Directions to My House

First you must travel to California. If you are driving from the east, take Interstate 80 up and over the Sierra mountains and down down down into Sacramento. Keep driving west until you see the amazing Jenga silouhette of the city of San Francisco balanced on its own spit of land in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It's a wondrous place to visit.

My husband and I never had kids, so we put time and energy into finding and creating a place to live that suits us. We loved Boulder, Colorado, until it got too noisy, crowded, and privileged, but we will always cherish that place. We loved Carlsbad, near San Diego, mostly because we had both mountains and ocean nearby, but it was even more crowded. Northern California is where we finally landed. That was a long time ago now.

You'll admire San Francisco, but skirt its edges on the Richmond Bridge. From Interstate 80, turn north. Take Highway 580 over the bridge above the sparkling bay with its ships and sailboats, windsurfers and occasional whales. Merge onto Highway 101, the long strand that links the inland valleys of the Pacific coast like jewels tethered to a necklace.

A co-worker who knew I yearned to leave San Diego suggested Mendocino County, so I visited one July 4th weekend. I flew into Sacramento on Friday morning and immediately drove my rental car to Ukiah. From there, on the twisty, turny, up and down Orr Springs Road that is perpetually in various stage of what the state calls "failed" condition, I headed west toward the ocean. It took me along rolling hilltops of golden grasses and past artists seated in front of easels. It snaked down an impossibly steep grade to a hot springs, then wound through deep woods to a state redwood forest preserve. Finally, it ended at the Pacific ocean. During the entire drive, the place reeled me in like a lightweight crappie.

Travel Highway 101 through Marin, Petaluma and Santa Rosa. Healdsburg is a good place to take a driving break: Walk around the plaza and enjoy wine tasting at any one of a number of restaurants and tasting rooms. Maybe stay the night.

For many years, during college and my first work as a reporter for weekly newspapers in New Hampshire and Maine, low rent was far more important than a place that matched my desires. In some cases, I didn’t have a window at all.  When I moved to Boulder and founded the Boulder County Business Report (now renamed BizWest), that changed.  I rented a second floor office and there was a window near my desk that looked out into the spreading branches of an old maple. That tree view has stuck, from office to office, home to home.

It's a little weird, but in my current job as director of communications at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, the only way I got a second floor office with view into some aspens was because a co-worker died suddenly.  Once the office was vacant for a month, I lobbied to move in, ghost or no.

We built a home near a rugged hilltop in remote northern California that was beautifully designed to fit us like a glove (my office looked into a Japanese maple) but a nightmare to build.  The place is sublime and nearly impossible to find on the first go. For contractors and others who knew the area and roads, I wrote out elaborate directions.  If the visitors weren't from the area, I'd just drive down to the bottom of the dirt road where it turns to pavement and meet them there. There are many crazy stories of desire and rage and even heartbreak from the building of that place that now suits us so well, and those stories are directions to who we are now as a result.