Always Hopeful

Out early this morning for a little gardening and a dog walk before it got too hot. Spike will always lie down in a flower bed if one is available to him. We left Blake and Spike home by themselves for a few hours last night while we had our hors d'oeuvre dinner with our Friday coffee group. It was a lovely relaxed evening sitting out on their shady deck the whole time. Others were fending off mosquitoes but they don't seem to like me so I was fine. Smoking mosquito coils were produced and lit . The dogs were just fine when we got home.

Backstory from yesterday continued..
I preface it with Maureen 6002’s comment that it is a tale of lives ‘interwined by friendship and serendipity’ it is so true!
I left off as we were evacuating at 3am from the Tubbs fire. We banged on some doors and got people up before we left. We really didn't know what to do as this was the first really fast burning fire (and the most damaging of all the fires that followed ) and we wound up in one parking lot and then another, some friends' house and finally at Jim's office in Petaluma. While we were huddled there in a conference room, I got a phone call from Maureen asking if we were alright. She offered us their house in Sebastopol (the house we had rented from them on the same site was rented to somebody else) and I said that we really didn't know what we were doing, but that she should be careful what she offered.

Eventually we realized we couldn't stay in a conference room with five people, three dogs and two cats, so I called Maureen back. Not only did they turn their house and granny apartment over to all of us, but they came from their home in San Francisco on the weekend ,when they would normally have been in residence themselves, bringing a wonderful picnic lunch. Kelly hosted a private tasting of the wine from his vineyards and brought out a bunch of metal puzzles which kept us busy for quite awhile, lifting our spirits greatly before they took their leave to drive back to San Francisco. 

As the Tubbs fire morphed into the Nun's fire which more directly affected our neighborhood a voluntary evacuation became a forced one and we wound up living at Kelly and Maureens for two weeks. John and Dana worked in the garden and the cats lived in their car for two weeks because Kelly is allergic to cats. Jim went to work and came home with food for dinner, and I kept communications going with all the concerned people from all over the place who had read about the fire or seen it on television and called to see if we were ok.

We will never forget Kelly and Maureen's kindness and have remained good friends ever since, although busy schedules and Covid have made it difficult to get to get together. Of course it was Ruta who brought the clan together again at the new Willi's, relocated closer to town.

As for Rafael, we didn't know what had become of him and wondered about him often. The one thing we did know was that the Starks, who own and operate Willi's and several other restaurants in Sonoma County had stood by all their employees and even though their own flagship restaurant had burned down, managed to relocate everybody to their other locations. It is for that reason that I was having coffee one morning in a place in Montgomery Village, a shopping center near us, when who should walk in but Rafael. I leapt to my feet and gave him a big hug and said how happy I was to see him. He was a bit taken aback but sat down, looking a bit tired and subdued, and told me his story.

It turns out he lived in a house he owned just a block or two away from the original Willi's. He lost his house, his truck and a significant amount of cash he had been saving for a holiday in the fire. The Starks had relocated him to one of their restaurants in Montgomery Village and he had stopped by for a coffee before going to work. We went to that restaurant several times while he was working there.

So perhaps the Starks should have been at the restaurant on Thursday night also. Rafael said he had been working for them for 18 years. He has now rebuilt his house in the old location and is doing well, thanks to them. His father is now living with him so perhaps the lost holiday money, which was probably going to go toward visiting his family, wasn't quite such a loss.