Sonoma Grove's Mockingbird
“And yes. Mockingbirds everywhere. Rude, noisy with a major attitude.”— S.W.K. (Richardson, TX) in response to a query if mockingbirds lived and sang in Texas.
Amockingbird screams somewhere in the night, calling me from a toasty-warm sleep. The propane man had just filled my 20-pound tank, and I’d set the burner on my stove to medium-high. My 19-foot travel trailer had become a haven. It had a tiny bathroom, and even a built-in wall heater, but it never got cold in the North Bay. It got chilly, but rarely dipped below freezing. If it got too cold, a couple of stove burners would usually handle it. The bird kept singing, and I turned over to go back to sleep. Mockingbirds were weird.
The singing drives me nuts, and I search my mind. Why should I leave the bird alone? I can’t remember. Mockingbirds are annoying in the daytime, and now they’re annoying in the nighttime, too. In the morning, they jump up and down on the top of telephone and utility poles. They talk to themselves up there, hop, jump, fly a few inches up and down, and do backflips, I swear. They speak in a crazy bird language, and so I never watch for long.
In the glow of the burner, I think about mockingbirds. There’s something in “To Kill a Mockingbird” about why I should leave it alone, I think. I get up and walk over to my table, a cafe-style booth, tiny and worn. I use it for meals, and writing, often pounding anyway on my typewriter, rewriting poems.
I look out the window. In the trailer, five lots down, the other side of the lane, the lights blaze like a cruise ship on the ocean. They must have bulbs everywhere, for out of all the windows, blazing incandescent light spills out onto the trailers and narrow streets of Sonoma Grove. I can't hear them partying or anything, although people come and go a lot. The lights never dim on the cream-colored, one-bedroom ocean liner.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is on the Library of Congress’ list of most banned books, and Harper Lee had trouble with the endless challenges. She became frustrated, and in 1966 wrote a letter to the Richmond News-Leader to protest the newspaper’s praise of a school district for banning the book. Her letter referenced George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” which depicted a land ruled by a government that twisted the truth.
“‘Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners,’ said Lee’s letter. ‘To hear that the novel is immoral has made me count the years between now and ‘1984,’ for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.’” 1
As recently as 2017, a school board decided to ban “To Kill a Mockingbird,” again, to save eighth graders in Biloxi, Mississippi, from insight and compassion. Another misguided effort in a long line of attempts to ban the book. The reason the Mississippi school board wanted to ban Lee’s book, according to history.com? Some of the language made people feel uncomfortable.
When I read the novel, I felt no discomfort. Written in the tradition of Mark Twain, the precocious six-year-old Scout (eight, toward the end of the story), and her older brother, Jem, lived their life, that’s all. They talked endlessly about a recluse they called “Boo,” though, but many have known a Boo-like character in their lives. Boo’s behavior, especially at the end of the novel, became docile and autistic, or, perhaps, more developmentally-disabled. Scout takes Arthur’s hand (Boo’s real name) in the end. She walks him home, a code of honor and conduct worthy of any reader.
Sonoma Grove was a nudist colony once, at least, according to Barbara Mensch. I’ve never seen anyone wandering around nude, but I believed once that it harbored Sonoma county’s societal oddballs and outcasts. And, even more troubling in the suburbs of Rohnert Park, and other environs, retard, or perhaps, for the compassionately literate of Sonoma State, “Boo People.”
In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the children feared Arthur because they didn’t know him, and even today, children, and adults, avoid Boo People. I worked with these kinds of outcasts in psychiatric hospitals, group homes, and juvenile detention centers before moving to Sonoma Grove. But the more I struggled in the Bay Area, the more I came to question my initial attitude toward trailer park people. Even if there were eccentric characters living there, what did it matter?
I can take anything, and Sonoma Grove isn't even on the list of difficult places. I worked at Napa State Hospital cleaning toilets as a student assistant. Bullying and violence were common, especially on the criminal ward. Ultimately, I teamed up with nurses who were trying to undo some of the damage, especially by a guy who passed out medications. He hated one patient, and we were always untieing the leather straps knotted in his back. “Alonzo” had gotten loose in isolation, once, and smeared everything and anything with his own excrement. The med tech didn't want that to happen again, and so he began knotting Alonzo on a gurney.
