Blue Sky Dream by David Beers Page A

populace; more likely, a flurry of joyous meetings of the Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs. You can understand, then, why families like mine tended to behave with a certain hubris, why in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, for example, we were little concerned with a rural society extending back through Spanish missions to acorn gathering Ohlone Indians. We were drawn to the promise of a blank page inviting
our
design upon it. We were perfectly capable of devising our own traditions from scratch if need be.
    My mother and father, for example, invented for us certain rites of spring. In the spring of 1962, the Valley of Heart’s Delight was covered with blossoms. Back then, the cherry and plum and apricot trees would froth so white and pink that driving around the place felt like burrowing through cotton candy. Spanish colonizers had planted the first of these glades. By the middle of the nineteenth century the valley was a center for growing the “fancy” fruits that needed rich soil, gentle rains, and frostless springs, a Mediterranean soft touch. Just two dozen years before my family’s arrival, this was a place of 100,000 acres of orchards, 8,000 acres of vegetable crops, 200 food processing plants, a small city of 50,000, and a half dozen villages that were, as one county planner fondly remembered, “enclaves in a vast matrix of green.”
    “It was beautiful, it was a wholesome place to live,” by that planner’s recollection. And every year there would come a day in spring that called forth the blossoms, that seemed to make the world white and pink again in a decisive instant. That was a day eagerly looked toward, no doubt, by the people who had done the planting, the orchard people there long before us.
    On warm evenings in the spring of 1962, this is what my father and mother would do. After dinner they would place mybaby sister in her stroller and the four of us would set out from the too small, used house they were renting in an established subdivision (already half a dozen years old) named Strawberry Park. We would walk six blocks and run out of sidewalk. We would pick up a wide trail cut a foot and a half deep into the adobe ground, a winding roadbed awaiting blacktop. At a certain point we would leave the roadbed and make our way across muddy clay that was crosshatched by tractor treads, riven by pipe trenches. We would marvel at the cast concrete sewer sections lying about, gray, knee-scratching barrels big enough for me to crawl inside. We would breathe in the sap scent of two-by-fours stacked around us, the smell of plans ready to go forward. Finally we would arrive at our destination, a collection of yellow and red ribbons tied to small wooden stakes sprouting in the mud. These markers identified the outline of Lot 242 of Unit 6 of Tract 3113, exactly 14,500 square feet of emptiness that now belonged to us. All around the outline were piles of cherry and plum and apricot trees, their roots ripped from the ground, the spring blossoms still clinging to their tangled-up branches.
    My parents had laid claim to this spot in the usual way. They had sat in folding chairs in the garage of a model home while a salesman showed them maps of streets yet to exist, the inked idea of something to be called Clarendon Manor. They had been given a choice of three floor plans, the three floor plans from which all the dwellings of Clarendon Manor were to be fashioned. My parents had selected the 1,650-square-foot, four-bedroom floor plan, the one with the front door in the middle and the garage door on the right side. They had judged the price of that house—$22,000 at low GI Bill rates and no money down—to be a fair value and just within their budget. They had specified that the kitchen tile be yellow, the exterior trim white, the stucco blue.
    My parents had been attracted by some of the features they saw in the Clarendon Manor model home. They liked, for example, the short brick wall with lantern that jutted out