I am up in Monte Rio, California, one of the towns on the Russian River in Sonoma County, lesser known than its counterpart Guerneville. My friend S. lives there with her husband G. in a ramshackle house by the side of the road right above the river. I love it up here in the redwood forest, although I love it best when the sun is out and we can swim in the river or kayak.

I arrived here on Friday evening after 6 PM. My friend Lorelei, like me, loves to be surrounded by water and trees and jumped at the chance to drive me up to my friend’s house. We arrived with my travel backpack, my day pack and a couple of boxes of food I have been hauling around since I left my former home in Kensington. Lorelei snapped a few nice photos of me out on S’s deck. I call the one above “Sharyn and the Paycock.”

S. had spent the day clearing a space for me to sleep and making up a bed for me. I am sleeping on another high bed under a window with another window behind me: when it is dark I can see a spray of stars. There is enough room for my travel gear and a wide ledge for a lamp, my laptop, pens and my glasses. In daylight I look out into the trees and a purple buddleia growing up from the garden.

I have been down into the garden to sketch, to test out the almost-ripe blackberries and to sit in the sun. I drew the blackberries with watercolor pencils on watercolor paper and then saw a weathered white statue or mannequin leaning against the weathered white boards of the house. She was festooned with duct tape around her neck and speckled with mossy green. I had a postcard that I had painted over that had kind of a basket-weave pattern of gray and white, the perfect background to recreate the mannequin with leaves growing where her thighs ended.

Yesterday I asked S. if the mannequin had a name. She didn’t. “You can name her,” S. said.

“Penelope,” I said. It’s what came into my head because she looks like she has been waiting awhile down there in the garden.

S. and I have got up to no end of fun already. On Saturday we went out to a library sale where I replenished my supply of books. I had mailed a box of books off to my storage facility in Port Angeles on Friday before I left Martinez, but I can’t stand having nothing to read and books are cheap at library sales and they had such good books: I will be mailing off another box of books before I leave Monte Rio. For now I have the pleasure of reading essays by Ann Patchett.

After the library sale, S. suggested we go to a cafe. There I had a Mexican mocha and she had a latte and we sat and talked. When we got back to her house we rehearsed and performed at an online singing session and played a couple of games of Jotto.

Sunday we went to the Sonoma County Fair, but that is another story…