Sonoma ghosts

Home towns are where our ghosts live.  Ghosts of relatives, now dead, and of friends, now lost.  But especially ghosts of ourselves and our siblings -- ghosts of ourselves at every age.  For me, perhaps, the ghosts I see most clearly -- my ur-ghosts -- are of myself at 13, my brother at 10, and my sister at 5.  

My home town was a medium-sized city on the Columbia River in Southwest Washington.  That's where we three kids grew up, from birth through high school.  Even after I had left town for college and graduate school, I considered that home town my "home."  Not until I started law school, at age 31, did I begin looking elsewhere -- ultimately, not so far away, in Seattle.

But sometimes, we also acquire home towns of adoption, towns that come along later in our lives, towns in which our lives become so ingrained that they also are haunted by our ghosts.  For me, such a town is Sonoma, California.  

I've never lived in Sonoma, which makes calling it my adopted "home town" a bit awkward, but such is the reality.  When I visit Sonoma, I do see ghosts.

My sister, her husband, and her oldest son moved to Sonoma in the mid-70s.  Sonoma now, of course, is nationally known as a center of wine-tourism, its central Plaza surrounded by hotels, fairly expensive bars and restaurants, and purveyors of luxury goods.  And a much-utilized ice cream shop.   Our oldest ghosts, however, arose out of an era when the town, although already a tourist attraction with many reminders of Californian pre-Gold Rush days, was also still a town with a more decidedly agricultural flavor than it possesses now -- a town where you could find a feed and seed store on the Plaza.     

My sister's two younger sons were born in Sonoma.  She, her husband (a physician), and her three sons lived -- and held court -- in a pleasant, but not extravagant, house on a hill above Sonoma Valley.  I visited them probably twice annually.  Over the years, I became acquainted with their friends, scattered around the valley.  I played uncle to her kids, taking them with me on hiking trips, once they reached their teens.  Today, I know my way around Sonoma better than I know large parts of my own home town in Washington.

These paragraphs are all introduction to the fact that I spent the past week attending a de facto family reunion in Sonoma.  The occasion was the return to America, for the first time since before the pandemic, of my sister's middle son Denny, an adventuresome sort who has spent several years teaching middle school in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  He arrived with his wife Jessie, who is also a Sonoma native.

Greeting Denny was the occasion for our gathering, but -- like a wedding or a funeral -- the gathering also served as an excuse to meet up and socialize with folks we see all too seldom.  Couples and individuals were coming and going during the six days I was in Sonoma.  Besides all the relatives, an old friend, Chris, who Denny and I met during a trek in Peru 25 years ago, came up from San Francisco, and we visited one of my sister's oldest friends, Francine, who we found confined to quarters by a poorly-timed broken ankle.  We also had a chance to visit with Pascal -- whose name appears in numerous reports on this blog of our foreign treks together -- and his wife.  They moved back to Sonoma from San Francisco several years ago.

The six days passed all too quickly.  We all love to eat, and we were in the right town for that activity.  Several of us love to hike, and we did a couple of hikes in the hills -- hills beautifully garbed in the temporary green of Spring -- surrounding Sonoma.  Many of us, in addition, enjoyed a short walk through hills to the remains of Jack London's "Wolf House," in near-by Glen Ellen.  I tried to tell myself that these hikes were working off the calories consumed during our many meals, but my bathroom scale, once I was back in Seattle, just laughed at my presumption.  

Both meals and hikes were opportunities to do the one thing most of us enjoy more than eating and hiking -- which is, of course, talking.  Subjects ranged from the early days (early, for us, that is) of Sonoma, through our more recent adventures, and forward into our plans for the future.  All served up, spiced and well seasoned by our family's famously bizarre sense of humor.

I find many ghosts in Sonoma.  Ghosts of loved ones with whom we once shared meals but who are no longer with us; ghosts of ourselves as children, and as young people; ghosts even, perhaps, of friends who have drifted away to other parts of the country.  As with all families, some of those ghosts represent unhappy times.  But most of my own family's ghosts move happily about the city.  This week, we found ourselves surrounded solely by ghosts who were not only happy, but ghosts who gladly joined in our general hilarity.

We need to do stuff like this more often.  As do all families.