12th and C

In the spring of 2009 I was living in this old Victorian house on the corner of 12^th and C Street in my college town of Arcata, California. The house itself was fantastic.  Big and open, with dark wooden floors and a long staircase that creaked with every step, loudest during those quiet early morning hours.  In the kitchen the floor was blue and the room had an odd array of cupboards and countertops, with pots and pans hanging here and there, and an oven that hardly ever worked jutting awkwardly out from a wall in the middle of the room.  A small hallway contained the perfect space for a keg, and shelves for electrical tools, croquet sets, jars of growing kombucha cultures, and an overflow of dishware.  Downstairs the bathroom floor was decorated in tiled patterns of black and white, the walls a bright red.  The shower in that downstairs bathroom could hold at least 8 or 9 people, if you were willing to try.  And we were. There were two couches and one oversized chair in the living room, with an old white carpet now stained brown and red from nights upon nights of beer and wine, glasses filled only a little too full, and walls perfect for housing a nice healthy growth of black mold. The upstairs bathroom had no shower but a tub that could hold three people comfortably, if you were willing to try.  And, of course, we were.  Four bedrooms slept six people, one bedroom down and three up.  Mine was the smallest of the lot. 

Inside outside and all around the house we lived our lives simultaneously to those around us. We danced. We drank. We ate. We saw, learnt, and changed. Most of all we laughed. We planted and we cultivated seeds into gardens turning lawns into kale forests as we worked towards some sort of neighborhood sustainability. We conquered the block. We created community.

I’m saying all this because it’s important.  Without this house and its small lot of land on this particular street corner only three blocks from town and six from the Redwood National Forest, things would be different. 

When I first moved in I knew four of the five people living there, and didn’t meet the fifth until a few days after I moved in.  I had just gotten back from 7 months in India, and the circuits in my mind were somewhat loose and fuzzy.  So when I finally did meet Lauren I’m pretty sure I seemed crazy, dazed and shaken.  I worried a little about it, not liking to feel so strange in front of a stranger.  But, what I didn’t know was she was the same as me.  Her just back from a new years spent at a Native American peyote ceremony, and myself still trying to come down from that Indian high.  My soul sister.  Thank you big house on the corner of 12^th and C.

Fast forward a couple of months down the road and I’m walking up that dark wooden staircase as Lauren is coming down,

            “I bought a ticket to Peru just now”, she says, casually as can be.  She tells me she’s going in the summer. 3 months. “I just really liked the flute music, so I bought a ticket. You should come!” She says, and we laugh. 

                                      But the words had been released: You should come.

And somewhere in a dusty corner of my mind I stored the knowledge that I would, in fact, be going to Peru that summer.