Jen came to Idyllwild following her mother's death and never seriously considered leaving. She volunteers for everything, bakes for her neighbors, tends her garden, rehabilitates her faith in people, and is in the early days of building a houseplant and landscaping business called Planted. Her husband says this is the happiest he has seen her in years.

Her mother was an oil painter who had spent thirteen years on this mountain before she got sick. Jen had been making the drive up from Harbor City constantly in those last two years, helping her dad, and somewhere in all those trips she stopped thinking of it as her parents' place and started thinking of it as hers. A year after her mother passed, she and her husband packed up their two small kids and moved in. He left almost immediately for a six-month restoration job in Indiana — he's a telecom lineman, the kind of work that follows the damage. Her daughter was about to start kindergarten. Her son had just turned three. For those first months, it was just Jen, her dad, and the two kids in a house that felt large and quiet and very far from everything familiar.

A preschool teacher called Kathy, who had been running childcare out of her home on Oakwood for thirty years, was the first lifeline. Then COVID arrived and sealed everyone indoors, and Jen sat with what she had: a mountain she was still learning, children who needed her, and a father she was grateful to be near.

A Room Full of Stories 

When things opened back up, her friend Megan brought her to the American Legion. Jen's grandfather had served. That was enough to join as auxiliary. The Legion had always seemed like a place with a slight air of exclusivity — a door you couldn't walk through unless you had a reason to be there, a veteran in the family, something that connected you to it. Then you walked in, and it turned out to be just a room full of people who had been showing up for each other for decades and were glad to make room for one more.

She started bartending there not long after, and stayed two and a half years. "You get to meet so many different people and hear their stories," she says. "The whole town goes." Every shift was a lesson in who this town actually was. She listened more than she talked, and the stories found her anyway. They brought their kids, who colonized the dining room with card games and coloring books while the adults had something both of them had been missing: an unhurried evening, with people they had chosen.

Their closest friends here all have Legion roots. Some grew up going there with their own parents. The whole town moves through the place eventually. For Jen, it is where Idyllwild stopped being the place she had moved to and started being home.

The Cheers of California

That sense of belonging didn't come easily. She had been guarded in LA. Not cold, but careful. When you live in a big city long enough, she says, "you lose trust in humanity". It's hard to know why people are being kind to you. When people were warm to her in those first months here, she didn't trust it. It took time. "I had to realize that the people in this town are not here for what you have," she says. "They are genuine."

"LA was always about keeping up with the Joneses. Comparing what other people have to what you have." She doesn't feel that here. You are liked for who you are, or you're not, and nobody is keeping score. "It's freeing," she says. "It's like a weight lifted off your shoulder."

Her husband still commutes to Indio four days a week and she can see it on him every time he comes back up the hill — the slow unwinding, tension leaving him, the tightness he carries down there dissolving somewhere on the drive. She went through that same transition herself, over years, until her dad started calling her a blithe spirit. Her husband calls her that too. She'll talk to anyone, say hello to strangers, stop to ask how someone is doing.

Idyllwild, she says, is like the Cheers of California. Everybody knows your name.

Her neighbor across the street sells firewood and plows driveways. Somewhere along the way they worked out an arrangement: she bakes pretzel bites and he clears her driveway. It is the kind of transaction that doesn't exist in Los Angeles, and it is exactly the kind of thing she loves about living here. During Snowmageddon a few years back she took it further, bringing a thermos of coffee and a plate of cookies out to the Caltrans crew working the highway near her house, hoping they might spare her driveway in the plow pass. They did. "You treat people with kindness," she says, "and the kindness is reciprocated." She considers this the mountain economy working exactly as it should.

Her neighbor Sarah, who lived next door to her dad, started a Christmas decoration competition with him years ago that went on for years and years. That kind of neighborly sparring — warm, ongoing, a little ridiculous — is what she means. It's not just that everyone knows your name. It's that they know your Christmas lights.

"I wouldn't be as open or welcoming," she says, "had I not come here." The mountain did something to her that Los Angeles never could.