It wasn't ideal work, but good experience. I never did work in recreation, even though, after finishing my bachelor's degree, the staff on the children's ward rolled out the red carpet for me. That's neither here nor there, though. I turned to humanistic psychology in my postgraduate studies at good old Sonoma State. Things changed in ways I could not have imagined.
The mockingbird is still screaming in the tree. I get dressed and go out to see if I can find it. It’s singing out by East Cotati Avenue. I stumble along past the shower house and find the tree. “Shut up!” The bird keeps singing. “Shut up!” It ignores me. I can’t see anything in the tree, even with the streetlight across the street. In the gray, dark nether reaches of the mockingbird’s tree, even though it is only twenty feet tall, give or take, the bird keeps singing. I give up and return to my trailer.
Sonoma State University and I do not get along. It started on a get-together on Sonoma Mountain, or somewhere east of the campus. Over a dinner of lasagna and red wine in a camp-like dining hall, I complained about children, as young as twelve, drinking leftover red wine after we’d finished eating. “What’s the problem with that?” a lady asked as if I’d stepped off the moon. I stare at the melee, confused.
Then, the next day in a discussion group on the ins and outs of “Moby Dick,” I revealed I hadn’t read the novel. I tried to be honest, but I didn’t tell him I had to work. It must have been my delivery. The workshop had been the only activity worth attending, and I wanted to sit in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t allowed. The English instructor was incredulous as he telegraphed his disbelief. “You didn’t read the book!?” I had failed the get-to-know-you retreat, and everything went downhill from there.
From the outside, Sonoma Grove sits behind a dilapidated fence. Walking or driving past the place, on East Cotati Avenue, the trailer park looks like a junkyard or something, especially the way scruffy, untrimmed trees shroud the place. Many at Sonoma State University ignored the place altogether, which included me. That is, until, like Scout, I learned most people, as Atticus Finch had pointed out, are nice. “When you finally see them.”
The bird is still screaming, or singing, I guess, if that’s what you want to call it. Suddenly it is too warm in the trailer, and I get up and turn the burner down. I turn the lights on and look at my newest poem. I have been endlessly, typing, and retyping the stanzas to make the thing work. I do not type because it's 3 am, and so I read my poem. But even after shortening it, it still doesn't work. I read it over and over.
References to mockingbirds are rare in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Only two are mentioned outside everyone’s belief that it’s a sin to kill them. Harper Lee writes about the birds independently of not wanting to kill them when they stop singing.
In one example, a rabid dog comes walking down the street. Because it seems normal, rather than sick, many have drawn a parallel between the bird dog, “Tim Johnson,” and Tom Robinson, the black man accused of rape and assault. The reason? The dog hides the problem. Thus, the hidden nature of the dog’s rabies becomes a symbol of the hidden sickness in the community. The folks in Lee’s fictional town believed segregation is normal. Because of this, many experts, like English instructors, for example, believe Tim Johnson (an odd name for a dog, right?) is an essential, racist symbol in the novel.
Mockingbirds are noisy. According to one person in Texas, they even come with a major attitude. Could it be that when Lee wrote the mockingbird was silent, it merely meant the situation was so frighteningly odd, even mockingbirds finally shut up? Others have even suggested that the mockingbird feared the bird dog, i.e., it dreaded the dog so much it shut up. This is highly unlikely, too. Mockingbirds are narcissists creatures, like the English instructor on Sonoma Mountain. Not only that, but Harry named his dog Tim Johnson. What a character, right? Maybe this is what Lee had in mind, not a far-fetched parallel. Should Atticus Finch shoot the townsfolk, too?
The question remains: Why is it a sin to kill a mockingbird? It's a sin because, according to Miss Maudie, “mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That is why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 2
All I found on the question, according to experts, like the guy giving an audience on Sonoma Mountain, is that mockingbirds are innocents. You shouldn’t kill a mockingbird any more than should kill Tom Robinson. But mockingbirds are birds, and they do what all birds do, they sing. The males especially sing like a train wreck. Why? Because they want a mate. Innocence has nothing to do with it. I guess maybe for Miss Maudie, the mockingbird sings for her, like African Americans in the town she lives in, but to me, it’s just a noisy bird.
