Taxes, Money, and Thoreau Envy

After reluctantly (understatement), verging on nauseously, paying a stupefying amount of taxes this week to a government run by a snake-oil salesman with a zero approval rating from me, I have money on my mind. Have you noticed that there is apparently a law of nature about money that when you are especially struggling to make ends meet, and an unexpected expense from one area of your life bombards you, that you suddenly experience a landslide of unexpected expenses from other areas of your life as well? Expensive calamities attract one another and arrive in herds. Costly events must cast some kind of vibe out to the universe or generate an expensive-catastrophe pheromone or something. 

It seems that whenever I am at the point of turning out my pockets and finding only fluff, I get blindsided by some crazy expense, and then, simultaneously, my car breaks down and my cat gets sick. When I was pregnant with my second child, and anxious about how to budget for my maternity leave from work, I must have put that come-take-all-my-money vibe out to the universe. We went to a restaurant for dinner one evening, and when we returned, the neighbors descended on us. While we were gone, my 14-year-old cat was hit by a car. (He loved to go outside and was street savvy, but he couldn’t see very well or move very fast anymore.) The neighbors took my unfortunate fellow to a 24-hour vet clinic, where the staff tried to revive him, to the tune of hundreds of dollars, before he gave up the ghost. Do you have any idea how much it costs to have someone perform CPR on a cat? I loved that cat, but I had one child and another on the way, so I was extremely preoccupied with caring for little people at the time, and frankly would have preferred the cat to have had the decency to stage a budget demise. I did love that cat, and I wanted his ashes to bury ceremonially under my apricot tree, so I asked for them to cremate him, an additional expense.

This story continues. A few days later, I was driving to the vet to pick up my cat’s ashes and fork over my food money for the family for that month for services rendered, when the clutch went out in my standard transmission Honda hatchback. I coasted to a safe stop on the side of the street and walked (still eight months’ pregnant) to a nearby friend’s house to call my husband to come get me. This was back in that prehistoric time before cell phones, which we can all dimly remember if we have taken our gingko. It was cheaper to replace the clutch than to buy a new car, but the new clutch would cost the equivalent of two months’ food for our family. In parts alone. Because my husband actually did the work himself using the How to Fix Your Own Honda book, which was a thing back then, before computerized cars. Any mechanically inclined person could actually figure out how to repair their own car using one of those DIY car repair books. Having worked for four years as a machinist in the Navy, and with an excellent ability to solve puzzles, Ron could understand these books. (“It’s easy, you just follow the directions,” he said. Then gently pointed out that I was holding the book upside down.) Car repair used to be a good argument in favor of co-habiting with an engineering-type creature. Nowadays, with everything computerized, ordinary mortals having no specialized training cannot repair a car using a book. However, it does seem that certain mortals can, nowadays, fix a computer problem using self-taught skills and a smart phone. Therefore, I am still co-habiting with an engineering-type creature. Instead of inventing a self-driving car, I think the auto geniuses should invent a self-repairing car. But where was I? Oh yes, I was out of food money and expecting a baby. It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

On another occasion, a few years ago, just when my car needed a full new set of tires and brake shoes, the vet informed me (on an annual office visit) that both of my cats needed to have their teeth cleaned. Cleaning cats’ teeth requires a general anesthetic and runs hundreds of dollars per cat. Once again the cats and the car had it in for me. At least I wasn’t pregnant. In fact, all the children had left home by then so fewer mouths to feed. But it was a year in which I learned the repercussions of a basic law of economics:  when you earn more money you owe more taxes. What is up with that? Why do I even bother to try to earn more money in the first place? My tax therapist, AKA accountant, tells me earning more money is a good thing. He studied economics in college for six years so he should know, but I still have my doubts. And why can’t I write off the cost of having the cats’ teeth cleaned as a medical expense? The system is rigged.

