This one's for my Dad.

It's 7:00 a. m. in the Santa Barbara cottage on Vista Buena Rd.

The sun is coming up over the 100-year old mission-style adobe farmhouse next door and I know my 86-year-old neighbor will be coming out to tend his fruit trees any minute. 

The days are still warm and bright but the air this morning is misty with dew and carries the sweet coolness of fall on its breath.  Fall actually doesn't change much about Santa Barbara: it still hardly rains, leaves don't really turn and the temperature won't drop considerably until the rest of the nation is layering for winter.  Mainly, you just have to slow down on your way to work and watch for school children crossing streets.

So maybe it's the temperateness of the climate than, that I'll really miss when we move to the Sacramento valley in two weeks. 

We've called our 70-year-old single-wall-construction honeymoon home "the cottage," sometimes "the cabin," but more affectionately, and perhaps more accurately, "our tree-house," because it's nestled under a huge Magnolia.  It has all wood flooring and all wood walls, a knotty pine with unique little termite dinners carved out in places, and it feels like we carved it out of the tree trunk.  

We have loved every inch of this place during our first two years of marriage: Terry revamped the front porch into the open-air studio/launching-pad he needed to get his dream of an art career off the ground again. I tended to the yard and to my heart in the process: filling flower-beds, trimming hedges, picking plums and watching apples turn. I saw flowers magically become fruit, uprooted cuttings to explore how they took root, garlic bulbs to explore how they divided, potatoes to wonder at how they multiplied.  

"Just leave them in the ground," Terry teased me.  But I couldn't.  For the first time, it was all mine and I was curious and I was allowed to make mistakes.   So I did, and I killed a lot of things but a learned a lot of things too. I think maybe that's what the first years of marriage are about.

So, I'm broken-hearted that the next tenant seems predisposed to be critical of every inch of our honeymooner-paradise. 

Chester and Lois, our landlords, flew out to show the place this past weekend and before they came I cleaned for a month straight: weeded the easement, bleached the tub, scrubbed at calcium deposits from the water, oiled nearly every beautiful pine board of the wall, chased out spider friends and destroyed their homes (if you're reading this guys, you can come back now ;)  The landlords cooed that they had never seen the place so lovely or so well decorated and that they should pay us for living here, we'd done such a fantastic job. 

And they did. They gave back our full deposit and cut the rent for our last week here.  

But the woman said, "Are you going to take care of this before I move in? " and "Is there a screen for that? Can I see it? Will you put it back on?" and "What about barking dogs?" . . ."Will I hear the neighbor children? I don't want to hear skateboards scratching."  She didn't get this place, at all. 

So I clamped my mouth shut and went in the back yard to prune my (it is still my) tomato plant, to stress it until it feared for its life (as well it should) and produced.  Hopefully two weeks will be enough to turn something hard and green to red, juicy goodness. 

"Are you going to have it cleaned before I move in?" she asked.

"What exactly is it you want cleaned?" returned Lois.

"Lady," I wanted to yell, "You can see the MOUNTAINS from your living room!"

But she doesn't get this place, at all.