Gold country, the steep and narrow. Wild hills with big trees and breezy air like a warm bath, almost paradise and dry as paper. The rolling oak hills climb into the steeper granite and marble and quartz, buckeyes and pines and manzanita cling to cliffs. Along narrow ditch banks timothy grows tall, waving slender stalks and perfuming the air with that sweet grass smell.

The towns are old with crooked streets and narrow brick sidewalks and narrow storefronts, tucked into narrow valleys and up against hillsides. Ravines carve the landscape in surprising folds. Glimpses through the trees show pale grey free-standing marble boulders, the ghosts of quarries past. Rattlesnakes and red dust, a clarity of air, gold mines and machinery long ago forgotten.

My Grandparents live five miles out of a small gold mine town, far enough out so the road turns into gravel. They live halfway up an incredibly steep hillside in the house my Grandpa built. It's an amazing place. From the porch it is possible to see the valley and big hills, and on a clear day the distant snow-caps of the Sierras. The air is clear as a bell and sounds travel from the valley below, the woman down the hill who trains horses, and across the road there's a sheep ranch. The sounds of hooves and neighs and baaas and the bells on the sheep.

Crickets and tree frogs sing so softly and constant it's only noticeable when they stop, when some unknown creature rustles in the bushes down the hill. A skunk, raccoon, rabbit, coyote. My Grandpa showed us the fruit tree just down the hill from the house that was split and broken by a bear. The night has many prowlers when the moon is down. Night hawks shriek at each other from the tall pine and a pale shape of an owl flies silently overhead. At night the stars are so vivid, and so many of them, it almost feels like looking at music. The individual constellations are lost in a wash of glinting lights. The world is a small thing and I am a mote of dust.