The other day I realized that nearly half of my income goes to the combined cost of taxes, insurance, and interest on my mortgage. I pay an awful lot of money for invisible commodities. I might just as well be buying rocks lying around on the moon. This makes me want to give up on this century and go live in a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond like Henry David Thoreau. When did life get so complicated? And when did complicated get so expensive? And when did life insurance get so hard to understand? My life insurance agent says that if I live to be 100 that my policy will disappear. So I have to die before I turn 95 for my children to get all the money I put into it. I don’t need this kind of pressure. The stress could kill me.

I want a time machine to take me back before insurance was invented, but, for obvious reasons, after the dark chocolate bar was invented. A fictitious time I guess, because, according to the internet (which eerily knows everything), insurance was invented in the 1760s and the chocolate bar wasn’t invented until 1847. That’s just so wrong. And spending the lion’s share of my income on virtual stuff is also. But then, money itself is virtual. So maybe I would enjoy living in a time without it. I might get my wish on that if climate chaos causes a full systems collapse. But I don’t want to give away the plot of my next novel. Let me say, for the record, that I regret paying my taxes. After having righteously been a war tax resister for many years in the last century, in times when I had precious little income for the government to plunder, I feel ashamed to pay up now, when I have hit my stride and actually earn something more substantial.

Not long after the 2016 election, I reread Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” which is his reflection on spending one night in jail in 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against the American invasion and occupation of Mexico in the Mexican-American War and the institution of slavery (in particular the expansion of slavery into the Southwest). In truth, the poll tax was a more localized tax that was not used to pay for any federal shenanigans, but Thoreau was apparently a bit fuzzy on how all that worked. He stood on principle. Much to his chagrin, his aunt paid his poll tax and he was released in less than 24 hours. How ironic that I dearly wish I could withhold my income tax 173 years later for similar reasons – to protest the military, the nonsense at the Mexican border, and the institutionalized racism in this country. I never went to jail for refusing to pay my taxes. (The government eventually absconded with my back taxes by forcibly seizing the money from my bank accounts.) I did go to jail once in protest against nuclear weapons, and I spent three days in Santa Rita Jail, and I have written about that experience. I want to point out that I spent more time in jail than Thoreau. Plus I was handcuffed (he was not, the bum). He managed to turn one night in jail into a 173-year bestseller and all I got was a T-shirt. (Seriously, I have a Livermore Action Group T-shirt that says “Santa Rita Peace Camp.”) If Thoreau could get published writing about one night in jail, you would think I could get published writing about three days there. But I can’t seem to catch a break. What’s more, the food at Santa Rita was dreadful, and Thoreau got oatmeal for breakfast. Is there no justice? 

Thoreau's cabin in the woods on Walden Pond.

Adaptability of a Cockroach

A few weeks ago I went on a weekend getaway in Guerneville on the Russian River with a dozen close friends from my salad days in Berkeley. If one’s salad days were to refer to days when one eats salad, then I would still be in them. But you know what I mean – the days of my long-ago youth. Our group came from East and West, North and South, and gathered in a big house with not nearly enough bathrooms for so many seniors. We practiced our sharing skills. We also ate heaps of good food and laughed a lot. I did not have the last laugh, however. Roadside mulch had the last laugh. While slowly backing my car out of the tight parking situation at the bathroom-impaired house, I gently slid over the edge of the driveway and sank my rear tire into a comfy bed of damp, broke-down fir needles – in other words, fir mulch.

Stay with me. When this story gets back on the road it will head into climate chaos. And who can resist another story about climate chaos?

Our group almost didn’t meet up as expected at all that weekend because climate-chaos-induced biblical weather (read heavy flooding, downed trees, power outages, hail, sleet, massive snowfall, locusts, frog plague, and almond butter famine) nearly prevented some of us from traveling to our destination. We felt plenty fortunate to have the gang arrive as planned. (Especially when we saw Guerneville evacuated and under water only a week after we met up there.) So a car stuck in a bed of fir mulch was small potatoes. Even so, I needed to get the car out of the muck to drive home. Fortunately, one of the friends is a civil engineer and extremely resourceful when it comes to solving mechanical problems. He orchestrated a group effort to lift the back end of my car (a little Honda Fit, thank goodness), slide it slightly to the right, and set the tire on a wide board, then he managed to slowly back the car out of its predicament. The most miraculous feature of this incident is that no one put their back out. I attribute this to the fact that we had eaten most of the food that had arrived with me so the car weighed much less upon departure than it had upon arrival. And we, of course, weighed more so better leverage. This proves that you can eat your way out of any number of messy situations.

