Santa Cruz / San Jose

by Kate Evans

When I wake with the plan in my head of what I want to do that day, Annie kisses me goodbye. She is happy that I’ll be spending a day to rejuvenate. She’s off to Turlock, a Central Valley town a couple of hours from us, to visit her mother’s sister, Aunt Nancy. Nancy has lung cancer and is homebound on oxygen. Her husband and daughter take care of her. Nancy looks and sounds a lot like Annie’s mother, Murial, the same deep, watery eyes and cackling laugh. Being with someone who is virtually her mother’s twin is both comforting and difficult for Annie.

Murial is buried in Turlock and whenever Annie goes to Turlock, she stops by the cemetery and brings flowers for her mom, her Aunt Mary, and her grandmother.

I’ve never been a fan of cemeteries; I’ve only been to my grandmother’s grave once or twice, and I don’t have much desire to go back to where half of Dad’s ashes are buried. Annie, though, finds comfort at the cemetery, in knowing her mother—or some version of her—dwells there. It’s similar perhaps to knowing, when her mother was alive, that no matter where we were, she was in her green chair in her house.

I drive away from home and turn left on the Alameda, away from the university where I work. I merge onto 880 South, which becomes Highway 17, which leads into the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains and up high into the thick pines and redwoods. It’s a jewel of a spring day, the sky a brilliant blue, the air a perfect 70.

The first time I came to Santa Cruz was in high school, with my graduating class, the class of 1980. We spent the entire day at the Boardwalk—deep-fried Snickers bars, saltwater taffy, garlic fries, and a creaky wooden roller coaster, the Giant Dipper, which plunges you into darkness and then up and out into the light and fresh sea air.

My second trip to Santa Cruz also focused on the Boardwalk. I was 27 and had just separated from Jim, my husband of almost five years. He was an engineer. He had liked that I was getting a graduate
degree in English so I could teach. He didn’t like that I was taking all this literature to heart, that I was soaring with Walt Whitman’s proclamations about everything being connected, that I was questioning life’s purpose as I got engrossed in Emily Dickinson’s poems.

His passions were: saving for a house, going to dinner parties, collecting Fiestaware. He was a retiree in a 30-year-old body; he told me I was getting too idealistic.

I’d met Matt in my master’s degree program. He egged me on. In flowery handwriting, he wrote soaring comments on my poems and academic papers about my soulful insights. He read Whitman to me in his broadcast announcer voice. He took me to a Robert Bly reading—we both scribbled voluminous notes in our journals. Of course, I fell in love with him. Our first kiss (or was it our second? or third?) took place in a seat dangling on a cable over the Boardwalk.

The third time I went to Santa Cruz was 14 years ago, when I was 31. I was driving my little red car, the first car I’d bought by myself. The T-tops were off, the sun shining down, the wind whipping at my ponytail. And Annie sat next to me, a woman I’d recently met in a poetry class. This was our first time alone together. We visited the Boardwalk, but we spent most of our day on the beach, talking, digging holes in the sand. This was our beginning.

Months later, we moved to Santa Cruz. We said private vows on the beach one night, the barking sea lions our bridesmaids, the moon our witness....