Bodega Bay. We visited long-time friends, gathered from around the country. Wednesday and Thursday this week … just day trips. It’s an hour and three-quarters drive each way from our home in Ukiah. There was coastal fog, and much lower temperatures than inland. I do like Sonoma County (Bodega Bay is on the Sonoma County coast). Given different life circumstances I’d love to live there. But, it’s the Ukiah BrownHouse for us. Not so long a drive into Sonoma County, for better shopping, bookstores, restaurants, wine, beer, and more. I keep thinking there must be some good way to be Sonoma County-ish even while living an hour or more north.

I wake each morning with a smile and a silent expression of gratitude. I’m determined to give gratitude more focus. “… the state of being grateful : THANKFULNESS” (Merriam-Webster) I’ve selected four books to guide my gratitude-forward thinking. First up is The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life, by Janice Kaplan. That one’s on order. Then two books (essays) by Ross Gay: The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy. I’m reading The Book of Delights now. Fourth, an odd choice: Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. I appreciate Burkeman’s tone. And I intend, as he suggests, to “pay more attention to every moment, however mundane.” More books, I know.

DAH: Just Visiting.

DAH is me, David Anthony Hance.

We lived in Santa Monica, Mum and Dad and me, when we first came to California. I cried, said Mum, whenever we took a car trip away from town. I wasn’t happy away from people and their places.

I come from a place I’ve never lived. My parents immigrated to California when I was scarcely a year old. They never became U.S. citizens. I was an English citizen until I was nearly 40. I’ve spent most of my life in California, labeled with a specific legal status: “Resident Alien.” Being from somewhere else, somewhere not here, is a big part of what made me me … just visiting, an alien.

Since I’m just visiting, time and place are urgent and magical concepts:

“Time” is the fire in which we all burn. That gives us all an essential commonality: We’re all just visiting, all just fuel for the fire of human time.

“Place” is a wondrous, complex interplay between nature and people, inextricably entangled with each other, simmering over time’s fire.

When I think of home it seems for me a journey … from a mythical England where I never lived – an England of kings and queens, of Robin Hood and Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes, of rolling green hills and ancient, magical woods – to California’s Coast, on the edge of the Pacific, where peace should reign eternal but seldom does, at the ring of fire’s rim.

I don’t have children of my own. Nor do my two brothers. My blood family’s visit here is soon ended. We burn away in the fire of time and leave behind only the residue of how we acted in this place, how we spent our brief flame of life, with nature here, and people here, all of us, all of you, just visiting.