After rescuing my car, my civil engineer friend told me that he had taught both of his daughters that same trick for getting a car out of a ditch. He raised those daughters in the extreme winters of Massachusetts. (Why he and his wife left California to live somewhere where it snows up for half the year remains a mystery to me.) His daughters have used his method on more than one occasion to get out of a fix. He raised them to be resourceful and clever, and to think in terms of solving problems themselves rather than easily declaring defeat and calling AAA, which usually takes about a week to appear. Here is where I’m going with this:  that’s precisely the mindset we need to cultivate in our children and grandchildren so that they have a possibility of surviving the climate chaos beginning to engulf us.

I have spoken out and have worked to preserve and protect our environment for more than half a century now. I went to jail to protest climate destruction. (Where I involuntarily engaged in a hunger strike because the food was inedible for a vegetarian.) Could I have fought harder? Of course. Would it have made a difference? At this point, I have to say I don’t think so. People hear what they want to hear and believe what they want to believe. But my point is that I have understood the danger and recognized the catastrophic future we face for almost as long as I can remember. Yet I feel proud that I chose not to become a survivalist raising children in the depressing shadow of impending loss. Humans will have plenty of time to mourn when the loss really sets in. Let’s cherish the fragile wonders of this planet for as long as we have them. I want my children to rejoice in the wonder still before us. Although not a survivalist, I did do some things to prepare my children for a challenging future on Earth. Like my friend the civil engineer teaching his daughters how to rescue a car, I have taught my children certain survival skills. I intentionally raised them in a forest, close to the beauty and the ferocious wild energy of nature, where they learned to think for themselves, be resourceful, and find solutions to problems. On occasion they spent days in the wilderness with no electricity and limited water during winter storms. With no TV, they had to find creative ways to amuse themselves. They shared their home with all manner of beasts, requiring them to remain alert to their surroundings. Snakes in the car port (yes, sometimes rattlers), scorpions in the woodpile, skunks under the house, mice in the pantry, frogs in the bathtub (how they got there I’ll never know), insects, bats, birds, raccoons, wild turkeys, deer, wild pigs, and even big felines (bobcats and mountain lions). My children learned how not to panic. They are practical, realistic, and quite capable of putting on their big-person pants and doing whatever needs to get done.

I taught my children basic skills, such as how to grow food, cook, build things, fix things, and approach a problem. Even more than teaching our children and grandchildren basic skills for what lies ahead, we must cultivate in them habits of mind and certain attributes that will help them cope with climate chaos, such as resilience, resourcefulness, creativity, inventiveness, and courage. If they lack a skill they need, such as knowing how to sew on a button or raise chickens, then we want them to just teach themselves how to do it. We want them to know how to think critically and how to come up with solutions. We want them to try to come up with solutions. We want them prepared to make a shift in their thinking, perceptions, and way of living in the world when necessary. They need to have the perseverance to figure out how to make something work when it’s not working. They will need to make things work in ways that they never worked before. They need to stay positive and, most of all, we need to teach them to adapt. The most adaptable creatures on the planet are insects and for this reason they are the ones that have survived the most extreme environmental shifts. I want my grandson to have the adaptability of a cockroach.