Icome home from work, and a kitten runs over from the trailer across the lane. It’s living under Pat and Christiana’s place, a trailer like mine. I invite the kitten in. She follows me to my twin bed. The kitten is gray and white and chases my finger on the bedspread. After we play for a while, I sit down at my typewriter. She wants out, and so I let her out.
I threw my 12-in Curtis Mathes television into the trash. It had been a constant companion for twenty years. It still worked, but things change.
I lived in Jung Haus, an off-campus housing project named after the psychiatrist, Carl Jung. But his concept of “psyche,” went far beyond the perceptually knowable, i.e., God. Unfortunately, that understanding got lost in translation at Sonoma State. The humanistic psychologists there believed in the psyche, but not God, as best I could figure, anyway. The existentialist nature of humanist psychology created too many barriers. Not all transcendentalists believe in God, of course. Jung either. He knew there was a God, as did I.
But God grew distant. Probably because my singing grew deafening. In my defense, I was losing my way. One Jung Haus buddy, a guy on the other side of my wall, liked to stay up all night. He never slept, and neither did I. He rifled through his bookcase all night long, month after month. He had a remarkable sixth sense. He pushed a book hard against the wall every time I fell back to sleep. The Curtis Mathes went into the trash, and I moved into my van.
Christiana, Pat’s daughter, is amazed when she realizes her pet keeps running to my trailer uninvited. She decides to adopt me, and both Christiana and her mother, Pat, become good friends. I tell them I never feed the kitten. This is necessary because I’m hoping they will shed some light on this mystery. Pat asks me to join them. She wants to see “Gandhi.” It’s playing at the Plaza Theater in Petaluma, and we go Friday night after her last class. She’s working on a bachelor’s degree in humanistic psychology.
I've had enough. The mockingbird will not let me sleep. This time when I get up and stumble over to the tree, I take a shoe. I cannot see into the canopy, but I fling the shoe at the noisy bird as best I can. I miss, and the bird keeps singing. I throw again and again like a madman until finally, I get close enough, and it flys away. The silence rushes in, and everything bursts into a quiet, silent symphony silhouetted against the gray fog overhead. The tree defuses the grainy streetlight and adds a shadowy black and white sheen to the rustling leaves of the tree. It looks like the fuzzy screen on my trashed black and white Curtis Mathes. Sad, but enriching, too.
Before I lay down to sleep, I work on the last five stanzas of my poem. I write at my table with pen and pad:
I go to bed. The upper stanzas no longer match the bottom ones. That's okay, though. The poem will probably never be published anyway.
Sonoma Grove Trailer Park changed. A new owner put the land up for sale. The asking price? $12.4 million. That much money stunned residents. The price raised fears that the trailer park would soon be bulldozed. The dream of a North Bay Haight-Ashbury would soon be ending.
Houser Holdings LLC bought the Grove, according to Metroactive reporter, Patricia Lynn Henley. The rules of the park were tightened and the rents increased, some doubled overnight. A number of residents left. About 20 followed the advice of lawyers and organized a rent strike, which led to a flurry of eviction proceedings. More residents moved out.
After nearly a year of friction, a deal was struck. Exact details of the legal settlement are confidential, but all of the long-term residents who remain in Sonoma Grove—about 80 or so—moved to the southern end of the property, leaving the north portion free to operate as an RV park for people passing through. 3
The exact details of the sale remain buried in the archives of The Press Democrat. Me? I prefer to remember it as I experienced it.
The gray and white tabby ran over to say hello. A yearling now, she jumped up on the kitchen-table seat, then to the back of the booth. She loves to nuzzle me under my chin and on my cheeks. When I decide to go back up north, Pat and Christiana accept this stoically. They're used to this. It is time to move on.
I never return to Sonoma State University, nor to my work with the mentally ill, and developmentally disabled. I have not missed the violence, nor the drug-induced comas we forced on so many people. My fear of hepatitis B, HIV, and all the other blood-borne illnesses that came with the work leave, too. At Thanksgiving, I send Pat and Christiana a card. I still have the card and poem they sent me for Christmas in reply:
We were both really glad to hear from you, thanks for the great Thanksgiving card—Christiana thought it was really funny that you called yourself a turkey—We're doing fine; the semesters almost over and we're both looking forward to the vacation—hope things are going well for you there—
Best wishes from both of us!
