From Costa Rica, we moved to Dallas to continue working for Jane, but we left after seven months and moved back to Redding, where employment was still sparse enough that we left again after a year. Richard went salmon fishing one summer while I traveled to the East Coast, France, and England, and when the salmon fishing money ran out, we embarked upon a peripatetic three-year gig: For two months each winter, we apartment-sat a place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for the mother of a good friend. She would go to Florida for January and February and we would stay in her apartment and sign up with temp agencies. In the spring and fall, we would travel, and for five months in the summer, Richard worked at a resort at 9000 ft. on the border of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. I wrote in the mornings and hiked and mountain-biked in the afternoons, with the occasional carpentry job thrown in. After that scene fell apart on both ends, we moved to Eugene, Oregon for a year, where my sister and her family lived. Then, propelled by a killer allergy season, we left there and lived on the road again for a year before moving back to Redding in 1991.

 

 

 

 

 

* Despite this, I am still a firm believer in magic.