The other part of surviving the climate chaos in which we find ourselves is inherent in the story of my friends lifting my car out of the ditch. Not one of us could have rescued my car on our own, but together we could lift it. The entire episode offers a neat allegory for the whole picture. I fell off the road. My friends used resourcefulness and the strength of the communal group to lift me up and set me back on the path. And no one even made fun of me for my foolish maneuver. Although, perhaps I heard a fir tree laughing. I am fortunate to have the community part happening for me in the post-apocalyptic present, but the adaptability part will keep me working. Can I make as much change as will be demanded of me at this late stage in my life? My grandson helps me practice by exercising my creativity muscle. I have to find my cockroach muscle and get it working.

 Guerneville not flooded. So beautiful.

Guerneville flooded -- we drove on this road only the week before.

Retirement Hobbies

Beware the inspired new retiree. After they have spent a year or two figuring out how to sign up for Medicare, these individuals will likely dive into that creative hobby they always wanted to pursue with near-religious fervor. The difference between a creative profession and a creative retirement hobby is that retired hobbyists have no carefully constructed audience (from a lifetime of achievement). Their audience is merely a close circle of supportive family and friends and a chatty couple with a cute Chihuahua whom they met while waiting on line at the pharmacy.

So, basically, when Mom retires and decides in a brilliant lightening-flash of genius to take up painting, her children had better begin clearing wall space for those paintings. Just when they have filled the walls with the scribble-scrabble produced by their children, they will be laid siege to an army of masterpieces by Mom, because what else will she do with the output from all her newfound creative productivity? Watercolors of wildflower-blanketed meadows, birds with eerily human expressions, picturesque streams running through forests, and her cat (repeatedly) in one of the three typical aging-cat  poses:  sleeping, eating, sitting up while pondering sleeping or eating. (Isn’t she the most adorable cat?) Mom can only give so many of these paintings away to the Chihuahua couple (and perhaps the pharmacist if the pharmacist makes the mistake of showing enough interest) and after that it’s all on her adult children.

Expect a similar outcome from the avid retired photographer, potter, glassblower, sculptor in large metal, jeweler, maker of wooden walking sticks, bird cage weaver, pajama knitter, tie-dyed shoestrings artist, whatever. Hope that your retired family member doesn’t develop unusual dietary interests, such as vegan juicing. Only a retiree has the time to clean a juicer.

If the retiree decides to learn to play the piano, then chances are you will have weeks and weeks of “Fur Elise” to look forward to, and after that the avid new musician will move on to ruining “The Spinning Song” for you. That piece is insidious. You will need to hire a professional pest removal company to get “The Spinning Song” out of your head once it gains traction. Although, it could be worse. Your darling retiree could take up the trombone, which doesn’t make any sound recognizable as music for several years in the hands of a novice. (Trust me on this, I speak from experience.) In fact, if you live near a forested area, hide a trombone from any enthusiastic retiree musician before he inadvertently summons a herd of wild pigs to take up residence, yearning for another uncanny replica of the mating call to emerge from that trombone.

You never know what exciting diversion will capture the fancy of an enthusiastic retiree. If you thought they would finally organize all the photographs, find and fix that weird problem with the plumbing, start growing herbs and making curative tinctures, or take up cooking gourmet French cuisine, then think again. No. They will start weaving homemade steel wool, become obsessed with nut-related limericks, alphabetize the canned food in the pantry, and decorate all the light switch faceplates with clown faces. It’s as if the practicality bone disintegrates at the stroke of midnight on retirement day one. Granted every once in a long while a geriatric genius becomes a superstar in their old age, like Grandma Moses. But don’t count on it in your own family.

This train of thought reminds me of a time, back in the day (in the previous century, I’m sad to say), when I was a college student working toward my degree in English, I had a good friend, also an English grad student, whom I will call Daisy. Daisy and I believed the naysayers who convinced us that we would never make a living from our first love, which was writing. So we frequently brainstormed fun professions we could enter to support ourselves while we each wrote our own version of The Great American Novel in our off-work hours. More practical than Daisy, I planned to work as a carpenter because I didn’t yet know the rampant sexism I would face in that trade. Daisy, on the other hand, would come up with the most hair-brained schemes. For a while she seriously thought she could earn a living as a cheese taster. She had read in a magazine article while waiting to get her teeth cleaned that big cheese companies hired tasters to give feedback on product quality. She even dragged me to a Cracker Barrel cheese outlet once to taste all the flavors for practice. I could see her point that it seemed like the right profession for us, since we both love cheese. But we never did figure out how to convince someone to pay us to eat it.

