I share about the time in my life I lived in the woods, worked as a firefighter, and met my true love.
I lived in Del Norte, Humboldt, and Siskiyou Counties in California between the years 1976 and 1982. It began when I first left home at age seventeen up until the time my husband and two sons moved away. It was only a few, short years in which I lived there, but that beautiful region of coastal Northern California has always been home to me. Back then, I fell in love with the land and believed I would always live there, but life had other plans for me and I left. I've never stopped wanting to return.
Excerpt
He was running ahead of me, as usual, my eldest son, at that time only three years of age. I could see the boat shed across the river where my husband spent so many hours waiting to take someone from one side of the river to the other. The water level had finally gone down and it was haymowing time, no highwater to cross since spring had arrived. It is true, one-hundred inches of rain fell that last winter and the grass told of the long, wet days. Greenery and blue skies in the wind and I shouted ahead to my son and Barney Beagle to wait for me. He was already at the bottom of the hill. My shouting was swept up from the road by a sudden gust that carried it away.
The fence where we could stand and watch his dad mowing the field, was the best view of that perfect day, that spring morning in 1982. White clouds passed overhead like trains of steam and branches snapped loose from redwood and maple, blown down onto the dirt road and down along the creek. I held my younger son in my arms, the baby I bundled from the cold that may yet be in those shadowed woods we walked along. At the edge of the pasture, where hay was cut and formed neat rows, it was perfect. The river flowed nearby and all was forgiven of the constant rain that filled its banks and carried trees along to catch upon a further shore.
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