PS. The poem's a little gift from Christiana:
Footnotes
1 Jackson, Harold. “Why To Kill a Mockingbird should be required reading, not banned”. The Philadelphia Inquirer (October 19, 2017 Thursday) Philadelphia Inquirer. Article retrieved from LexusNexus.com on April 13, 2020.
2 Lee, Harper. “To Kill a Mockingbird” ). To Kill a Mockingbird. New York, Harper & Row, p. 49.
3 Hennley, Patricia L. “Shaping Sonoma Grove”. Metroactive (January 31, 2007 Wednesday). Metroactive. Retrieved April 16, 2007.
Other resources (some referenced above)
Sonoma Grove Tenants Face Uncertain Future; Trailer Park Tenants Seek Counsel’s Aid; City Explores Way to Help Sonoma Grove; Rohnert Park Earmarks $50,000; Sonoma Grove Trailer Park; Shaping Sonoma Grove; Home, Sweet Trailer; A Clock Work Orange--In Cotati?
Amockingbird screams somewhere in the night, calling me from a toasty-warm sleep. The propane man had just filled my 20-pound tank, and I’d set the burner on my stove to medium-high. My 19-foot travel trailer had become a haven. It had a tiny bathroom, and even a built-in wall heater, but it never got cold in the North Bay. It got chilly, but rarely dipped below freezing. If it got too cold, a couple of stove burners would usually handle it. The bird kept singing, and I turned over to go back to sleep. Mockingbirds were weird.
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In the glow of the burner, I think about mockingbirds. There’s something in “To Kill a Mockingbird” about why I should leave it alone, I think. I get up and walk over to my table, a cafe-style booth, tiny and worn. I use it for meals, and writing, often pounding anyway on my typewriter, rewriting poems.
I look out the window. In the trailer, five lots down, the other side of the lane, the lights blaze like a cruise ship on the ocean. They must have bulbs everywhere, for out of all the windows, blazing incandescent light spills out onto the trailers and narrow streets of Sonoma Grove. I can't hear them partying or anything, although people come and go a lot. The lights never dim on the cream-colored, one-bedroom ocean liner.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is on the Library of Congress’ list of most banned books, and Harper Lee had trouble with the endless challenges. She became frustrated, and in 1966 wrote a letter to the Richmond News-Leader to protest the newspaper’s praise of a school district for banning the book. Her letter referenced George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” which depicted a land ruled by a government that twisted the truth.
“‘Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners,’ said Lee’s letter. ‘To hear that the novel is immoral has made me count the years between now and ‘1984,’ for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.’” 1
As recently as 2017, a school board decided to ban “To Kill a Mockingbird,” again, to save eighth graders in Biloxi, Mississippi, from insight and compassion. Another misguided effort in a long line of attempts to ban the book. The reason the Mississippi school board wanted to ban Lee’s book, according to history.com? Some of the language made people feel uncomfortable.
When I read the novel, I felt no discomfort. Written in the tradition of Mark Twain, the precocious six-year-old Scout (eight, toward the end of the story), and her older brother, Jem, lived their life, that’s all. They talked endlessly about a recluse they called “Boo,” though, but many have known a Boo-like character in their lives. Boo’s behavior, especially at the end of the novel, became docile and autistic, or, perhaps, more developmentally-disabled. Scout takes Arthur’s hand (Boo’s real name) in the end. She walks him home, a code of honor and conduct worthy of any reader.
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In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the children feared Arthur because they didn’t know him, and even today, children, and adults, avoid Boo People. I worked with these kinds of outcasts in psychiatric hospitals, group homes, and juvenile detention centers before moving to Sonoma Grove. But the more I struggled in the Bay Area, the more I came to question my initial attitude toward trailer park people. Even if there were eccentric characters living there, what did it matter?
I can take anything, and Sonoma Grove isn't even on the list of difficult places. I worked at Napa State Hospital cleaning toilets as a student assistant. Bullying and violence were common, especially on the criminal ward. Ultimately, I teamed up with nurses who were trying to undo some of the damage, especially by a guy who passed out medications. He hated one patient, and we were always untieing the leather straps knotted in his back. “Alonzo” had gotten loose in isolation, once, and smeared everything and anything with his own excrement. The med tech didn't want that to happen again, and so he began knotting Alonzo on a gurney.