The one thing that stuck with me from these speculations about career opportunities with Daisy was an addiction to reading the classified ads, back before Craigslist ruined all the fun. I loved to see what other people did for a living and how much they could get paid for it, so I read the job listings in the newspaper every week for years, even long after I had established myself on a sound career path. It turned out that we had nothing to worry about because Daisy and I both used our English education to become professional writers; and we have both made a good living at it. I am not retired from the profession, but I have begun to consider what I will do in retirement if I ever manage to get there. I’ll probably just keep writing because I don’t know how to stop. Little did I know that all those years reading job opportunity listings would prepare me for this time in my life when my friends are retiring around me and taking up surprising crafts, such as refrigerator magnet collage or beading garage door opener pouches. The want ads taught me that people can make a living doing the darnedest things.

All this said, I think my retirement hobby, should I ever have enough money to retire, will be making chocolate. Organic dark chocolate. My loved ones won’t have to hang it on the walls, listen to it, wear it, or keep a garage door opener in it. And since, sadly, climate-change scientists predict that land suitable for growing cacao will be disappearing in the coming decades (because of warmer temperatures destroying the cacao habitat), I think it behooves us to eat as much organic dark chocolate as possible while it’s still available on the planet in order to appreciate this magical food given to us by the Creator before it ceases to exist. So chocolate it will be. However, if you or anyone you know will pay me to eat cheese, message me privately.

Not Memoirs

I have thought lately about writing my memoirs, but I can’t do it because as it turns out no one wants to be in them. Typical writer’s dilemma.

I have volumes of material to draw from after blogging for more than a decade, plus writing elaborate, epic holiday letters every year since 1984. But when I originally started my blog, and mentioned it to my father, he said, “Leave me out of it.” Meanwhile, each year when I complete the first draft of my holiday letter, I send it to my children to read what I said about them so they can make corrections or additions, and so they can veto anything they would prefer I did not say. My daughter vetoes almost everything right off the bat. “Just say I’m alive,” she suggests. Her brothers and my daughter-in-law run a close second at censorship. Everyone has privacy concerns. By the time they get done with it, the paragraphs about them have nothing left in them but adverbs. They rip the heart out of my most humorous anecdotes about them and slash my carefully turned phrases to smithereens. (Don’t tell them about this blog post. Shhh.) What movie they watched last night is private. Where they live, how old they are, where they work, and what kind of cheese is in their fridge are private. Off limits. You would think they are all in the Witness Protection Program. 

This is a classic issue writers face. We write from life. We write from what we know and whom we know. Authentic writing comes from our owned experience that is closest to the bone. But this involves other people, and mainly other people who play a primary role in our lives. And they want to protect their privacy. What a burden this puts on me to come up with vast quantities of engaging fiction out of thin air. Notice that I write a lot in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. I hope I have not offended any alien life forms.

My daughter has a terrific sense of humor. (I’m probably not supposed to disclose this.) Several years ago, I encouraged her to consider doing stand-up comedy. She’s funny. She finally got me to shut up about it by reminding me that most female comics rely on their relationship with their mother for most of their best material. Way to turn the tables, huh? A few weeks ago, she asked me if I could modify an old blog post in which I revealed her age so as not to reveal her age. Since the blog post was a personal reflection on her birthday (from her mom), I didn’t see how that would work. So I simply deleted the entire blog post. She seems to think that the whole wide world reads my blog. Honestly, on a good day, my father and maybe a couple of penguins read my blog. Consider yourself an aberration if you are reading this (unless you are a penguin). I felt confident that it will not hurt my chances of winning the Nobel if I deleted the blog post about my daughter’s birthday, so I did it to make her happy. All I want is for my children to be happy, like any Jewish mom worth her weight in kugel.

