Sonoma County residents thankful for the little things

It’s been a lonely year for Diana Rose. At 70, the Santa Rosa artist knows she is at high risk for the deadly coronavirus. So she mostly stays at home, visiting friends and family only online. But each night before bed she makes it a spiritual practice to name at least five things she’s grateful for.

Chief among them? The trees and her childhood memories. During these solitary times, Rose frequently visits the Santa Rosa places where she grew up — the Grace Tract, Proctor Terrace, the leafy streets around McDonald Avenue — to touch the trees, to walk under them or sometimes just to park her car and observe them through her window.

They conjure happy memories of her childhood. Some of the same trees she passed on those streets on her way to school or to play are still there more than 60 years later, taller, broader and even more beautiful.

“Like the trees in front of Proctor Terrace School — I started going there when I was 6 years old. That was 1956,” Rose recalled of the line of liquidambars with their fiery star-shaped autumn leaves. “The trees there had just been planted and they were my height then. I like to just look at them now. Little things like that keep me centered to the earth.”

The coronavirus pandemic has forced people all over the world to live within a much smaller footprint. The common pleasures of public entertainment, parties, organized activities, celebrations and social gatherings are gone. Most of the common touchstones of life in Sonoma County are on hold. But in this forced quiet, without the distractions they took for granted, many people are finding their senses are more finely tuned. They’re noticing the little things still available to them with a heightened awareness and appreciation.

Rose said she is grateful for the opportunity to revisit old haunts again and again. There is one particular yard she loves to look at; it’s filled with persimmon and Chinese pistache trees, which turn a vivid “Technicolor” red in fall, she said. It’s near her childhood home and a house where she remembers three nice boys once lived.

“It’s one of my favorite places. I’ll just sit across the street in my car and remember that time in my life when I was in grade school and I had those friends and loved those trees,” she said. “That, to me, is a benediction, a blessing, something I can hold on to without going back to the past, but just remembering those wonderful connections.”

Jazmin Gudino, 27, said she started noticing the little things this past summer, when she began working as a contact tracer for the county. At her parents’ home in Roseland, she’d set up her laptop on a folding table in the backyard to work.

“Every day there were butterflies that would fly around the garden. I didn’t know if they would come back the next day. But every day I saw them I felt blessed and grateful,” the new UC Berkeley graduate said. “Most recently I’ve been grateful for simpler things that have always been but I’ve never taken the time to appreciate, like drinking a warm cup of coffee on a cold morning or hearing my mom say her prayers or hiking in the beautiful open space we have in Sonoma County.”

Gratitude movement

This year there will be far fewer gatherings, as health officials warn people to avoid mixing with friends and even family outside their own immediate households in the face of an alarming spike in new coronavirus cases. A lot of people will spend the day alone.

As the pandemic flared up in mid-August, the first of two huge wildfires tore through the region. The Walbridge fire and September’s Glass fire destroyed homes, scarred public parks and forced evacuations that triggered old traumas from the past three years. Sept. 9 was a somber day, as the buildup of atmospheric smoke from throughout Northern California left the Bay Area in darkness.

Yet despite — or perhaps because of — the profound personal, social and economic losses due to the pandemic, people are taking comfort in focusing on what they have rather than what they have lost, said Kristi Nelson, the executive director of the Massachusetts-based Network for Grateful Living, a nonprofit founded by 94-year-old Holocaust survivor Brother David Steindl-Rast.

In the past decade, there has been a growing movement dedicated to grateful living, with an explosion of research into the health and psychological benefits of gratitude and a subgenre of books dedicated to practicing appreciation daily, not just once a year at the Thanksgiving table. Gratitude is identified as one of the key components of well-being by The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, which maintains that research shows people who consciously count their blessings tend to be happier and less depressed.

“At a time when so much is being taken from us and our lives are changing, it can be hard to find outside reasons for being grateful in the way we understand it. But we have found it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but it’s gratefulness that makes us happy,” said Nelson, whose new book “Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted” was released last week and already is in its second printing.

“The more grateful we can learn to be in challenging times, the more we’re going to benefit, because challenging times teach us about gratitude,” said Nelson, a stage-4 cancer survivor. “Most people become more awakened to what matters to them when they’ve had a wake-up call.”

That was doubly true for Lisa Saxon. The 52-year-old Windsor Unified School District administrator had just begun treatment for breast cancer when the stay-at-home order took effect in March.

“I was literally working from home, figuring out how to transition a school district with 5,000 students to distance learning and driving daily to Rohnert Park for radiation treatments,” she said. Saxon was tasked with leading the transition to distance learning, working with IT, prioritizing distribution of the district’s available Chromebooks and making sure the entire staff was on a learning management system.

She takes comfort in the support of family, close friends and colleagues and cherishes the small moments, like the day she and her daughter, Bayley, 17, spontaneously drove from their Graton home to Bodega Bay just to catch the sun slipping into the Pacific.

