TAHOE LOCAL

A journalist relates tales from her life in the eastern California wilderness.

In her nonfiction debut, Tahoe Mountain News columnist Tomer regales readers with stories of her experiences in the wild Tahoe region, where she moved 50 years ago for, as she puts it, the same reason any girl moves to the mountains: “so I'd never have to shave my legs again,” she writes. “Or wear nylons. Or dresses, except for church, which I no longer attend, having received a lifetime ban at the age of twelve.” In the pages that follow, she episodically recounts a string of stories ranging from the tense to the heartfelt, with a vein of humorous thankfulness running through all of it: “If we pause to think, which I seldom do,” she writes, “gratitude helps us cope with the stresses of life,” and this tone informs every anecdote she shares. She relates when she and her unnamed “Hubby,” during her pregnancy, were living in Fish Springs, “a cow-skulls-hanging-on-barbed-wire-fence acreage, renowned for its climate's similarity to hell,” when her water suddenly broke and “I put an end to the evening festivities by requesting a mop and a ride to the hospital.” She reflects on her high school days, navigating the school's “toxic aerosol cloud of dime store cologne…industrial-strength Right Guard deodorant…and hairspray so sticky it became a fly trap.” She tells all of this with an easy storyteller’s grace and perfect pitch, gently ushering the reader from one wistfully amusing scene to another. The author's humor often has a great sense of timing, as when she writes that she and Hubby usually celebrate their wedding anniversaries by sitting on the deck, gazing lovingly into the foam of their microbrews, and asking, “What the hell were we thinking?” Ultimately, it’s Tomer’s enthusiasm for life that’s the most touching part of the book: “It’s easy to forget you’re sixty-six when you're feeling six,” she writes, and her readers may feel young again as well.

An upbeat and funny series of reminiscences about Tahoe living.