OmegaMom’s post about housing, including the silo she never lived in and her cottage that was formerly a chicken coop made me think of a town I lived in for a few months when I was five years old. It may have been on my mind because Anne Lamott talks about it in the introduction to her new book, which I was looking at in a bookstore last week. I wonder if we lived there at the same time?
We moved up to Northern California with my mother’s boyfriend, who worked at a Bird Observatory. I think he may have been doing some kind of Conscientious Objector service, but I was only five years old, so I really don’t know. We moved in with some people who lived in a house that had a sunroom where my mother put the homemade bread to rise and a bathroom whose shower had large window to the outside (which wasn’t a privacy issue until somebody started building a home next door…). At the end of the road was a cliff over the ocean, and across the road there were a lot of cows. I remember wild artichokes and poison oak.
There was a little girl about my age who lived down the road in a geodesic dome. For some reason my most vivid memory of her house is that we ate celery as a snack one day and I had never had it with salt, just with peanut butter (or maybe vice versa–I really do have a poor memory).
I Googled the town’s name + dome* and found some references to Lloyd Khan. He built a dome there in 1971, and one of the articles mentions he has grown children. I wonder if one of them is the girl I remember?
*I’m only being coy about the name to keep in the spirit of the town, which is famous for residents who took down the highway signs for the place in order to discourage tourists. I remember that as an integral part of directions my mother would give to friends who were coming to visit: “there won’t be a sign, but it’s x miles after such and such a place.” This NY Times article traces the whole hippie culture to people who came to clean up an oil spill in 1971, but I remember it as being a well-established place (to my 5-year old eyes) already back then.
April 3, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Ha! My partner’s family has had a home in that town for a very long time and we got married there. In our directions for the wedding we said “and there’s no sign, but you turn L x miles after the school.”