Glen Ellen correspondent says adieu to the Valley

Longtime columnist, teacher reflects upon 41 years in the Valley|

“What a different world Glen Ellen was when I first moved here,” says Sylvia Crawford, 69, a longtime Index-Tribune columnist, former teacher at St. Francis Solano Catholic School and a 41-year resident of Glen Ellen.

After four decades, Crawford and her husband, Bill, are leaving the Valley, relocating to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to family and her 2-year-old grandchild. Though Crawford is candid about already missing her home in the trees, at the confluence of two creeks, which she lovingly refers to as Creekbottom House, she says it’s not what she’ll miss the most about Glen Ellen.

“It’s the people,” Crawford smiles, sitting outdoors in her yard, where neighbors and townsfolk frequently pass by and wave. “After 41 years in one place,” she says, “you find so many people you come to love. Half the town walks by this yard every day. I wave to people all day long.”

Asked why, then, she’s packing up and leaving, Crawford’s answer is direct, and given with another, even brighter smile.

“I want to be with my kids,” she says. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

As she prepares to embark on her journey north, Crawford’s final few weeks in the Sonoma Valley have been a long list of last acts – her last visit as a Californian to Bouverie Preserve, where she’s been a docent since the 1980s, one final meeting of her longtime book club, a last gathering with her women’s meditation group.

“Yesterday, particularly, was a day full of tears,” Crawford says. “I admit I spend a lot of time thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ But I know what I’m doing. I’m not really leaving something so much as I’m going toward something. What I’m moving toward is a good and wonderful future, but I can’t deny it, leaving all of this behind is absolutely wretched.”

Crawford met Bill in 1971, when she was a student at Humboldt State University.

“I took every English class for seven years and never graduated,” she laughs.

At the time, Bill lived in Albany, New York, doing work as a conscientious objector with the War Resister’s League, and other pacifist groups.

“Bill was visiting a friend in Humboldt, and he walked into this office where I had a summer job with a government program that helped educators teaching in remote places,” she says. “I look up and there was Bill, looking for a job.”

Two months later, now “head-over-heels-in-love,” as she happily describes herself, she moved with Bill to New York. After three years there in the cold and snow, they married and returned to California, first to Southern California, where Bill did two years of graduate work in printing management at Cal Poly University. Eventually, the Crawfords decided to head north, to find a home where there were plenty of trees.

“My friend Judy Larsen was living here,” she recalls, “so we lived in her driveway in our Volkswagen bus for a while. I just couldn’t believe how beautiful this area was. It was magical.”

Not long after, the Crawfords purchased Creekbottom House, which was then just a small Glen Ellen one-bedroom. It was the late 1970s. Crawford had landed a gig at the Index-Tribune pasting up ads and doing other tasks, including tackling the occasional writing assignment, and eventually decided to enroll at Sonoma State University, to finally complete her degree and earn a teaching credential. She then taught English at St. Francis until her retirement. She took to teaching, she says, as if she’d always been doing it.

And in a way, she always had been.

“Even as a little girl,” Crawford recalls,” I would surround myself with my stuffed animals and be their teacher. I would care for them, no matter what level they were at, whether it was the lamb with white wool who wasn’t very bright, or the bear who knew everything. I wanted them all to learn and grow and enjoy books with me.”

Before her retirement from teaching, she’d long-since taken over Sandy Zimmerman’s regular column for the I-T, “The Folks in Glen Ellen,” focusing on life in the “village” to the north. Like teaching, becoming a columnist was a confortable fit.

“You have to be a little nosy to be a good columnist,” Crawford says. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m nosy, exactly, but I am naturally curious. I love hearing people’s stories. I’ve so very much loved writing those stories all these years. Every column has been a little love letter to small town life.”

Crawford allows, with a bittersweet smile, that writing her final column for the I-T – see page B7 – is the very last item on her “List of Lasts,” before climbing with Bill into their car and heading up to her new home in Oregon. As she sits outside, glancing about at the trees and birds she knows so well, Crawford tells of a small plaque she purchased at a garage sale shortly after she and Bill bought Creekbottom House, all those years ago.

“It said, ‘May I live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to Man,’” she says. “Living in Glen Ellen, teaching the children of the Valley, and writing the column – it’s been my way of doing that. To live by the side of the road, and to be a friend to my fellow human beings, all these people I love so much, and who I suspect I will miss more than I can possibly imagine.”

Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com.

UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy:
  • This is a family newspaper, please use a kind and respectful tone.
  • No profanity, hate speech or personal attacks. No off-topic remarks.
  • No disinformation about current events.
  • We will remove any comments — or commenters — that do not follow this commenting policy.