At Schoolhouse Beach, they sat side by side in the sand. “It was just one of those perfect sunsets where you could just sit back and watch the sun appear to drift into the water from a yellow and orange sky,” she recalled.

Saxon said she felt a wash of gratitude that such a spectacle was available just a short 25-minute drive away.

“I’m reminding myself to not take for granted this amazing opportunity. I’m so fortunate to have this nearby and to remember, particularly given the year and what it’s been like, that the seemingly small things really are the big things.”

A place to play

Carolyn Prieto serves on the front lines of the pandemic as an assistant nurse manager in the COVID unit at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Rosa. She has watched the ebb and flow of recovery and death from a virus that has stricken more than 11,600 people and killed 155 in Sonoma County.

While undertaking a dangerous assignment, she also has had to manage three kids, ages 10, 9 and 5, with schools closed and child care difficult to come by. Her nanny, terrified of contracting the coronavirus, abruptly quit, and Prieto and her husband, Robert, were left with the unnerving prospect of leaving their kids home alone. Her employer offered emergency child care, but she would have had to drop her kids off at 8 a.m., an hour after she was due at work.

So when the city completed the renovation of the community park in Coffey Park, destroyed in the Tubbs fire, she was ecstatic. Prieto lives five blocks away in a house that miraculously survived the disaster that torched 1,321 homes in the subdivision three years ago.

The new park is a wonderland of enchanting and imaginative details, like the spinning raindrop sculptures visitors can sit in, a tile mosaic that glows in the dark, a fountain for dogs and a play structure with inside moldings that mimic the feeling of the inside of a tree trunk.

“I am so extremely grateful,” Prieto said of the park, which has stood as a symbol of resiliency in a sea of devastation. For a time, its future was in doubt. But when the fences came down and the new park was revealed, Prieto said she was blown away by how cleverly it was conceived.

“When you go inside the park, there are so many personalized things, you can just tell that people put their heart and soul into it,” she said. Prieto loves the fact that so many groups, companies and individuals, including her own employer, Kaiser, contributed, making it a true community effort.

“It’s amazing to be able to bring my kids there to play,” the grateful mom said.

Appreciating elders

Julie Morris-Adkins lives in a cottage in Fulton next door to her father, Wes Morris, who turned 89 in July. A Korean War veteran, Morris raised six kids as a single father when his wife died of a heart attack. His daughter admires him deeply, and the pandemic, which has claimed so many elderly people, has shown her how much she values the chance to help a man who helped so many people in his life. She said her father, a contractor who remarkably retired only last year, would pop out of bed at midnight or in the frigid cold of a winter morning to help a friend or neighbor with their lights or frozen pipes.

“My dad is a good man. He has been a deacon in his church for as long as I can remember. He loves God. He’s just the kindest, sweetest human being,” said Morris-Adkins, a veterinary technician who cut back her hours to help out her dad.

He lives in the house he built himself in 1972. Morris-Adkins cooks for him and helps with other tasks, but her dad still performs chores and chops wood.

“I still try to have gratitude every day,” Morris-Adkins said. “It’s really important even during times of strife to be grateful. It’s what gets me through. A lot of people have parents in facilities they can’t visit. I can’t imagine not being able to see my dad every day. I’m grateful I get to help him and hopefully see him to his 90th.”

Sebastopol artist Maria Isabel Lopez is grateful for her elderly mother and the chance to visit her in an East Bay nursing home. She brings her mom Asian food, waves at her through glass and writes messages on a white board as the 94-year-old can no longer hear.

In addition to being a mosaic artist, Lopez is a TV and film star in her native Philippines. Lopez, 63, grew up poor, so she appreciates every day that she can eat fresh food from the garden she shares with her husband, Jonathon Melrod. Their 4 acres are filled with vegetables, flowers, herbs and berries.

“We are in a new normal and we have to learn to adapt and welcome change and just be grateful,” she said. “There’s always a silver lining, even in this pandemic.”

That’s what friends are for

Like many people, Santa Rosa resident Calvin Johnson is more grateful than ever for friends. At 65, the life coach has found a lifeline during the year of isolation with kindred spirits through his church, The Center for Spiritual Living, who aren’t afraid to share their feelings or ponder the big life questions like what happens when we die or how do we deal with depression and sadness.

“We will pray together and talk about stuff in our heads and on our minds and in our hearts,” he said. “And we can do it safely because we have known each other for a while. I can bring anything to the group.”

He recalls his grandmother declaring, “Thank God for getting old. It’s better than the alternative,” so he’s grateful for his years and remembers he’s standing on the shoulders of those who endured worse hardships.

“Black people, my parents and their parents, went through some really tough times but they got through it. They held on. In comparison, my times are not so tough. No one is chasing me. No one is burning down my house. No one is denying my freedom,” he said.

“There’s ample reason to believe, because I’ve made it this far, that miracles do occur, and that is my focus now. How can I, in every single situation, reach for the good and focus on miracles? That’s why my group helps me. How do we become people who celebrate the miraculousness of life at every turn? It means everything.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. OnTwitter @megmcconahey.