I’ve missed you!

I hope you’ll all come on this trip with me, from Sacramento (CA) to Las Vegas (NV)! It’s about a 10-hour drive…and about 40 years.

After living in the Sacramento (CA) area for over 40 years, it was time to move closer to family. For many years, I had to drive 10 hours north to see my daughter, 10 hours south-east to see my son, and 10 hours south to see my brother. (The American West is just too darn big!)

Our house in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael was plenty big for all 4 of us plus a big dog, way back then. Lots of bedrooms, big yard, nice pool… but for the last two decades there was only one of me and many of them at great distances, so I always did the driving.

(If you enjoy details, or are curious why I usually chose to drive instead of fly, see the blog from March 10, 2022, called “Driving a Marathon.”)

And what a drive it is! 564 miles to my son’s house. 580 miles to my daughter’s, and about 500 to my brother’s. Always done in a single day. To get to my son’s requires driving several hours of numbing ‘auto-pilot’ the whole length of the Central Valley flatness, then up 4,000 feet into and over the Tehachapi Mountains and immediately down into the Mojave Desert for several more hours.

The town of Barstow (pop. 25,415 this year) is a welcome respite from the unending desert, just a few hours past the airline cemetery outside Mojave (the town, which is in the desert of the same name), at the foot of the Tehachapis.

To get anywhere far from Sacramento, you must go up and over mountains – and their accruing weather challenges. Winter trips to my daughter (over the Siskiyous and the Cascades) were usually out of the question. When snow or sleet is blowing sideways through a mountain pass at 5 or 6,000 feet, a little car like mine is not a safe place to be, even with chains or snow tires. Even the southern Tehachapis, only about 4,000 feet, can be forbidding and dangerous in the winter.

So for over a year, I tossed old stuff, found stuff I’d lost for years, packed up my life, and finally headed south.

But packing a life like mine is not your usual moving job. I’ve had many lives, many jobs, worn many ‘hats.’ Just packing up the many dozens of paintings was a daunting job! I’ve been an artist all my life, and the many walls of our house were covered with my work.

Like this, which is just one of my “Japan walls” —

…or this, my ‘music wall’ —

The packaging required for large paintings is enormous!…as is all the equipment I use to make the paintings (boxes of different kinds of paints, brushes, books, several easels, sketch pads, etc.). And over the 10 years when I was an independent publisher, my books won many awards… which all had to be wrapped and boxed. Smaller than paintings, but still fragile and numerous:

Each of my ‘hats’ was equally demanding, in terms of equipment… and moving it. Music, for example — a piano (and bench), a large accordion (as big as a huge suitcase), a crate full of musical scores, books and sheet music… small drums, a guitar, several flutes, music stands…. Each different aspect of my life took a lot of space in the moving truck. Only time will tell whether I’ll use all of them again…but they’re all integral parts of me.

I was already leaving behind a significant part of who I was, who I had been for those 40 years. Mother. Professor. Gardener. Publisher. Author. Orchestra founder and conductor. Public speaker. Marathoner. Climber. But the things, the equipment, the gear, the stuff that had made all those possible… that, I wasn’t willing to leave behind.

So a very large chapter of my life closes, and a new one launches. Fifty years ago, I could never have predicted, in my wildest imaginings, any of those adventures that took over my life. They did, though, and it’s been a wild ride!

I can’t even imagine the next part!