A sort of update
I have just managed to regain control of my blog, so have approved a bunch of comments that have been lingering awhile.
As many of you know, my residence and an income property burned to the ground in one of the California wildfires in 2020. I have been living in rented rooms and/or a trailer since then. Here's a brief history of the last five years.
After the fire I rented a room in my hometown of Boulder Creek for two years while trying to get my house rebuilt. I had two houses, both insured, and the insurance proceeds from both were enough (I thought) to rebuild one house. I had a contract with a company that specializes in rebuilding after fires and other natural disasters, but the planning dept. is afraid of debris flows in this mountain community, and their required mitigation measures would have cost another $300,000, which I didn't have.
To save money I moved into a trailer on my property. PGandE, our electric company, couldn't manage to get power to me for almost a year, so I couldn't run a dehumidifier and the trailer got infested with mold. I had a bad reaction to the mold in Spring of 2023 and had to move out, so I rented a room close by in a newer building that has no mold issues. As a lung cancer survivor with maybe 70% of my original lung capacity, my lungs are a priority.
In December of 2023 I applied for a grant through a state-run program, ReCoverCA, that helps fire victims rebuild their homes. I was granted enough money (I thought) to take care of the mitigation issues and get my home rebuilt. It took most of 2024 to get through the application process.
In January of 2025 I signed a contract with a contractor working with ReCoverCA. It is now October, and they still don't have a permit, so I have no idea if I'm going to have a house again or not.
The last year and a half since leaving the trailer I have had multiple health challenges, including but not limited to: diverticulitis more than once, mold toxicity, pneumonia twice, including four days in the hospital with sepsis, and a blood clot acquired on a plane trip. I was already on blood thinners because of a blood clotting disorder which was the result of my lung cancer surgery, so that was just adding insult to injury.
Needless to say, survival has been on the top of my to-do list for the last five years. I turned 81 in July, and have diminishing energy to do much of anything else but get through one more day.
I have three books writing themselves in my head, but no time/resources/energy to write them down. Two are fiction. The other is about my experience of wildfire and its aftermath.
After I finished and published my trilogy, I started working on a story of a woman who was a victim of the lesbian witch hunts after World War II. I lived in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, and I heard some stories that got my imagination going. One was about a woman who got a "pink" discharge from the Army and settled in San Francisco rather than return to her homophobic hometown. She managed to pass as a man, got a good union job delivering beer to neighborhood bars--think carrying a beer keg on your shoulder. Passing as a man, she even married her sweetheart. I don't know who she was, but I heard that story more than once. Over the years, the book I have based on that story has completed itself in my head, but I have no time/energy/resources to write it down.
Then in the years since the fire, another (imaginary) woman has been whispering her story to me. She's a generation older than me, from a time when being a closeted lesbian was rather challenging. And she has a lot to say about what's going on in our world right now. I wrote about 10,000 words of that story, but my health challenges the last year and a half put a stop to that.
I hope to have a house again some day. I hope to have a home again some day. I hope to have enough energy and enough reasonably good health to write again some day. I hope.
posted by Catherine M. Wilson at
3:01 PM
1 Comments
