Living in the craziness of San Francisco, you need a quiet space to chill out, unwind and find your inner peace. There’s only so many hipsters, hippies, and dot-com millionaires one can take in a day on top of everything else that’s going on in the world. It’s hard to find that space inside your home in San Francisco because the luxury of space isn’t readily available at a $1,000 per square foot. So you tend to look for some respite outside of your house cubicle.
Of course, that’s not so easy here either. Cafes and coffee houses are filled with the same hipsters who use them as their rent-free office space, writing their own blogs, I suppose. Parks are often filled with homeless camping or dot-com millionaire kids on play-dates and in SUV baby carriages. Going for a walk can be nice, unless you don’t feel like hiking back up the 1,000 foot hill with a sidewalk that consists of a 4-block staircase. Because land is at a premium on the 7 mile x 7 mile peninsula that constitutes San Francisco, not many homes have much of a yard here.
We fortunately do, and it’s one of the places where I try to find some respite when things are crazy. I spent a couple of years taking landscape architecture classes which gave me a lot of ideas, much less so the practical skills to actually implement them. But I try. I’ve created different outdoor rooms, on different levels to deal with the sloping hill terrain; and built a river-rock stream to connect different spaces. There’s two outdoor eating areas, one for the sun, the other more shade, and another small conversation area with a fire-pit in the center. We’ve built raised garden beds with strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and lettuce. I turned a couple of galvanized metal water troughs into additional growing areas for snap peas and raspberries. It is accented with multiple flower pots at key spots for a burst of color. We’re surrounded by an amazing number of trees for a small city lot including Japanese maple, palms, gingka, lemon, and apple. There are monarch butterflies galore, flocks of hummingbirds, even our friendly, adopted neighborhood cat named Bubba – who should really pay rent for his deck space with the city views.
Some of my favorite moments with Joe are sharing lunch together on a sunny day in the middle of our little urban oasis. There is no cafe or park that would come close. It’s just us in a private urban paradise. It’s got a few weeds, and often looks short on the maintenance, but it never fails to refresh the soul and my spirits. Just stay off of my lawn.
NQR 