When you move away, you set up life somewhere else.

Often you rarely return.

After ten years in Riverside, we moved to Altadena for fifty-five years, and rarely went back to Riverside.

We did periodically drive back to see the Christmas lights on the Mission Inn.

We did sometimes drive out past Riverside to Redlands to see a concert at the Redlands Bowl. We saw the Romeros, the First Family of the Guitar, all four of them, who told us about their roots with Redlands, how, if I remember it correctly, they were performing a concert and got a call from the hospital that the baby was born.

I had lived for a year in Buffalo when I was in the fourth grade, so I had a few shallow roots there, but it took almost a lifetime to get back for a visit.

And now I’m sitting in the family house in Dunsmuir. Chaz and Kristina bought it as a get away house, a just-in-case retreat. It’s a house I love immediately, in a town I love immediately.

Shirley had been here before I had, so she one-upped me. I’m catching up with memories I never knew about.

And now I’m just sitting here looking around and being emotional.

If we ever sell this house, because of the need for money, and the world situation if it doesn’t get better, I know how it works and I’m saying goodbye to Dunsmuir. To neighbors who are now close friends. To the streets where I’ve walked. To the places for food I love. To the Library, with friends and people and books and friends.

I’m not a nomad. I put down roots. I know that when I pull up stakes and move, the roots are still there.

Even if everything around them has changed, the roots are still there alive and I can re-connect and awaken them from memory.

It happened in Riverside. After many years, we went back to see that the Crest was gone, our little student married housing in its own park where we spent the first years of our lives together.

It was cleared, bulldozed, getting ready for high rises.

We drove past the corner on Third Street. The grand house was gone.

In amazement, we found it moved to the entrance to Riverside among all the other grand houses.

Without me there as Dunsmuir waxes and wanes, the Dunsmuir memories will fade, pull loose, pull apart from their roots. I try to take the roots with me. Maybe I can plant them in a little pot on a little shelf, and water them with tears.

And now I feel it deeply close to home. After the Altadena fires, so many people lost everything. Their roots in the very ground have burned, because they cannot afford to rebuild. That part of their lives is lost with the house.

Sometimes the past is moved, to live another life in another location. I don’t know what to say about that.