It wasn't ideal work, but good experience. I never did work in recreation, even though, after finishing my bachelor's degree, the staff on the children's ward rolled out the red carpet for me. That's neither here nor there, though. I turned to humanistic psychology in my postgraduate studies at good old Sonoma State. Things changed in ways I could not have imagined.
The mockingbird is still screaming in the tree. I get dressed and go out to see if I can find it. It’s singing out by East Cotati Avenue. I stumble along past the shower house and find the tree. “Shut up!” The bird keeps singing. “Shut up!” It ignores me. I can’t see anything in the tree, even with the streetlight across the street. In the gray, dark nether reaches of the mockingbird’s tree, even though it is only twenty feet tall, give or take, the bird keeps singing. I give up and return to my trailer.
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Then, the next day in a discussion group on the ins and outs of “Moby Dick,” I revealed I hadn’t read the novel. I tried to be honest, but I didn’t tell him I had to work. It must have been my delivery. The workshop had been the only activity worth attending, and I wanted to sit in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t allowed. The English instructor was incredulous as he telegraphed his disbelief. “You didn’t read the book!?” I had failed the get-to-know-you retreat, and everything went downhill from there.
From the outside, Sonoma Grove sits behind a dilapidated fence. Walking or driving past the place, on East Cotati Avenue, the trailer park looks like a junkyard or something, especially the way scruffy, untrimmed trees shroud the place. Many at Sonoma State University ignored the place altogether, which included me. That is, until, like Scout, I learned most people, as Atticus Finch had pointed out, are nice. “When you finally see them.”
The bird is still screaming, or singing, I guess, if that’s what you want to call it. Suddenly it is too warm in the trailer, and I get up and turn the burner down. I turn the lights on and look at my newest poem. I have been endlessly, typing, and retyping the stanzas to make the thing work. I do not type because it's 3 am, and so I read my poem. But even after shortening it, it still doesn't work. I read it over and over.
References to mockingbirds are rare in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Only two are mentioned outside everyone’s belief that it’s a sin to kill them. Harper Lee writes about the birds independently of not wanting to kill them when they stop singing.
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The question remains: Why is it a sin to kill a mockingbird? It's a sin because, according to Miss Maudie, “mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That is why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird.” 2
All I found on the question, according to experts, like the guy giving an audience on Sonoma Mountain, is that mockingbirds are innocents. You shouldn’t kill a mockingbird any more than should kill Tom Robinson. But mockingbirds are birds, and they do what all birds do, they sing. The males especially sing like a train wreck. Why? Because they want a mate. Innocence has nothing to do with it. I guess maybe for Miss Maudie, the mockingbird sings for her, like African Americans in the town she lives in, but to me, it’s just a noisy bird.
Icome home from work, and a kitten runs over from the trailer across the lane. It’s living under Pat and Christiana’s place, a trailer like mine. I invite the kitten in. She follows me to my twin bed. The kitten is gray and white and chases my finger on the bedspread. After we play for a while, I sit down at my typewriter. She wants out, and so I let her out.
I threw my 12-in Curtis Mathes television into the trash. It had been a constant companion for twenty years. It still worked, but things change.
I lived in Jung Haus, an off-campus housing project named after the psychiatrist, Carl Jung. But his concept of “psyche,” went far beyond the perceptually knowable, i.e., God. Unfortunately, that understanding got lost in translation at Sonoma State. The humanistic psychologists there believed in the psyche, but not God, as best I could figure, anyway. The existentialist nature of humanist psychology created too many barriers. Not all transcendentalists believe in God, of course. Jung either. He knew there was a God, as did I.
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Christiana, Pat’s daughter, is amazed when she realizes her pet keeps running to my trailer uninvited. She decides to adopt me, and both Christiana and her mother, Pat, become good friends. I tell them I never feed the kitten. This is necessary because I’m hoping they will shed some light on this mystery. Pat asks me to join them. She wants to see “Gandhi.” It’s playing at the Plaza Theater in Petaluma, and we go Friday night after her last class. She’s working on a bachelor’s degree in humanistic psychology.
I've had enough. The mockingbird will not let me sleep. This time when I get up and stumble over to the tree, I take a shoe. I cannot see into the canopy, but I fling the shoe at the noisy bird as best I can. I miss, and the bird keeps singing. I throw again and again like a madman until finally, I get close enough, and it flys away. The silence rushes in, and everything bursts into a quiet, silent symphony silhouetted against the gray fog overhead. The tree defuses the grainy streetlight and adds a shadowy black and white sheen to the rustling leaves of the tree. It looks like the fuzzy screen on my trashed black and white Curtis Mathes. Sad, but enriching, too.
