By Jennifer Adams

Other Voices

The foundation on which Los Altos’ multimillion-dollar status was built trembled and crumbled a bit more recently with the quiet passing of a lovely woman. I cannot write an obituary for Betty Patterson: though my family shared many winter holidays and summer evenings with her, I regretfully do not know the details of her life such that I’d be qualified for that writing. However, I do know the importance of her presence, and others like her, to a town like Los Altos.

Mrs. Patterson moved to Los Altos with her husband Ken when there were as many apricot trees as there were homes. They built their own home - swimming pool, gazebo, patio, and each picket of their white-picket fence - from the ground up, with their own hands. There is an intricate needlepoint replica Betty made of the house with all its carefully tended roses proudly displayed in her living room. When joining Betty for tea, always served in some kind of beautiful little English-pattern pot and delicate floral cups, she’d greet you with a happy face of surprise (even when she knew you were coming) from behind the curtain of the front door. Betty loved visitors. Walking in, the first thing you’d see was that needlepoint of her house.

The saying “home is where the heart is” was perhaps never more truthful than with the Pattersons. His woodworking and her needlework and green thumb filled their home and garden with much more than objects. The little blue house with its whitepicket fence and now-dying roses, the house next to mine, is so imbued with the hearts of those folk it’s nearly impossible to believe they are gone.

What will replace each picket of the white-picket fence, each slat of the gazebo in back, each grainy granule lining the shallow self-dug pool?

Where will so many pounds of needlepoint and stitching and knitted afghans be sent? I heard a sermon this week about change being the natural course of life, which gave me some comfort. Still I fear the house will be razed - or close enough to it in a drastic remodel - its life and the lives it holds paved over to build a house (as big and ostentatious as you can, please!) where once there was a home.

Los Altos gets shinier and slicker by the day. Like the town Christmas tree, uprooted several years ago and paved over with a gleaming plaza in the center of town, Los Altos’ roots get too quickly buried under the hollow gleam of bigger, better, more.

For years already I have missed seeing Betty wave from her garden as she tended to her roses. Too often I waved back from the car, smiled, and kept going - busy keeping up with the rest of fast-paced modernity.

Maybe if we spent a bit more time sharing tea in the living room or wine in the garden, we wouldn’t be wondering as a society what’s become of us. Perhaps if we learned to build with our hands again and perhaps if we so carefully and lovingly tended to our roses, whatever those may be, we would not be so estranged from each other or from ourselves.

In Betty’s later days, after her mind had begun slipping from one decade to another in a single moment, she could transport herself to the loveliest of days. In a flash she could escape her dying body in the darkened den of the house she’s inhabited alone for the many years since her husband died. At once she’d again be a blossoming young woman, twirling in the arms of her new husband at the Los Altos street festival in a time when there was still room enough to dance at the fair.

I wish I had known Betty then. I was fortunate to know her later, and I will miss her. And I will miss the gift she gave of her honest presence in Los Altos, tending so carefully to her garden.

Adams grew up in Los Altos and was a neighborhood friend to Mrs. Patterson. She now resides in Oakland.