My husband has been a real mensch all these years living with a writer. He has stoically suffered a vast array of indignities in the service of humor on my blog and in my holiday letters as well as in other personal essays and autobiographical writing. It’s so easy to turn the idiosyncrasies, actions, and quirky personality traits, of someone I know so well, live with daily, and see so close up into funny stories. None of us could live perfectly moment to moment without doing occasional ridiculous, inexplicable, and just plain weird things. No one can live up to that kind of scrutiny. And here he is stuck with a writer-wife who is just waiting to pounce and harvest the stuff of his everyday life to go for a laugh. If he has the misfortune to drop a raisin on the floor, and makes picking it up look like an Olympic acrobatic event because he is old and doesn’t bend anymore, I can’t restrain myself from asking him to look around to see what else he can do while he’s down there; and then writing about it. I want to take this opportunity to thank him for being such a good sport. I might go so far as to call him my muse, but in truth, he’s pretty much mostly my amusement (which does in fact have the word “muse” in it, so there is an argument to be made there if he’s so inclined).

I should write my memoirs and then seal them in a time capsule with instructions for my great-grandchildren to dig them up in a hundred years and have them published. Sadly, they will have to remove all the football references since no one will have any idea what that’s about. Also, if my current backlog of rejection letters is any indication of the whims of the publishing industry, no one in publishing thinks I’m funny, and that may not change in a hundred years. It occurs to me now that I could make a living writing more entertaining rejection letters for publishers if they would let me, which they certainly would not. I would probably get rejection letters for my rejection letters. Honestly, a potato could write a more entertaining rejection letter than the ones I get from these publishers.

I suppose I must also face the fact that the planet may no longer exist as we know it in a hundred years. So if I create a time capsule, I would have to consider my audience, which could turn out to be algae and cockroaches, neither of which are famous for their literacy skills. Any way that I look at it, my memoirs are doomed to the ash heap of history. I won’t ever get to tell my version, and in a hundred years, if people are still around and I have descendants, they will hear the stories of my life through the filter of my children, grandchildren, great-grands; like a colossal game of telephone (does anyone even remember that game these days?). I hope the stories will retain a grain of truth and a dose of humor. Someone else will have to win that Nobel for telling the story of my life, because I would rather have my children feel secure in the fact that I have not revealed their favorite colors in a tell-all memoir. I am a Jewish mom before I am a humorist. So I’m zipping it. You will just have to imagine that I had a good life and that I’m funny. I sincerely hope you are not a penguin.

Fire Flight

My husband and I disagree about how to answer the question, “Where are you from?” He thinks that when people ask that question, they want to know where you were born and raised. I think they want to know where you live, your rooted home. As a born-again Californian, who has spent far more of my life in NorCal than anywhere else, why on earth would I answer that question by saying I’m from upstate NY? I have no clue what life is like in upstate NY these days other than it snows. A lot. And that’s why I left. So when Ron and I travel, and we start chatting with strangers, and they ask us, “Where are you from?” Ron answers, “Chicago,” and I answer “Northern California.” Then they give us a confused look because they could have sworn we are married. That’s my cue to say, “We make it work.”

I’m not just from NorCal, my heart is in NorCal. Until I moved to Mendocino County, I felt displaced in the world. But when we went out to the Ranch in 1991, I felt like I had finally found my home. I settled in, put down those proverbial roots. (Which, I suppose then grew into large proverbials or something.) I raised my children here. I made powerful friendships to last a lifetime. I became attached to places. I adore this landscape. I know the seasons. I know the trees here, the plants, the wildlife. I know what to grow in my garden. I know how destructive deer can be and when cityfolk visit and coo over the deer, I mutter “rodents.” And those evil, demented wild turkeys. “Oh how cute,” say friends from L.A., and I say please take them with you when you go. They dig up the garden, eat my fruit, break my trees in half, and, pardon my French, merde on everything (in excess – a bird has no right making such big merde). I know this land. But now, in the past couple of years, the land has stopped behaving as expected. And I know nothing.

