The Jeffers’ cottage in Carmel – Tor House – remains today, half a century after Robinson Jeffer’s death, with the dishes and photographs, inkwells and piano, books and furniture, and hundreds of precious objects intact. Including the bed where Jeffers died. The docent who gives tours knows all the stories because Una Jeffers kept a meticulous inventory of what they owned and the history of everything.

 I had spent a summer in Carmel when I was eight years old, staying with my aunt, and after the tour of Tor House and Hawk Tower, I found what I thought was my aunt’s house on Santa Fe Road. I think it was Aunt Boo’s house – old Spanish, two blocks up from the village and a chimney that looked like it could have been the one I remembered in the living room, but everyone who would have known whether in fact this was her house, is now gone. And with them the memory of all the things that house had held, the stories and history, has vanished. Nothing had been written down.