Forty years ago, Wendy arrived in Idyllwild as a young bride with no particular plan, just a temporary shelter in what her husband's family modestly called "the cabin." Her husband had a graduate degree in French and Southern California wasn't exactly clamoring for his expertise. Her in-laws' cabin became their answer to a question they hadn't quite finished asking.

Four decades later, Wendy is still here. She has become something quieter and more essential, a thread woven so thoroughly into the fabric of this mountain community that to pull her out would unravel entire sections of what makes Idyllwild itself.

The Recognition She Loves

There's a moment Wendy returns to often, polished smooth by repetition. The Fourth of July parade that gloriously hokey procession where everyone knows everyone. She's been in that parade every single year. Sometimes with the Garden Club, sometimes with the PTA, once as Volunteer of the Year riding in a car and waving to the crowd.

"People would shout, 'This parade wouldn't be the same without you!'" she recalls, her face lighting up. "And I'm just walking down the street, running back and forth saying hi to everybody."

It's not vanity that makes her voice brighten. It's something deeper: the basic human need to know that you matter, that your presence registers, that your absence would leave a hole. In a city, you can volunteer for years and remain anonymous. But here, in this mountain town of three thousand people, Wendy's contributions are visible. They're known. And she loves that.

"The volunteer aspect and the community spirit" is what she hopes never changes about Idyllwild. "You make a difference if you volunteer," she says simply. "Whereas if you're in Tustin, my sister-in-law volunteers all the time and nobody knows her."

"It's not why you do it," she's quick to add. "But it is nice to be recognized."

At the post office—where everyone eventually congregates—she can be there for an hour, not because the line is long, but because she keeps running into people. This is her reward for decades of service: to be seen, to be known, to walk into a room and have people's faces light up. At the Red Kettle, where her daughter once worked, she knows everyone. The expensive breakfast is worth it for the social currency alone.

Twenty years in various roles, various organizations. Nominated for Volunteer of the Year by someone she never identified. 

Here, if you show up, you matter. If you show up consistently for twenty years, you become infrastructure.

The Architecture of Belonging

Recognition wasn't always hers. In the beginning, Idyllwild felt impenetrable. "It was tough at first because we don't go to church, so we couldn't meet anybody," she remembers. "There's nowhere to meet people up here."

Children turned out to be her key to the kingdom. But more than that, they were her purpose.

"All I wanted to do was have kids and be a mom," Wendy says. Her husband was thrilled, he'd been a latchkey kid with professional parents who were never home. When their first child arrived, Wendy made a choice that would shape everything that followed: she would be there. She never worked full-time again.

Instead, she poured herself into motherhood and, by extension, into the community that held her children. "Once we started having kids, we met people that had nothing in common with us except that we all had kids," she says. "I'm still friends with all of them, and my kids are still friends with those kids. It's just lifetime family."

Three children, spread out over the years, meant twenty years of being the mom who was always there. The mom in the classroom every week. The mom coaching soccer. When her kids started school, she jumped in headfirst with volunteering. Twenty years on the PTA board. Twenty years coordinating up to nine soccer teams at once, driving down the mountain to Hemet.

She inherited soccer from her father, half German, half English, who played in the Royal Air Force. Her husband, a disillusioned baseball player, embraced soccer for its constant movement, its democracy. All three of her children played. Her son got recruited to college for it. The altitude gave them an advantage: "their lung capacity stronger, their endurance huge."

Being a stay-at-home mom wasn't a sacrifice. It was an identity, a vocation. And in Idyllwild, it became the foundation for everything else; building the architecture of belonging, brick by brick, volunteer hour by volunteer hour, always with her children at the center.

The Garden of Community

When her mother-in-law, a Garden Club president, asked her to start a junior garden club at the elementary school, Wendy said yes. She put in gardens everywhere: at the elementary school, at the middle school, at the front entrance. 

Now, as Garden Club president herself—twice, in two different eras—she tends not just to flowers but to legacy. "That's what everybody knows me for," she says of the school gardens. They're still there, still maintained, still teaching children that beauty requires care.

Her own garden has become more laissez-faire. The deer come through. The altitude's intense sun burns things that flourish at lower elevations. She's learned to let what will grow simply grow. But when she visits her daughter in Santa Maria, she plants herb gardens and butterfly gardens and roses, weeding and nurturing with each visit.

The lilacs, though. The lilacs make up for everything. "Lilacs only grow in the mountains, and when they bloom, for a month, we have beautiful lilacs everywhere," she says, her voice softening. It's a smell that means spring, that means winter is over, that means you've survived another season.

The Sound of Silence

Her favorite sound in nature, she says, is silence. But silence in Idyllwild is relative. She sits high up on her property, sound rising from the valley below. She can hear the Legion Hall, the amphitheater. Summer concerts drift up to her porch. 

But during COVID, something miraculous happened. The birds made a return.

"For two years, the birds came back," Wendy says, wonder still in her voice. "We thought we didn't have birds anymore. But with nobody driving their cars and no tourists and nothing going on—no airplanes going over because air travel was cut back—it was just lovely."

"It's very peaceful up here and calming," she says. No smog. Clean mountain air. No police—she's never needed them in forty years. For everything else, there's just neighbors and knowing who lives where.

The Map of Character

"We always joke that we have bad people up here, but we know where they live," Wendy says matter-of-factly. "We know who they are."

It's not a threat. It's a fact of small-town life. There are no anonymous transgressions here. And if you're raising teenagers, that surveillance can be a blessing. "For kids that are good kids, it's fantastic," she explains. "For kids that are troublemakers, they don't like it because everyone knows everybody. You get a phone call really quick."

She didn't get those phone calls. She made a few, though.

When her daughters wanted to date someone, she knew too much. She knew their families, had watched these kids grow up. "It only backfired once," she admits. "I gave my opinion, and they didn't listen, and then later they were like, 'Oh, my God.'"

None of her children ended up with someone from Idyllwild anyway. They're scattered now (Santa Maria, San Luis Obispo, Oakland) and Wendy finds herself in that strange liminal space of mountain parents whose kids have fled to flatland cities.

The Leaving and the Staying

Wendy has thought about leaving. Her mother and mother-in-law are both alive, both in the desert now, and she and her husband have made a pact: "We're here until they're not. And then we'll see where the kids landed."

She'd rather be in her children's lives than rooted to a place they've outgrown. But for now, she's still here in her in-laws' cabin that was never supposed to be permanent. Still walking her dogs on the trails. Still showing up when the elementary school calls.

Still playing bridge on Thursdays and Fridays, the game she once swore was for old people. "It is so much fun and it is so good for your brain," she concedes now.

Still tending the school gardens, her legacy growing in raised beds and flowering vines.