For the Love of Place | Sacramento

Villages are where people know you and your family, where you know the land and its seasons and the food it provides.
Patricia Monahan, The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog

If villages are where people know your family, and you know the land and its seasons and the food it provides, then Sacramento is my village.

I lived there twice as long as any other place I’ve ever lived, even though I’ve been gone longer than I lived there. Three quarters of my siblings were born there. Half of my children. My wedding took place there.

My Sacramento was mostly the Sacramento from 1950 to 1980. My sacred center was what we called 39th and T, but it was closer to R—right along the railroad tracks. A half-acre lot filled with fruit and nut trees—apricot and peach, fig and pear, mulberry and grapes, walnuts and almonds—all free for the picking. An enchanted bamboo grove became our own private jungle. At the center was what very well may have been Sacramento’s oldest and most enormous blue gum eucalyptus tree. In its shade sat an old Victorian farmhouse, once boarding house, and finally home to a tribe of wild siblings and their pets, before it was ripped wall from wall and buried beneath I-50.

My tree-lined world was punctuated by Rancho Market, County Hospital, CocaCola, the old fairgrounds, Oak Park and Immaculate Conception school on one side. On the other side of the tracks were Sacred Heart Church, Mercy Hospital, Phillips Bakery, the Rosemont Grill, Sutter’s Fort, McKinley pool, and the magical Alhambra Theater. Sprinkled liberally with libraries—Oak Park, McKinley, McClatchy. Crowned by the Crocker Art Gallery. My world straddled both sides of the tracks.

The seasons were announced by the perfume of fruit rising from Libby’s cannery. Peaches and pears and tomatoes. The scent of smoke rose from burning rice fields that separated the city from the little farm town that grew a university; and beyond, the old farm stand that became the legendary, now defunct, Nut Tree. It was the scent of those tomatoes and the smoke that called us in from summer’s heat and swimming pools—back to hard wooden desks, spelling bees, and the relentless pull of winter. A winter that came in the form of fog. Not on little cat feet but wearing combat boots.

That house, the one no longer there, was the fourth we lived in as we settled into place. And it wouldn’t be the last, but it was the last that I think of as a childhood home. I went away to school in the bay area in my early teens. By the time I came back, we’d moved from the center of town to the southern hinterlands. Everyone knows. You can’t go home to a place that never really felt like home. And when that house is no longer there, you can only go back to the place in your heart.

This series of paintings is inspired by my years in Sacramento. The container for 30 years of my life, with two rivers that surrounded us as if parenthetically. The images are inspired by my memories and some of the many photos my husband and I took over the years, mostly in the midtown area, of those two rivers along the western flyway, where we kayaked and birdwatched, and for a few years rode our daughter up the river bike path to go to school on the shores of the American River. It was filled to the brim with siblings and cousins and in-laws and nieces and nephews and dear, dear friends. Of joy and sorrow. Of life.

I hope you enjoy these images, and they call to you the memories of your own village. Wherever it may be.

With warm regards, Pat