Oakland ramble
Narrator: Geraldeen she/her
In the town of Oakland, west of Ebott, smack dab between the sea and the big city, life turns at a different pace.
People forget about the town. You it out on a map for people to even grasp what the hell you’re going on about. Then people stare at it like you’re pointing to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “There’s a town there?”
It must’ve been a decade ago when the world forgot bout Oakland. Sponsors and big businesses stopped coming to town. The people repossessed the stores, reconstructing them in their own image.
The new owner of the grocer made it into a mini mall. One gal took charge of the mechanical dohickies and oils, taking them into her own shop. Another two shared the new “mini-mal” with the grocer’s owner to have a clothing shop and home goods store within there too. The only thing dividing them a thin removable wall so the spaces felt separate.
In the time since, the clothing ran out. While there still were mysterious deliveries of food that popped up now and again, the clothing drops stopped immediately. Instead, the joy in charge of clothing worked with the community to produce their own clothing.
Lot of the old grandnopas and homebound folk need a thing to do. With how rarely folk left town and mended their own clothing, the prices were high enough to make a good side business for them folk.
Other parts of the town shifted as well. Boarders most prevalently. Corporations that owned vast swaths of farm land disappeared over night. Anyone who lived out of town up and left. Whole swaths of farmland left to the wandering folk.
Afterall, their bodies baked in the sun all these years so the town elected to leave the land and its machinery to them. Overnight the land changed, as if appreciating the new boss. The crops grew wild and far larger. One woman employed her mama’s teachings of making a food forest rather than wide open fields. In a few years’ time, her field was so plentiful that almost every other farmer adapted to the same fashion.
In the years since, the once open, wind beaten country side sports an arrangement of pockets of forests growing in. In time, people say no truck will fall due to any gale.
Everything seems to fall into place like magic.
People who lived on land, owned that land. Those who worked at a corporation whose owners left, shared in that business.
The town council continued passing strange laws that force some reason didn’t feel so strange. Not as strange as the packages no long coming or the mail always having to be picked up from the next town over.
So when the town council declared that anyone who didn’t live in a house, didn’t own said house… it should’ve caused an upheaval. None in the town were radical folk. They shard what they could with a good neighbor or two but weren’t for big gestures of charity.
For some reason, the wealthier in town owners let the properties go.
Wanderers and homeless alike were housed. Overnight, not a single person had to leave on the street if they didn’t want to. Several parts of town offered free meals three times a day. Larger houses had their own food deliveries so they didn’t have to make the miles long trek.
The old motel I worked at and now own is one of them. Toiletries, food, water, medicine, and basically anything else we need is handled provided for.
The Council decreed it in the newspaper and the day after the homeless settled in, the deliveries came. I couldn’t believe it at the time. It felt like everyone had gone insane letting the council go about the way they did. I marched right up those marble steps and hammered at the mayor’s door.
A note slips under the door. It had a check pinned to it along with a contractual agreement.
Motel would act as housing recovery centers to the homeless. The following day, I’d receive several new employees to handle the cooking and conflict resolution. I’d recognized the names. A couple therapists and a guidance counselor would act as the intermediaries between myself and the new residents.
Honestly, I had my reservations but the tidy monthly sum covered all the utilities, damages as well as double the salary me and my follow maids would’ve gotten if we hadn’t inherited the motel so I accept it readily.
I could always turn them down, contract even said so.
Soon after, a community group called Do-It came in. Unlike the Conflict Resolve folks in blue polos, these folks sported moss green shirts that burst with embroidered flowers. (Later I learned courtesy of Marge down the street.)
Many of them were recovering addicts, abuse survivors, etc who helped those residents acclimatize to the new environment. Often times, they’d buddy up and hang with the green shirts.
What I thought would turn out to be a disaster, instead turned into residents tidying up their own stoop. One even offered to help me with the wiring problem that always made the aft lights flicker when it got cold.
In the coming years, the roster of the Half-Way Motel changed considerably. Many faces flashed by as new faces cropped up. By the time eight years had passed, only a handful of the original group remained. Most found the rooms cramped, moving in to empty rooms in other homes in the community.
Since the majority of people moved into town, the buildings on the edge of town were torn down, instead redoing infrastructure in the center of town, creating spacious apartment spaces. I’d gone down there a time or two. Along every balcony, a resident could plant flowers, making the place even more green than the forest mosaics covering it.
I’ve worked in the hotel’s front desk for long as I can remember. I think I started working in high school but I can’t seem to recall.
The transition I remember clearly. Especially with how only I and another two maids were working at the time. They left soon after when better work opened up, one had a husband who inherited one of the fields.
Personally, I liked the work. Without cleaning or having to handle many of the resident disputes, it got a whole lot quieter. More time I spent fixing up the place and occasionally negotiating with residents for changes, like filling up the pool to make a community garden.
That’s one I particularly enjoyed.
Only a few things didn’t change in the coming years. For one, the skeleton with a skull that looked etched with vines. Ey was the first to come outside of town. Like many of the out of towners, ey forgot eir name.
Unlike the others, none of the sponsors were able to connect with em. Afterall, a sponsee had to open the door to be helped. Occasional wellness checks found that ey hadn’t been hurting emself, eating properly with good magic reserves so after the first month had been left to eir own devices.
Aside from the gathering groceries and meals each day at the front desk, the neat rarely ever left those four walls.
What’s strange is when I saw the resident with both feet planted on the ground staring at me. The lost drift like ghost through the hall so often, to be asked Do you have any other towels? shocked me into silence. Behind em I notice a taller skeleton who was missing one of zir front teeth, one of the baker’s assistants. Another one of the lost, though, at one point, ze’d lived here as a child. Nobody could remember zir name so everyone called them Squatch, like a Sasquatch due to zir height. The only thing I could recall about zem is that ze wasn’t ever far from zir motorcycle or without something about baking on zir tongue.
It amused me seeing the two side by side, the smaller one barley reaching the taller’s one’s belly. The motel had become well known for matching odd balls together. I guess this was just another unlikely match.