Global warming has raised the temperature in Cali  so much that our dry, hot season is far longer. You can’t fool me with fake news and denials. I have lived here for 40 years. The temperatures in the hot season are much hotter. There are many more extremely hot days. Summer starts earlier and ends later. Usually we have less rainfall in the winter. The plants dry out and turn to husks, and they do it rapidly at the beginning of the summer. Trees dry out inside and fall down. In the late summer, deer eat things they never used to eat because there is so little out there with any moisture in it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually became carnivores just to get some fluid in them.  (Vampire deer? That’s a concept.) When a fire starts, it goes crazy and can’t be contained because the whole world is tinder. And I am not a lobster in a cookpot, oblivious to the rising temperature. I know it’s happening. So the question is what do I do about it?

Should I leave Cali, my beloved home, land of my heart? I’m not the only one. Others who live in my paradise have shared the same thoughts with me. Should we leave? I understand that one of the greatest reasons that fires are so deadly in Cali now is that more and more people are living in places that are close to natural environments. Frankly, I don’t know why anyone would choose to live far away from trees. I have to live near nature. Some of my best friends are trees. Houses near nature is exactly what my town is. It is exactly where my home is, and that is why I have friends whose homes have burned down. When we were on standby for evacuation for a week in August, and I was driving around with my most prized possessions in my car, I had to face the possibility that I could lose all my stuff. Yes, I know, it’s just stuff. But I like a lot of it and I want to keep it. I also like to avoid drama, and having your house burn down qualifies as drama. I also couldn’t fit all the things I wanted to take in my car. What scared me the most was how long it took me to chase down my cats and get them into the house. What a horror it would be to lose my old girls in a fire. Ron would be a basket case. He’s a hoarder. All those old shoes and magazines he is so attached to, well that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So now the forecast, as I write this, is rain coming in on Tuesday. We just need to make it a couple of more days and then we might be OK for this season. We might be able to take a breath (literally – a breath of clean air) and relax for this year, knowing we made it through the peak of fire season. But May is just around the corner. So I find myself wondering where I would go if I left my home. This brings to mind my ancestors, wandering Jews all of them, who fled oppression in Eastern Europe and Russia, leaving family, community, lifelong friends behind, and sailing across the ocean with no more than a potato in their pocket. (Perhaps they should have taken something more practical.) How did they do it? At what point did Grandpa Sidney say, ”time to go,” and kiss his parents good-bye. He never saw them again. Hitler killed them, and most of his family. They should have set sail with him. But I get why they stayed. It’s so difficult to pull up stakes and leave.

I feel foolish for staying here. It’s only a matter of time before this land of my heart burns up. I should find a sensible place to live, where it rains all year round, and is also safe from many of the other hazards of Climate Change, such as flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, massive snowfall, mudslides, heat waves. I realize these natural disasters have always been with us, but, seriously people, not in this profusion. If you think these are still completely “natural disasters” then you might as well stop “believing in” gravity. Some of those Midwestern states that you would think are safe, are not. They are susceptible to flooding, heavy snowfall, tornadoes, and a host of other traumas. Some Climate Change researchers in Portland recommend moving North of the 42^nd Parallel. That runs from the southern borders of OR and ID through the middle of PA and NJ. If I go above the 42^nd Parallel, then I will go as a Climate Change refugee and will live out the rest of my days exiled from Eden.

Oh, California, how I love you, how I mourn the loss of this beautiful land that has turned to dust in the wake of the fires. I think it is symbolic that the worst fire in our state’s history happened in Paradise. I am grateful for every day I have lived here. Now more than ever as I contemplate fleeing ahead of the inferno. If I do decide to go, then in years to come, when someone asks me, “Where are you from?” I will still say, “Northern California,” even if that’s not where I live anymore.