Hello friends,
Hamlet’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune hit us all at one point or another—those events with a clear ‘before’ and an ‘after’ which your life is never the same.
Scotty’s drug bust in 1985 was one such event for me. In a previous edition, I wrote about how we landed in California in 1985.
14. San Francisco
That fall—my freshman year of high school—I enrolled in an independent study correspondence school called Oak Meadow. We drove 3,000 miles in our motorhome to Sonoma County, California, and a week later Scotty flew back to New England do “a big business deal” which entailed selling cocaine to a DEA agent in a White River Junction, Vermont hotel room. He landed in jail and mother flew back to bail him out while I lived in the motorhome on Pat and Marian Boudreault’s property near Sebastopol. Daily life consisted of school lessons, running in the orchards, and helping Marian with Alicia, who was now four.
I was entranced by California. It was everything I imagined after more than a year letter writing, sticker trading (Mrs. Grossman’s stickers from San Rafael!), wearing OP (Ocean Pacific!) and ESPRIT (designed in San Francisco!) clothes. By that time I’d been to probably 30 or more states, and I finally found a place I wanted to stay. But I couldn’t stay with the Boudreaults forever, and returned to New Hampshire six weeks later, ashamed by Scotty’s actions and determined to live a different life than him.
All of a sudden, my real father sounded more attractive. I fantasized about this surely successful man taking me to a mall and giving me money me buy clothes. Scotty’s court case dragged on for more than a year, but he was never convicted. I somehow knew that my real father wasn’t caught up in illegal activities. And it turns out that he was in California, though I wouldn’t find out until long after he passed.
Perhaps the ‘after’ part of the drug bust was not just about my loss of trust in Scotty. Perhaps it was visiting California that impacted me forever, because I’m writing this email 27 miles from the Boudreaults’ former home.
What was a turning point event in your childhood? How did its effects shape the course of your life?
Regrowth is inevitable
Last fall I clipped back a 6-foot long mass of Santa Barbara daisies that had grown about 2 1/2 feet high. Just sticks remained, and the clippings filled a garbage bag. I had no idea if it would grow back, but I watered it during weeks it didn’t rain, closely watching tiny green leaves sprout on the sticks. Now the daisy patch is approaching a new kind of glory, without the dead undergrowth that had been accumulating for at least four years.
I’ll never know how my life would have been different without that ill-fated trip to California in 1985. The seeds planted in those difficult times emerged into a glorious life in a glorious state, continually bursting with possibility.
May you capture the seeds of opportunity in difficulty, trusting that life is continually taking you where you’re meant to go.
Love,
Lee Ann