Before I lay down to sleep, I work on the last five stanzas of my poem. I write at my table with pen and pad:
Shroud-like fog, the mist so cold
like dreams of silent city lights
Silhouetted on amber-grey nights
while overhead our spirit soars
On seas we sail the land no more!
Sonoma Grove Trailer Park changed. A new owner put the land up for sale. The asking price? $12.4 million. That much money stunned residents. The price raised fears that the trailer park would soon be bulldozed. The dream of a North Bay Haight-Ashbury would soon be ending.
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After nearly a year of friction, a deal was struck. Exact details of the legal settlement are confidential, but all of the long-term residents who remain in Sonoma Grove—about 80 or so—moved to the southern end of the property, leaving the north portion free to operate as an RV park for people passing through. 3
The exact details of the sale remain buried in the archives of The Press Democrat. Me? I prefer to remember it as I experienced it.
The gray and white tabby ran over to say hello. A yearling now, she jumped up on the kitchen-table seat, then to the back of the booth. She loves to nuzzle me under my chin and on my cheeks. When I decide to go back up north, Pat and Christiana accept this stoically. They're used to this. It is time to move on.
I never return to Sonoma State University, nor to my work with the mentally ill, and developmentally disabled. I have not missed the violence, nor the drug-induced comas we forced on so many people. My fear of hepatitis B, HIV, and all the other blood-borne illnesses that came with the work leave, too. At Thanksgiving, I send Pat and Christiana a card. I still have the card and poem they sent me for Christmas in reply:
We were both really glad to hear from you, thanks for the great Thanksgiving card—Christiana thought it was really funny that you called yourself a turkey—We're doing fine; the semesters almost over and we're both looking forward to the vacation—hope things are going well for you there—
Best wishes from both of us!
PS. The poem's a little gift from Christiana:
Sitting Under a tree Just
Being me
Sitting under a tree on a hill next to the sea
just being me Just being me sitting under a tree
the tide is up and I am sitting on a hill next to
a tree Just being me thinking.
Me, too. Sonoma Grove is no more, but the mockingbirds are still around where we lived. The memories, too. Thank you, Pat, for not rejecting me outright because of a moment of pique. It meant more to me than I dared express when you accepted the fact I’d chased the mockingbird away. It made me whole again.
Good news! I welcome the mockingbirds. And the deer, and also the raccoon bigger than a German Shepard, countless squirrels and birds, and friends. And, all I've known and trusted on my journey, especially you and Christiana. There are no mockingbirds in Iowa, unfortunately, but the loneliness is gone. I would welcome a mockingbird singing all night. The trees are in a deep ravine—a perfect place for mockingbirds.
Good news! I welcome the mockingbirds. And the deer, and also the raccoon bigger than a German Shepard, countless squirrels and birds, and friends. And, all I've known and trusted on my journey, especially you and Christiana. There are no mockingbirds in Iowa, unfortunately, but the loneliness is gone. I would welcome a mockingbird singing all night. The trees are in a deep ravine—a perfect place for mockingbirds.
Footnotes
1 Jackson, Harold. “Why To Kill a Mockingbird should be required reading, not banned”. The Philadelphia Inquirer (October 19, 2017 Thursday) Philadelphia Inquirer. Article retrieved from LexusNexus.com on April 13, 2020.
2 Lee, Harper. “To Kill a Mockingbird” ). To Kill a Mockingbird. New York, Harper & Row, p. 49.
3 Hennley, Patricia L. “Shaping Sonoma Grove”. Metroactive (January 31, 2007 Wednesday). Metroactive. Retrieved April 16, 2007.
Other resources (some referenced above)
Sonoma Grove Tenants Face Uncertain Future; Trailer Park Tenants Seek Counsel’s Aid; City Explores Way to Help Sonoma Grove; Rohnert Park Earmarks $50,000; Sonoma Grove Trailer Park; Shaping Sonoma Grove; Home, Sweet Trailer; A Clock Work Orange--In Cotati?
posted by C. DeForest Switzer | 2:22 PM
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