Bad Gas Travels Fast

The other side of everybody knowing your name is that nobody's business stays private for long. "Bad gas travels fast," she says. A rumor doesn't take long to become a whole story that everyone in town believes they witnessed firsthand.

Her husband tested this early on. He is, in her words, the epitome of the class clown. He went to the pharmacy, then the post office, then the grocery store, and at each stop told whoever was there that they had been on a break and she had finally let him move back in. He wanted to see how fast it would get back to her dad. The answer was three days. Her father called, having heard from someone at the post office that his daughter and son-in-law were reconciling.

"I'm so happy to hear they're getting back together," the person had told him. "That's wonderful news."

She had to explain the whole thing. Her husband thought it was very funny. She still tells it with more affection than she probably intends.

Reputations can take a hit up here, she says, but they recover. Something new always comes along. "Everything ebbs and flows," she says. "It'll have its peak, and then its valley, and eventually die off." You keep your head down, stay out of the noise, and let it pass.

Planted

In February she walked away from three years answering phones and doing billing at Idyllwild Appliance and decided it was time to build something of her own. Mike, who runs the place and has been a friend since he fixed their heater the week they moved in — "Who doesn't love Mike?" she says — saw it coming before she did. He knew she wasn't happy. When she told him, he understood completely.

The new business is called Planted. She does houseplant care and colorscaping — landscape design that adds color and life to a property without disturbing what's already beautiful about being here. She'll map out your yard, plant fruit trees or vegetables, come by every week to water and tend while you're away. She has been doing this kind of work since she was twenty-one, trained by a woman in LA who ran the same type of business. She loved it and had to stop when she got pregnant.

Her husband pushed her to start. He could see it in her — whatever she carried at work came home with her. "If you're going to fret and stress," she says, "it might as well be about your own thing."

Work on the mountain has never been easy to find, and she is not alone in that. Friends are struggling, holding things together, looking for work or clinging to it. Her husband drives off the hill four days a week, and his gas bill alone runs close to seven hundred dollars a month. She is building Planted into all of it anyway.

Her husband has said, more than once lately, that this is the happiest he has seen her in a long time. She was overstimulated before — bartending all day, phones all day, then the kids, then dinner, then her husband home at 6:30 wanting to tell her about his day, everyone pulling at her at once. Now she is outside more. She cooks because she wants to. The kids come in from the yard smelling like fresh air and dirt and she stands in the kitchen and lets the afternoon go slowly.

"My happy place is either outside or in the kitchen," she says. "That's where you'll find me."

Loving a Hard Place 

Every spring, her son points out the window on the way to school and says: Mom, it's an absolutely beautiful day today. He is ten. The fact that he notices it at ten stops her every time.

She spent years as a wildlife rehabilitator in LA, taking in injured raptors and hummingbirds and everything in between. That work deepened something that was already in her, and it's in him too, this habit of noticing what's alive and what it's doing. Here, she sits outside in the mornings and listens. She can identify birds by sound. Nuthatches. Flickers. Ravens going through their full repertoire of clicks and calls. The screech owls at night when mating season starts and they get talkative. The squirrels drive her a little crazy but she names them anyway.

Spring and fall are her seasons. She loves watching new growth come in and the leaves turn at Lake Fulmor. Summer feels long and winter feels longer, or maybe it's that the good seasons feel too short because they're so good. The winters are hard and expensive and isolating in ways that catch people off-guard. "Not everybody can hang," she says simply. Vacationing here and living here are two very different things. You may come in July and think you understand the place. You don't. Not until you've gotten through a winter when the propane runs low and the roads are iced and you're out there trading baked goods for a cleared driveway.

Her family has talked about leaving, the way people do when the bills get heavy and California feels impossible. And every time, the same question rises and stops them cold: where would they go and find this? Her dad is her neighbor. Her mother planted roots here that are still growing, buried in this ground. Her kids are out in the yard with a metal detector, pulling old Cadillac parts out of the creek behind the house, piece by piece.

She knew all of that before she moved. She moved anyway.

She joined the gardening club this year. With her dad, who she calls the unofficial mayor and still volunteers for everything on the mountain. She says it without drama, the way you say something you've stopped questioning. "I can't imagine living anywhere else now."