Deja Vu?

[rejectomorph]

Someday, I'm going to have to read this journal. A couple of hours ago I began writing an entry about something that happened long ago, and I kept getting the nagging feeling that I had already made an entry about it. But there are over 2000 entries here, and I have no idea which one of them it might have been. Since there is no search feature, and I haven't the time to go on a hunt, I just kept writing. But now the sky is growing light and I am nowhere near finished with the piece, so I'm going to have to put it away for another time. I really ought to keep a paper record of what I write about, so I can find stuff in here.

I am thankful that this night has been considerably cooler than recent nights. There's even been a bit of wind to listen to. Today might turn out to be quite pleasant. Unfortunately, it is expected to heat up again by Friday. Some years we get Oregon's rainy spring, and some years we get Southern California's balmy spring. This year there seems to be a bit of Arizona drifting in.

Last night, I channel surfed by Jimmy Kimmel's show while David Duchovny was on, and saw some pictures from a slash/fanfic site devoted to The X Files with which Kimmel was embarrassing his guest. Of course, I had to visit the site itself. It has very romantic pictures of Mulder and Krycek making out which, even though I was never a fan of the series, I found quite amusing.

Comments

[rejectomorph]

Spring truly is the best time of year here, even though I invariably spend much of it sneezing. I especially like those days (which, alas, have been few this year) when the clouds gather through the morning and then produce one of those intense afternoon rainstorms which lasts an hour or two, until the sun breaks through and everything glitters and shines and the air has that electric freshness, and all the birds sing as though in celebration.

How long ago did you leave Paradise? I've been here since 1986, myself, and I've seen the town change quite a bit.

Life in a celestial village...

[annina-writes.livejournal.com]

We officially left Paradise in 1976, the year Chris and I were married. Since he was in the navy, we traveled around quite a bit, and it's been far too long since I've been back there there...something like seventeen years, but Chris has made it back a few times on his own. His mother still lives on a quiet lane in town. I'm sure it has changed quite a bit in the intervening years. When I lived and worked there, the Skyway had only one lane in each direction, and there was one tiny shopping center...no K-Mart or whatever else is up there now. Chris' step-dad, Charlie Todd, designed and built those wooden Welcome to Paradise signs. There was on summer, shortly after I moved up there that I lived up on Coutelenc Road in a pup-tent, where friends were clearing a building site, with my parakeet cage swinging on a tree branch. I found a place in town for the winter, though living out in the boonies helped me save a bundle and was great fun.

So did you become enchanted with the beauty and move up there like I did? Only falling in love with a sailor had the power to tear me away.

Re: Life in a celestial village...

[rejectomorph]

I actually ended up here by accident. My older brother was living near Redding, and his stepdaughter married a guy from Paradise and moved here. Within a few years, my brother and sister and their families had moved here as well, and then my parents moved here when my father retired. I just sort of came along, with some vague idea that I might go back to school at CSU Chico, but never got around to it.

Oddly, I've never developed a very strong attachment to the place. I like the landscape very much, though not more than the landscapes of many other parts of the state, but the town itself has always struck me as odd and somehow displaced, and a bit sad. It's like a fragment of suburbia that got lost from its city, and didn't know how to get home.

There wasn't much change in the place for the first ten years or so after I arrived in 1986, but the last few years there has been a lot of activity. Within a half mile of my house, about forty or fifty new houses have been built, mostly in small tracts, and most of them fairly large and expensive. The biggest building booms in town have been on the edges, though, along the canyons where several hundred new houses have gone up, few of them smaller than 3000 square feet, most of them with three or four car garages. Some of them are quite lavish.

There is one neighborhood where some of the houses feature fully grown palm trees in their landscaped grounds. It's really quite surprising to see palm trees in the mountains, but I suspect that most of them will not survive the next snowy winter. It's been more than ten years since we had as much as a foot of snow on the ground at one time, but it's bound to happen again eventually.

I don't think that much of the growth is driven by retired people anymore. Chico has burgeoned from a sleepy college town into a bustling mini-metropolis, and many of the costly new houses in Paradise are occupied by well-to-do suburban commuters. It looks as though the orphaned town may have found a city to adopt it at last.

Re: Life in a celestial village...

[annina-writes.livejournal.com]

Oh no! Paradise a suburb...[shivers] Part of its charm for me was in its unincorporated status back then, plus the rustic charm...mostly older homes...little ones...and quail, deer, and coons wandering around everybody's yards. I suppose if we moved back there now, we couldn't afford to live there! We're going back for a visit in a year, so I'll get to see it for myself. I lived in Chico too, before meeting my husband, and worked at a Mexican restaurant on the Esplanade, commuting by bike and living with three UCChico coeds. Loved that little city, and I suppose I wouldn't recognize it now.

Re: Life in a celestial village...

[rejectomorph]

The center of Chico hasn't changed much, except that the chain stores have moved out and been replaced by restaurants, night clubs and small boutique-y places catering mostly to the students. The city hall has been expanded, and the Senator theater is closed, awaiting renovation. Moviegoers now have a choice of dozens of screens in several large multiplex theaters in the newer sections of town.

Chico now not only has two malls, east of the freeway, but a whole swarm of big box retailers, small office buildings by the score, and lots of new neighborhoods of town houses and apartments. I don't know how many branches of Starbucks are there, but it's a lot! Still, Bidwell park is much the same as it used to be, though busier, and the town has done a pretty good job of creating a network of bike paths connecting everything. It's probably easier to get around by bike than by car there. Traffic gets pretty bad at rush hour. I think the population of what they are calling the Chico Urban Area (which does not include Paradise, but does include the development which has begun creeping up the lower ridge) is nearing 90,000.

Re: Life in a celestial village...

[annina-writes.livejournal.com]

Amazing!

Thanks for sharing!

I always enjoy your posts...you write in a kind of prosetry...very evocative.