On
a recent springtime afternoon I sat on the patio outside
my kitchen and read a welcome letter from a friend
who lives in New York. Spring was on its way, he wrote,
but the trees hadn’t yet leafed out. I looked
up from the letter to my garden, sunlight slanting
prettily across the garden beds. It was a beautiful
mid-April day in California. We might have another
day or two of showers before summer but it had been
full-speed-ahead gardening weather for some weeks now.
My
friend Philip, his wife and 7 children, moved from
the El Cerrito hills area to upstate New York about
20 years ago. They went because his wife’s family
was there, and they were looking for a more peaceful
and affordable, rural lifestyle. Philip went first
to find a house they could buy outright with cash from
their small house here. The rest of the family followed
driving a car and pulling a trailer with all the belongings
they would take.
It’s worked out ok. The new house wasn’t
large but they had some land. They raised chickens
and even had a few pigs at the start. Philip is a master
carpenter who has been able to stay busy with work.
Snow came and went, summer heat came and went.
Now
the kids are grown and gone and the winter is almost
over for another year. Philip says they wanted to
live with more definite seasons but winter is the
least appealing, it’s just so cold. He’s
been working graveyard shift for a couple of weeks
building scaffolding on the outside of a factory building.
The wind comes in off the lake and the men wear insulated
coveralls over multi-layers of clothing and still they’re
cold.
Two
blocks from Philip’s house is a house for
sale, not large, he says, about 700 square feet, but
it’s only a couple of blocks from the lake. Real
estate is slow. Asking price $55,000.
All
of a sudden I’m interested. I was cold just
thinking of the cold but this is pretty fascinating.
There are houses for sale for $55,000? I hurry to the
computer and easily find the very house he has written
about. It’s just a little wood-sided house, not
much to it, but it looks fine. Certainly as a summer
cottage sort of house, maybe even year round.
I’ve
never been to that part of the world, have no idea
what the area looks like, who lives there other than
my friends, what sort of stores are there, or what
the lake is like. A lake to sail on, swim in? A lake
to watch birds fly around, to fish in? I wonder if
we could be happy in a little house that costs $55,000
in upstate New York?
My thoughts last about 5 minutes. Then I stop. I am
sitting in the sunshine in my garden. My family is
here. My work is here. I like it here. Can I really
imagine going somewhere where I have to work to be
warm?
Many
of our friends and clients have moved out of state.
Most of them said they couldn’t stand
the traffic, the congestion here anymore. And, of course,
they are right. I remember when it took only 10 minutes
to drive from Elmwood to North Berkeley, when it was
a cinch to find a parking space anywhere along Shattuck.
When Hink’s Department Store with its hardwood
floors and ladies who knew their stock was the place
to shop in Berkeley.
Anet
grew up in snow country. She’s from Illinois,
the southern part near St. Louis, but she says that
even as a child she didn’t want to stay there,
could easily give up the fun part of snow. After college
she visited a friend in California, her first visit.
She stepped off the plane in November and there was
sunshine! Within an hour she saw a most amazing sight – an
enormous jade plant growing outside.
Anet had grown a jade plant of her own during college,
placed it a window, protected it and coaxed it to a
height of 5 or 6 inches tall. In this new land jade
trees leaped to tall heights, as tall as people, and
they did it all on their own out of doors.
She
decided to stay. She flew back home, loaded up her
car and drove to California. I don’t think
she’d be willing to go to upstate New York, or
similar, even though there is a lake, even though a
house can be had for a lot less money than anything
here.
As
I say, we have friends who report success and happiness
in other places. We had one client who sold the house
her mother had left her and moved with her husband
and teenage daughter to Kansas City (his family was
there). Suddenly they were "millionaires" and
were able to buy a much larger house on a big piece
of land, plus new cars, plus put away money in a college
fund, plus cut back their working hours. Although our
client had never lived in the snow, she says she is
fine with it.
But we seem to be in good company here. More and more
people come to California. They come for the weather
and the people and all the good things we have here.
Pretty mountains and trees, snow sports nearby but
not too near, Whole Foods and Monterey Market and the
like, beautiful San Francisco and the ocean, and on
and on.
In spite of congestion and crime and high prices for
everything, especially high prices for housing, California
is a lovely land. |
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