I had never been in the snow before, either, except for the little bit of snow I’d seen on my first day in Sonora. I loved how it looked—the stark white beauty of it. I loved how it felt to walk in it, to feel and hear the crunch under my feet. I welcomed the clean air and the smell of pine. And I loved how I felt with snow around me. The quietness and stillness of it. The feeling of everything being clean and pure.
I longed to have a fresh start in life, to have a snow storm come and spread snow all over my old life—my mistakes, my hurts and disappointments, my losses, my traumas—and make it all disappear. As I sat alone, enjoying the snow-covered ground, I imagined the snow covering up all the negative things that had happened to me, and giving me a clean slate—a crisp white easel to paint my new life on. I wished it was that easy.
In some ways, I was getting a fresh start. Being with Sharon and Grace showed me a completely different way to live—a life without chaos, drama, or darkness. A life where you could focus on pursuing your goals instead of constantly being sidetracked by personal problems.
But as much as this was inspiring to me, I could feel an undercurrent of boredom simmering inside of me too. I found myself wanting to stir up some drama and bring some excitement into our lives that week. I don’t remember actually acting on this urge, and even if I had, Sharon and Grace were just too healthy and grounded to go along with it. But the fact that I couldn’t just be happy with good clean fun disturbed me.
Aside from spending winter vacation with Sharon and Grace, there was someone else who helped bring me out of my depression about losing Sunny and Yvonne: Judy.
I met Judy at one of the YWCA weekend retreats. She lived downtown in one of the old Victorians and went to a different high school, but we had a lot in common. We both wanted to travel and see the world, we both loved art, and we both had single moms. Like me, Judy’s father was nowhere to be found and was never talked about. The difference was, Judy had a loving and supportive mother who gave her free rein in terms of expressing herself.
Judy might have been described as “bohemian.” She wore wild, multicolored skirts, colorful scarves, and flowers in her hair. She also was an artist, and a good one at that. While I just dabbled at painting, her bedroom walls were lined with her beautiful oil paintings, which looked professional to my untrained eye.
Even though Judy didn’t have a car, she had managed to find her way to places in Bakersfield I’d never even heard of and to make friends with people I’d never encountered. Case in point: Basque Town and the Basque people. There was a small community of Basque people in Bakersfield, who were hired by sheep ranchers to watch over their sheep. Judy explained to me that the Basque were from the Pyrenees Mountains, a mountain range between France and Spain, and that raising sheep was a major industry in that region. The Basque people had their own language and customs totally separate from the French or Spanish. She had befriended several of the Basque families, some of who owned restaurants and bakeries in what was considered “Basque Town,” a neighborhood close to the downtown railroad depot.
I started meeting Judy at the Pyrenees Bakery on Saturdays throughout the winter and into the spring. We’d buy sourdough French bread and a wedge of cheese, and then go to Woolgrower’s Restaurant, where the owner, a friend of Judy’s, would sell us a bottle of red wine, even though we were underage. We’d take our bottle of wine and our cheese and bread and climb some outside steps up to the roof of one of the buildings nearby and have a picnic while we sketched the railroad yard and the buildings around us.
Being with Judy introduced me to what life could be like as an artist—a free spirit. I knew I couldn’t afford to live that life. I needed to get a college degree so I could get a good job. Still, I tucked the idea in the back of my head. And learning about and being around the Basque people gave me a taste of what it would be like to travel and meet people from different cultures.
I’d lost a lot that winter, but I’d also gained a lot. My life with my mother up to that point had been so empty and painful that I’d longed for stimulation and friendship. But my forays into the world outside our dark apartment had often ended in so much pain that I had begun to feel there was no way out of the life I’d been born into. Fortunately, that winter I got a glimpse of how life could indeed be different. I got a sense of what it was like to be around people who I considered to be normal and healthy, and to live a life with minimal drama and chaos. And most important, I had been given renewed hope—hope that I, too, could one day live the kind of life where I could afford to go to the mountains on vacation or travel to foreign countries and meet interesting people from different cultures. A life where I wouldn’t be dependent on anyone else to make me happy. I’d gotten just a taste of this kind of lifestyle, and that taste had
