My elderly next door neighbor went from being rescued by the paramedics after days on the floor to the hospital to a recovery center–to being picked up by her son and taken home with him to an assisted living place close to his house a thousand miles from here. She absolutely could not risk living alone anymore.

And then the facility went into lockdown due to the pandemic. It’s got to be rough. I miss her.

Plumbing, mold, landscaping–her house needed a ton of work, and assisted living is expensive.

Houses a good bit below market are unicorns here–it probably sold the first day and it surely made at least that part of her life easier.

I took a few pictures this past week as the entire front yard was stripped bare and then planted anew and sent them to her children, with the question, Should I share these with your mom, too?

It would probably be better if, for now, I did not, was the response–but please, send more, they’d love to see.

New driveway. New walkway. And oh thank you, they didn’t put in the pestilent non-native monkey grass that was a fad against the drought for awhile there.

Today, a truck backed up onto the sidewalk, given that the new driveway was still taped off.

And what did they bring down the gangplank of that truck in front of that 1950s modernist-style Eichler house?

Two perfect Eames rocking chairs, in style if not in actual fact.

I grew up in an Eichler style house and my parents had an actual Eames rocker. I saw one years ago at the Modern Art Museum in San Francisco and kind of laughed that something that had been so utterly ordinary to me was considered art–and yet of course it is. My mom rocked her spitting-up babies in theirs, but then, plastic is easy to clean up.

I feel a connection with the new neighbors already and I haven’t even laid eyes on them yet.