that was fun

I'm back. That was fun. We had the entire place to ourselves. Apparently they don't get many visitors on weekdays because the restaurant and the bar were both closed and therefore there was no staff present our entire stay. We arrived last evening around 6pm and when we stepped out of my car the heat was so stifling I was forced to hike up my pant legs immediately. San Francisco is cold and windy during the summer months so it doesn't feel like summer one bit...blech, I hate it. It has been especially hard adjusting to it after spending the last 3 weeks in balmy climates such as Savannah, GA. So in a way it felt like I had a second chance at salvaging a summer for 2 more days.

As the hotel was completely vacant, the woman told me over the phone how to get into the place. The doors to all of the rooms were wide open and the keys to our room as well as 2 huge fluffy pool towels were left at the foot of our bed. She said if we liked another room better that we could just sleep there instead. Our room was by far the biggest, most beautiful, and coziest of the selection. We had access to the entire balcony which stretched the length of the hotel from each of our tall French windows.

After a short stroll through the town, we put on our bathing suits and headed down to the pool in the cozily overgrown courtyard. At a canopied table by the pool we lit our 3 Spanish white candles, and unpacked our 3 bottles of wine, 1 baguette, 1 loaf of olive and spinach Italian bread, and 4 selections of outrageously potent cheeses. We sat in that candlelight until 1am talking about miscellaneous topics, and of course I interwove my civil war facts in and out of the verbal tapestry...it was beyond my control.

Yaaawn...my friend suddenly grew sleepy, and we hurriedly packed up our belongings, just as 2 curious faces were peeking at us through a fence on the other side of the pool. Creepy. We moved faster, and just as we were halfway across the courtyard, a set of wind chimes on the balcony startled us with its sudden and erratic chiming. You could hear a pin drop in that town it was so quiet, every time a leaf had fallen from a tree and landed on the grass we both jerked out heads to look. Not to mention there was not one breeze the entire night and trust me we would have noticed one had there been, given the temperature which swelled into the night right along with us. We both paused and glanced up and in the direction of the chimes, nothing there. We reached the front of the hotel and there was nobody anywhere but we felt so safe and happy. We both sat down in the middle of the street and took pictures of each other and our surroundings and then retreated to the balcony outside of our room.

When you glanced down the long stretch of the balcony to the other end both my friend and I could see the men in their nice suits reclining and smoking their cigars and pipes, their billowy mustaches, their tall hats. The overdressed women fanned themselves as they sat perched at the edges of their wicker chairs. What a beautiful sight our imaginations offered us on that balcony, we were quiet and smiling as we watched.

The first words I heard my friend say the next morning as I stepped out of the bathroom and she stood looking through the slats of our wooden blinds were "Look, I see a person out there!" I ran to look too. I think our whole stay in that town we saw about 15 people total over the course of 24 hours. We exchanged words with more than half of them, on more than one occasion because in this small town you see the same people again and again and again. By the end their apprehensive watchful faces became inviting and full of the warmest smiles.

We didn't want to leave. After heading out to a nearby town for some lunch and antique photo collecting, we sat out in the courtyard of the hotel with our legs dangling in the pool, reading our books until the sky began to coat everything with a warm shade of orange. The magic hour had arrived and it was time to get back to reality.

Hours later I found a parking spot in my neighborhood, and got out of my car to the harsh slap of the wind along my bare legs, partially lifting my skirt and making me growl out loud. My car had maintained the same hot temperature of Mokelumne Hill, so it hurt to step out into the icy San Francisco street in a summer skirt and a spaghetti-strap shirt. Sigh.