Voices from the Gold Country

The Sonora Writers' Group has just published their first anthology, Second Saturday. I wrote the introduction to the book, and here it is.

You were expecting blissful accounts of life in the hills? Bliss may be the nuggets we hoped to mine from our conscious streams, but like the prospectors of old we came ill-equipped. Perhaps we weren’t as ready as we thought we were to let go of a job, a paycheck, daily involvement with our grandkids, Whole Foods, Trader Joe and Designer Shoe Warehouse. Perhaps our expectations were too high.

It’s not quiet here, it’s noisy! But, it’s different noise. These days, twittering birds wake us early. Twitters, blogs and emails still beckon, but our computers sulk darkly, no longer first to get our attention. We hear rocks spilling into a quarry below, dogs barking and voices drifting up from the cove. Live in the mountains and learn that sound rises.

Bliss is hard work! But we’ve found friends to adventure with, fellow writers to appreciate where we are on this journey, and good yoga teachers. And now, there are no more excuses. For most of us, age and place dictate that this is close to the last stop the train makes, and what a stop it is! No more waiting to retreat to a paradise where we can write; we live in paradise. No more waiting to retire; the economy grew tired of us. Like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, we can step out of the other side of the carriage that is rolling toward a destiny not of our desire. Instead of heading into “retirement,” we’ll explore a world without “work.”

With the exception of two of us still in tune to the work/life or school/life balancing act, finches are our alarm clock and seasons suggest the daily routine. There are no more paychecks to live between. Instead there are old relationships to nurture and new ones to cultivate. In this world without money, we’re told that five dollars will disappear from our wallets as easily as $100 used to; the difference is that now we must account for it in QuickBooks.

Happy are the hours we spend writing, encouraged by our time together the second Saturday of every month. We are the Sonora Writers Group.