I anticipated to get to Sacramento, pick up my rental car and head up to Grass Valley to pick up my daughter and head for Lake Tahoe. But beyond the exhaustion was the fact that I didn't live there anymore and even though I had left only 7 months before, it might as well have been years ago.

My whole family is undergoing great changes right now. My grandchildren both graduated from high school within the past couple of years and are getting themselves started toward their own lives. My daughter would like to move back to the east coast but may not be able to do that for years. My husband and I are getting older and time has become a quantity that I am all too aware is slipping away and cannot and should not be squandered. The trip did that. It squandered time. I did enjoy it but not as I had when I lived 4 hours away in Sonoma County. Then I had a connection to the whole state by virtue of having lived there for so long. Now I was a visitor and I felt as if I were stopping by to see a house I'd spent time in, had pleasant memories of and didn't belong in anymore. I hadn't been away long enough to want to go back to the neighborhood I'd lived in and see the house I thought I'd spend the rest of my life in. Don't get me wrong, I have no illusions about the problems we faced had we stayed in California but, there is and will always be, a tug on my heart whenever I think about the place and the time and all the good and bad things that happened there. I wouldn't change that time but I think I'll wait awhile before I go back again.

But here are some pictures of the places I love in shaky old California.