Love Letters to My Life #49: Settling in to my forever home

Santa Barbara: views and natural beauty everywhere

(We know the day we were born, but most of us do not know the day we will die. This love letter to my life is written on the day I've designated as my death day: the 17th of every month, and reminds me to be grateful for my joy-filled life. Once a year I get to celebrate both my birth and death days on the same day. -- Joyce Wycoff)    

     Two months ago, I moved into a new life.

Along with 18 boxes, two chairs and a mattress from my former life, I moved into 2 clean, white, and very empty rooms, amidst a community of 215 seniors. 

As many of you know, I’ve moved around … 60+ homes through 9 states and Mexico, winding up back in a place I fell passionately in love with 42 years ago: Santa Barbara. I never dreamed I would be able to return … the housing prices are as ridiculous as you’ve heard.

But, here I am, grateful to find a unique and affordable retirement community … the mountains and ocean feel like a familiar embrace. Long-time friendships are rekindled; new ones sprouting. Memories of former years still drift like fog through the streets, occasionally melancholy but mostly sweet.

During these first two months, I’ve sold both of my RVs and kluged together the basics of what I’m now thinking of as my forever home. 

I’m going to let a few photos do the talking on this love letter.

Beach colors

Mediterranean climate where everything grows.

UCSB Student housing mural.

Play dates and new experiences.

Mountains and ocean.

Perhaps, a mural I found today offers the punchline to this story:

Sweet Peace #24: Returning to a place known and unknown

2001 Memorial

In case I’ve ever wondered, I would not have made a good pioneer. Those hardy folks felled trees to build cabins without the benefit of step-by-step instructions in four languages and exactly the right number of screws in little plastic bags labeled 4C.

In the time it has taken me to assemble a wire storage cubby delivered by amazon and held together by ingenious plastic doohickeys, they could have skinned a bear, turned it into a parka and mukluks, and headed out to snare snow rabbits for dinner. My survival skills would have been measured by an egg timer.

I thought this would be an easy move. After three significant downsizings, I was living in an RV. How could moving be an issue when I had so little stuff? The challenge came when I moved from an everything-is-built-in RV to a bare-walls apartment. Even when you have little stuff, if there’s no place to put it, it looks like chaos.

However messy this move has been, I’m here, in the place I never dreamed I’d be able to return to, the place I fell head-over-heels in love with 42 years ago. One interesting aspect of this move is that I moved back to a place I know well (Santa Barbara) but wound up in a neighborhood that’s like a foreign country. Isla Vista is the unincorporated community home of UCSB, population 15,000, mostly university students and employees.

Beneath this tranquil, ocean-front community, rests a history of violence. Five people were killed in a vehicular homicide in 2001 and a murderous rampage in 2014 left six people dead and another fourteen injured. Plus, you could say that the same war in Vietnam which brought me to California in 1968 also brought me to this place where I plan to end my days.

The late 60s were a time of violent protests. In February, 1970, UCSB students began to riot and wound up burning the Bank of America. Governor Reagan sent in the National Guard but the tension continued for two months and finally abated after a student was killed.

During those days of conflict, student population dropped and a recently constructed dorm was sold to a group who turned it into an independent, senior living community … Friendship Manor … my new home. Who knows what new adventures this new life will bring, however, on my morning walk, I heard three different languages being spoken by young students just beginning their own adventures.

I am deeply grateful to be in this place at this time.

Love Letters to My Life #41: A new possibility opens up buried grief

Sunday morning on Garden Street

(We know the day we were born, but most of us do not know the day we will die. This love letter to my life is written on the day I've designated as my death day: the 17th of every month, and reminds me to be grateful for my joy-filled life.)    

Change comes in many forms from the slow creeping rise of oceans to the sharp cataclysmic fractures of the earth or fire-spewing volcanic eruptions. Aging is a slow form change, advancing cell by cell, obscured by the blur of life until time and the river sweeps everything away in one last heartbeat moment, leaving a barren but fallow griefscape for those left behind.

I am in Santa Barbara. It’s not where Richard died; it’s where we lived. Its streets trace our former life like lines criss-crossing the palms of my hands. I’m left wondering how I will make new paths in this deeply furrowed soil as I plan the return to our place, the place we claimed when love was new, where memories of shared sights and sounds, loves and losses, roll in and out like morning fog. 

This Thanksgiving season of his death is especially poignant as I walk through the inescapable past; every step a paper cut memory: the what-ifs and if-onlys, the words still unspoken, the remembered hopes and dreams of yesterday, the finality of change that has no tomorrow. 

With this possibility of returning with new skills and dreams as well as deeper wisdom, softened and strengthened by grief, I tug at the door so firmly closed years ago. The beauty of this place floods in mingling with the pain, the tears, the joy and heartbreak. Years of solitude and carefully controlled sorrow shatter into a what-now confusion as this place I adore invites my return, alone, without the love and the man who brought me here so many years ago. 

 All the things I know, all the wisdom I’ve gathered, cluster like monarchs on a somber day: colorless things waiting for warming sunshine before spreading their bright wings and continuing on their way. I know that sunny day will come to me also; I just have to walk forward into this gift of life, this one more chance to live in the only place my heart calls home.

Richard and baby Ava (now 20)