I was born and raised in Southern California. My mother was a Hollywood costume designer. She worked on 63 motion pictures and was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for Color Costume Design in 1962. She didn’t have children until her 3rd marriage, and I was her first, born when my mother was 39 years old.
My extended maternal family were Arizona ranchers descended from settlers who came west in the 1800s. My grandmother was born in Arizona in 1889 and became a teacher in Prescott, Az. My southern grandfather got his medical doctorate at Virginia Medical School at the turn of the century, and came west to be the doctor to the Indian Reservation outside Prescott.
I grew up in Beverly Hills. But my roots are not city. We lived in Benedict Canyon. My mother built one of the houses far up the canyon, in the wilds of the chaparral foothills between L. A. Basin and the San Fernando Valley. As a child, I hiked all over those hills, following deer trails and later when I had a horse, I followed dirt paths and fire breaks to get a long ways and come down in different parts of the city to visit friends, or just explore. I was never a city girl by nature. Which is why I left.
I live out here on the prairie, not completely by choice, because it’s close enough to the city, and to Boise State where I got my degree and spent a few years teaching, that I can drive there in less than 40 minutes. I loved the mountains, but could not live where I did in Garden Valley and drive all the way to BSU every day. I have come to love the prairie in many ways, because I love wide open spaces, and I love rocks and big vistas. But I don’t love the prairie better than other wildlands.
I probably love the beach the most of all. I spent a lot of time with my feet in the sand at the edge of the Pacific, because I grew up in Southern California. I lived on the beach in San Diego a while. And then I lived for a decade on the beach in Hawaii before I moved to Idaho. I love the solitude of walking, so really anywhere I can do that, I can fall in love with the land. But walking on the beach is my favorite. I used to walk the north shore of Kauai in the winter, when there wasn’t a soul on the beach, and the storms brought in beautiful shells by the bucketfuls on the rough surf.
At my age, my children are beginning to worry about me living “way out” on a ranch. It’s a lot of work, and I have rattled and worked my bones so hard, I hurt now. Soon I will be older and more tired. But moving to the city is not an option. In my head I see cities as interesting, busy, social places where smart, creative people can gather, and where you can spend time exploring museums and culture. But Boise has one museum and limited culture. The cities that would be interesting would be New York, or Paris, or something huge & bustling & ancient, and then I would go crazy from the katzenjamer, and die from lack of a vista and poverty, because places like that are only great for the wealthy.
My mother retired and built a real adobe home in Sedona, Arizona that she designed herself to be full of light. The country around her was wild enough to give her the sort of freedom she had always loved about our Beverly Hills hill home, and later her home on 22 acres in Boonville, Mendocino County, California. But the Village of Oak Creek was city enough to be okay as she got older. I tried to get her to move to an assisted living place in the Village when she was sick with kidney failure the last two years of her life, but she wouldn’t budge. I understand that now. She dropped dead walking to the bathroom to take a shower–in her beautiful upstairs bedroom of the adobe house that looked out on the red cliffs. Her lovely adobe and tile house had fallen to dust and disrepair around her. I had to deal with dead creatures wrapped in paper towels that she kept in the freezer, intending to paint them. I had to deal with broken pottery shards in buckets in the patio, and my sister’s ashes in a cardboard box under my mother’s easel chair. But it was perfect and should not have been any other way. The end of her life should not have been neatly wrapped up, just so I could handle it without effort.
I worry all the time that when I am gone my son will go through my things with impatience, and be eternally annoyed with me that I was not neat like him, and didn’t get rid of all my accumulated stuff and pack myself off to a comfy condo to make his life easier. I worry that life will become too hard for me out here on the prairie. But I don’t want to give up and just live the last decades of my life in some way that will make it easier for my children. I am finally finding my true self in all the life and years I have worked or squandered, and I have finally earned my own footsteps on this earth.
I don’t hate my mother for refusing to go to some tidy little care facility so I didn’t have to worry about her, or for not making my life easier after she died. Much to my dismay, I have become more and more like my mother. I don’t want to move to Sedona, or Tuscon, or New York or Paris, or maybe not even the beach, because they are all places too far from my children and my wonderful grandlings, Beryn, Tylie, & Colt.
So I don’t hold any negativity or resentment for my mother for leaving me with the burden of her independence. I miss her. And love her still, so much it hurts. I am proud to have been her daughter. And now, somehow, I must find a balanced, thoughtful way to become a great deal more like her.
