Linda’s Christmas Grove (Part 1)

Linda lived on the Southern Oregon Coast in a Thoreau-like cabin a good 15 miles up a narrow and potholed county road that the county had forgotten about years ago. The road somewhat followed Euchre Creek from its meandering mouth at the Pacific Ocean up into the watershed until the creek disappeared into the rocks and its mysterious source.

The cabin was the last home on the road. After that, the pavement turned to gravel and led into one of the most depraved clearcuts in Oregon.

Linda lived alone if you don’t count the menagerie of deer and elk and other woodland creatures that frolicked in the meadow outside her cabin. They were her best friends and she had names for them all.

It was a simple and quiet life, off the grid, solar powered, water from a catchment system, outhouse. Linda tended her fenced garden, split firewood, read 19^th century novels, listened to old radio shows on CD, and volunteered three times a week at the local animal shelter, where she walked dogs and read them Shakespeare to calm their troubled minds.

Linda subsisted on her Social Security and late husband’s IRA and Treasury bills. He was dead going on ten years now. He died falling a Douglas fir on the property when the tree didn’t drop the way he reckoned. It was he who had found the property and built the cabin on his vacations away from Hollywood where he had served as an executive producer on some stupid action films and came to utterly loathe what he did for a living and everything connected to Southern California. Two decades ago, during an existential jag, he had driven up Highway 101 and turned on Euchre Creek Road on a whim. He kept going until he ran out of pavement and then bought the property from an astonished real estate agent who didn’t know it was still listed.