In The Beginning

So I was saying.

As D settled into his new surroundings, the stories kept coming. There was the time he wandered onto a neighboring property and got chased down by a man in a truck waving a shotgun. Then he discovered a rat living in his oven (I try not to think about it). There were freezing winters with no heat, 100-year floods, and an evacuation by the National Guard. Did I mention the rat in the oven? Finally, after five years of roughing it indoors, D bought a mandarin orchard and happily got back to his farming roots.

Meanwhile, I blandly pushed paper in my sterile downtown office and wondered if I would ever see any of the conservation I was supposedly working on. So I set my sights on finding a job in the field, away from the city. No matter that I knew diddly squat about botany or habitat restoration or hydrologic geomorphology. I was going to be one with nature, dammit. Word reached a manager in northern Northern California who needed an Operations Manager, and suddenly I was moving.

Well, it just so happened that I landed in the same town where D was living. Maybe it wasn’t coincidence but a mixture of fate and a matchmaking manager. Whatever it was, if you asked me, it was all about the JOB. And I lived stubbornly on my own for all of a few months before moving into D’s house. So much for being an independent woman.