Grandma's Sun
Excerpt from novel

The Moon Valley

This life - is a gift of freedom and self realization...
Your dreams are only as far as the reach of your hand
If you have the courage to dream it,
You must have the potential to achieve it;
"I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live,
Not exist. I shall not waste my days
Trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

Jack London
The Valley of the Moon

Yaro's academic wanderlust led his shifty feet to a new world, a leafy valley: Sonoma-Napa Valley, an enclave known in legends as the "Valley of the Moon." A bright young Chinese woman Dorean Woo, a colleague at work in Pasadena, brokered his interest in Santa Rosa and its "Valley of the Moon." The enclave was strange in location and Yaro's thoughts because he had never before heard of either.

***

"Yaro, you are a man of emotional dynamic who loves adventures. You might like to add Santa Rosa to your map of creative wanderings."

"Where is this Santa Rosa and what is so special about the place to warrant this dislodging of my life from beautiful San Dokito, however temporary?"

"Isn't that what curiosity is all about? What of its twin sister called adventure? You are the writer, find out. You have always loved the noise of silence. Fill up the album of time with the issues of human condition from a new perspective. Remember me, okay? Besides, he who will be a leader must learn to be a bridge."

***

The Pomo and Mimwok Indians were native to the Sonoma-Napa valleys of Northern California, northeast of the international city of San Francisco. Nature's visit here many millions of moons ago cited the most gorgeous and pictorial architectural-scape ever known to man. From the bays of San Francisco and its mile-deep precipice of undulating landscapes, to the limitless expanse of a saucer-shaped valley, craters to the north and northeast were some of nature's approximations of geographic beauties which cataclysmic volcanic visitations sculptured out of the fiery angers of the deep. The famous, occasional revisionist visits of nature have never let the residents of these enclaves forget who gave birth to the picturesque wonders, anxieties and the risks with which they lived.

1906, 1948 and 1989 were not dates of romantic rendezvous, but of natures' Armageddons on human lulling complacency, ingratitude and abuse of nature's geographic architectures. It was the saucer-shaped valley that constituted Sonoma-Napa basin. Occupying the center, or near it, was Santa Rosa, a city of early Italian "agriturismo" and activities. Bordering the fringes of the valley were stunted, rolling mountains and hills providing solid shields against possible tsunami from San Francisco's sleepy lagoons and bays. Who could tell how many miles high nature trajects its tsunami, if it meant to send a punitive gigantic earthquake to the area? The world had been waiting for a long time now, for "the big one" which scientists predicted. This message of doom is not lost on anyone who lives in California. And because of it, many others fear to want to live in the state. They avoid it like a plague.

The geological upheavals created a rural rapture that was the envy of the world. Rich sediments and rain were an abundant collusion. Nature's greenery inundated the landscape-leading to a promiscuous cultivation of grapevines and selectable wineries, famous throughout the globe. The temperate climate conspires with nature's excellence to make the area an ideal habitation for European descendants who formed the bulk of the demography here. The minorities were indeed very minor, a mere sprinkling of sort, a numerical insignificance.

***

Sonoma-Napa Valley, which was the land of the moon, was a cultural normalcy away from the hurly-burly of Southern California. It was as if this valley in the north of California was actually another country within the state. It was neither fully cosmopolitan, being generally, a crossroad of extremities. Conservative, on the one hand, especially the older citizens, who time had stabilized and, on the other hand, were the liberals, especially its green youthful citizens. Time had failed to tame its licentious frivolity that its proximity to San Francisco promoted. The Caucasian young were like the other. They craved early parenthood for self-affirmation. Too crazily uneasy to be alone, yet they were without care for the results of what 'humpiness' fostered. The rebirth of life, which the spring invoked, inflamed the atmospherics of sensuality and sexuality. It burned the mind with panic desires.

All over the land, one found cozily prissy little homes, an aesthetic throwback to the turn of the century after the earthquake of 1906 hit Sonoma County most viciously. There were no minaret types of skyscraper announcements of snarling, rude intimidating structures into the air. Serenity was king and culture, its nurturing was motherhood. Every tree, every landscape, every architecture and sidewalk could speak the language of cultured civilization to every observer.

...