Me in Russia, Turkey, and China
For the second time in just a few months during this World Pandemic, I have been evicted from a house where I was renting a room. This house, like the other, is in Bakersfield, California–a sprawling agricultural town in the Central plains, surrounded by vineyards, nut trees, and distant mountains. Bakersfield is definitely not Los Angeles, New York, London, Frankfurt, Moscow, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi, or Shanghai–cities I have visited during my world travels. I taught English in Russia, Turkey, and China for 5 years, living under their political systems and economies. After returning to California, I was homeless in Los Angeles for over a year, living in my car and driving for Uber Eats to make barely enough money for food and gas. I finally got a good teaching job and then moved to Bakersfield.
Not new to challenges, I survived a rare form of cancer 25 years ago when my son Jonathan was just a baby and my daughter Jessica only 3. I lost my mother, father, and younger brother (my entire immediate family) when I was too young. I write these things into my books. By the grace of Jesus, I have survived them. But the idea of home is an elusive thing.
My Daughter Jessica visits me in a California motel room, looking like Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz,” who just wanted to go Home
Right now, nothing seems as difficult as trying to find a home. Should I stay in Bakersfield, in expensive, coldhearted California, during Covid-19? Everyone here must wear a face mask to go outside, people line up 6 feet apart to be allowed into stores to shop for food, and Starbucks (and all the restaurants) won’t let people inside. Governor Gavin Newsom (who was just caught in a scandal for disregarding his own Coronavirus Laws) has made new curfew laws that some California sheriffs refuse to enforce. If we order take-out food, we must pick it up ourselves “curbside,” or have “contact-less delivery” left beside our home. Eight months ago this began, and now winter is coming. The sun which shines so brightly hot in Bakersfield summer has been covered up with gray.
My mother as a teenager and little girl, with braids like my daughter Jessica. Lois Mary Groves was a haunted creature who ran away to meet a military man as a teen but then came home, met my dad, had me, and died too young
Home. When I was four, I played outside my Grandmother’s stately Southern mansion near the old university where my Grandfather and she had taught and my mother graduated. I remember the home’s tall white pillars by the stained-glass, embellished front door. I could wander out that door and stand at the front rock wall that bordered grassy yards. I was barely tall enough to glimpse the world outside. Walnut trees lowered branches beside a guest house and a little creek. My Grandfather, Professor Ernest Rutherford Groves, taught at UNC (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), one of the oldest campuses in America. He graduated from Yale University and Dartmouth College. He received an honorary Ph.D. from Boston University and became famous for Marriage and the Family books, classes, and counseling. He started the National Council on Family Relations that still holds conferences. Sadly, he died before I was born. Gimghoul Castle (part of a secret society my grandfather belonged to) rose stately down our road. The three stories of our house held treasures from far-away places: cut-glass display cases with hand-painted rose tea sets from England, Colonial sterling silver candlesticks and spoons, African ebony masks hanging scary on the wall, and mahogany tables with lions’ feet that were hand-carved in Holland.
I wish we could live in hotel room like this, my newest one
Lonna Lisa Williams 
