Valley Oaks Blues
A Fireside Chats excerpt
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
The Valley Oaks Mobile Home Park was an oasis in a stereotypical wasteland of trailer trash. Whether transformed by the magical grace of its live oaks, its meandering stream or the simple good fortune of stable, crime-averse tenants, Valley Oaks had always managed to skate clear of toilet-bowl lawn ornaments, refrigerator and car-hood fencing and the dizzyingly sweet and sulfurous fumes of methamphetamine labs. The park’s diverse tenants communed under a lush canopy of gray-green leaves and gentility more commonly ascribed to the explicitly affluent landowners who locked themselves in their towers up in Brook Hills or Morro Hills or Rolling Hills.
Not far from sea level, Valley Oaks’ residents were more akin to the salt of the earth. Artists captured the park’s pastoral landscape from the decks attached to their doublewides. Elderly couples walked the winding streets at dusk, their matching oxygen tanks in tow. Immigrants shared the earthy bounty of their verdant, well-measured gardens, and their respectful children always waved hello. Retired widows and widowers had ready and willing partners for their serial games of bridge and whist and the occasional roll in the graying hay. Eccentrics found accommodating neighbors who laughed at their antics or agreeably ignored them. People escaping raucous, chaotic lives found sweet solace in the pacific lanes and sage-scented breath of the community.
Indeed, the friendly tranquillity of the park was, Dorrie Cupa felt certain, the perfect — no, the only — place fit for nestling into her final days. And she had known plenty of less-qualified nests and nesters over the wide-ranging course of her life.
She awoke late-morning, as was her norm, to a chorus of birds — wrens, towhees, sparrows, scrub-jays — all vying for tasty morsels revealed as the morning shifted toward noon. After decades of rising with the sun in obligation to others, Dorrie was enjoying her natural nocturnal rhythms. She came alive in the dark; she loved the skies, the songs of the night, the cover of shadows. She would have howled with every moon, had she no neighbors. But she was content with crooning the tunes she used to belt in her youth. She would serenade the stars and the beasts who shared them with her, dancing through the night with her collection of seventy-eights and forty-fives, the albums and sheet music — music once devoured and then dedicated to a decade of audiences, until a consensus of disapproval of her burgeoning belly hooked her from the stage.
Rising slowly now, to avoid the vertigo of her eighty-eight years, Dorrie noted a different pitch to the birds’ songs as she hummed the Eames Brothers’ “Indian Summer Blues,” whispering a line or two: “Too bad you’re leaving, but I know you got to go.” She stretched her crinkled body, naked but for the turquoise and silver coiling every limb and the tattoo on her left breast, once bold and brash, now elongated and faded with the reach of age. “Live and love well,” it said, two things she had practiced avidly and with varying results until she got them both just about as good as she figured she could.
She took her old Brownie camera to the window and snapped the view, as she did every day, not wanting to forget one moment of her life and hoping her eyes wouldn’t go before she did, so her photographs would always serve as ready reminders. She donned the blue jeans and shirt she had tossed earlier that morning on the armchair by her bed, slipped her feet into ancient moccasins, and walked just a little gingerly toward the caffeine awaiting her in the kitchen. She touched the turquoise necklace that lay heavy on her chest and said “Good day” to her multitude of elders and cousins and siblings and friends and enemies, as she passed each along the hallway. She paused at the end by her Antonio, her dear husband of inadequate years.
“Beat you by ten thousand, three hundred and twenty-five days, Dear One. Ha!” And she kissed the glass that kept her husband’s lips, flung to the winds some twenty years before, from her own.
She put coffee on the stove to perk, rolled her cigarette and dropped some loose tobacco into her breast pocket, then headed for the yard to give thanks to Mother Earth for her many gifts, including allowing her to awaken yet another day more alive than dead.
As she stepped outside, she understood with one deep and smoky breath of the Santa Ana wind why the birds had altered their tunes, and then she heard a muffled, incomprehensible voice booming through the trees and someone banging on her front door. She tucked the cigarette in her pocket and walked back through the house, picked up her Brownie and opened the door to two young men breathing heavily and blinking fast, windborne ash caught by their ruffled hair.
“You gotta get out!” one of them blurted. “The fire’s coming!”
“Yeah,” said the other. “You have to be out in ten minutes, Ma’am. Do you need help packing up?”
Dorrie looked into their faces, not yet bearing the marks of much experience, and she took their picture. She could see they were as scared as they were eager to be part of the biggest thing that had ever happened in their short Fallbrook existence. But their image dimmed as she was struck by the vision, oddly out of context given her relative good health, of her life replaying on an ethereal screen only she could see.
• • •
The greasy smoke of a cook fire beside her father’s truck seemed to Dorrie a welcome alternative to the dust that had driven them westward, filling their nostrils and ears, their creases, even the folds of her most private part. She did miss little Wilma, her younger sister. The pretty one, she was married off to anyone but a farmer before they packed for California, the meager remnants of their life leaving plenty of room in the truck for people, flesh-and-blood and remembered. She never knew the three boys lost to the flu in 1918, the year she was born, but she missed them anyway. …
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