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I t takes five hours to drive out to my family’s land.

We pass a few small towns on our way up, with adorable, dainty-looking storefronts and a main street that looks like it’s been plucked right out of a classic holiday movie.

There’s no snow in these parts, but it didn’t stop any Californian from celebrating the winter holidays.

Tinsel and Christmas décor are everywhere, but my favorite part is always the lights strung above the street.

“This is adorable,” I murmur, letting my gaze wander as we roll through.

“Quaint and warm… Gosh, I can almost smell the apple spice, I swear.”

Farther ahead, a diner and a laundromat are sandwiched between two different coffee shops. On the opposite side of the street, there’s a bakery and a movie theater with one single film playing.

“We have to go see that,” Janet exclaims.

“What? Night Runners?” I ask, reading the marquee. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Maybe not that one,” she relents, “but at some point, we definitely have to go see a show there.”

“It’s probably really busy on Friday nights,” I assume, driving past.

Janet chuckles dryly. “How busy is a small town theater like this going to get? Come on, it’s part of the big-city-girls-moving-into-a-small-town experience.”

“We’ll indulge in it all!”

“Look, there’s a library!” Janet exclaims. “It looks so… small.”

“It’s like you’ve never seen a small town before.”

Janet gives me a long, pensive look. I can feel her eyes drilling holes into the side of my face. “Do you remember that time we went out to the park?” she asks. “Back in the city, that is.”

“I do.”

“Do you remember the spider?”

“It was a tiny little thing,” I groan, still remembering her shrieks when the spider crawled up her jeans. “Come on…”

“I’m a city animal, Mac. Everything outside the city is weird and new to me. Imagine the spiders we’ll find in wine country.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Let me enjoy the small stuff, like the cutest little library and the local cinema with its outdated movies, sister, because it’s my way of coping with whatever monsters nature has stashed in your future vineyard.”

That’s enough to crack me up, and I give Janet all the space she needs to marvel at the quaintness of small-town Cali while we continue our slow drive up to my land.

Pushing north, we move through orange groves and avocado fields and eventually find ourselves in a redwood forest. Giants rise all around us, with thick green crowns and trunks as wide as my old apartment studio.

It’s so beautiful, so quiet and serene out here…

for a second, I forget about everything we left behind.

“Oh, man, think about it, Mac. These trees have been around for centuries.”

“The things they’ve seen,” I mutter.

It takes a while, but we finally leave the redwood forest and reach the much-anticipated hills of fabled wine country. Rolling before our eyes in deep shades of emerald under a greyish-blue sky, Napa Valley welcomes us with soft tones and an eerie silence.

“At the next stop sign, turn left,” the robotic voice of my GPS says, almost startling me.

I follow instructions, discovering an old stop sign at an intersection between two one-way streets. I turn left, glide down a long hill, and at last the last of the trees falls away, revealing a breathtaking vista of the valley.

“It’s as beautiful as Tuscany, don’t you think?” I ask. “I’ve only seen it in pictures, though.”

Beside me, Janet catches her breath. “We should definitely put that on our travel list,” she says. “In fact, I think we have to visit Tuscany if we’re going to open a winery, Mac.”

“What better reason to go to Italy, huh?” I chuckle lightly.

“Business research,” she quips.

I wonder if we’ve arrived at my family’s land.

It’s been so long since I was last here that I can’t remember what it really looks like.

The GPS flashes, indicating that our destination is right over the next hill.

I pull up, expecting to see a ramshackle hut buried deep in a nest of scrub brush.

Instead, the house is a bona fide two-story home with only a scattering of weeds around it.

“Is this it?” Janet asks in awe.

I pull into the driveway and turn the engine off. Stepping out, I’m pleasantly surprised by the building. “This must be it. I’ve only been here once or twice when I was a child, and I think they’ve done a considerable amount of work since then.”

Beyond it, acres of wild land spread out. It’ll take a while to clear and prep the soil, but I refuse to let such thoughts intimidate me. We made it this far!

“Did someone live here at any point?” Janet wonders, walking around to the left side of the house before retracing her steps to the right. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s been around in at least a year or two.”

“I think so,” I agree. “We’re going to have to cut the lawn and repaint the siding, among other things. But I think the entire second story is new—look at the windows; they’re completely different.”

“I see,” Janet agrees, comparing the front-facing windows on the lower level with the more industrial-looking ones upstairs. “Let’s hope there’s not much grime and dirt to clean up on the inside, either…”

“My grandparents used to live here,” I explain. “And then it passed to my father, who wasn’t interested in it. I guess he had some work done, maybe hoping to sell it.”

“So no one has managed the place since your parents passed away?”

I shake my head slowly. “Bryan paid one of the locals to come in every other month and look around, fix whatever needed fixing, but I doubt they were paid to keep it clean or pretty.”

“We can handle it,” Janet replies. “You have faith in the winery, I have faith in the two of us. We’re golden, you and I.”

“Aw…”

I dig into one of my bags for the keys to the cottage. They’re in an envelope with my name on it.

“Either way, your brother’s helper seems to have patched up a few things over the years,” Janet mutters upon a closer inspection of the front porch steps.

“Some of the wood is newer looking. The hinges on the front door were recently changed. And I packed all of my cleaning products from the apartment, so we’ve got a decent head start. ”

“Bryan’s the best. He would’ve loved to be more involved with the winery, but he has his own business to focus on. I’m grateful he managed to handle the upkeep on this place, though, you’re right. I’m going to send him an engagement gift as soon as I have the requisite funds in the bank.”

We investigated all the rooms together, tallying the amount of work that needs to be done to bring the dwelling up to code. The electricity is working and the plumbing seems fine, but there’s a solid inch worth of dirt on the counters and a ring of scum around the kitchen sink.

“Okay, it’s not too bad,” Janet says. “I’ll go get the cleaning supplies from the car.”

“Wait. Let’s check out the upstairs first,” I suggest, putting off the inevitable chores for the time being. “Get the full picture before we dive in.”

The staircase is obviously newer than the floorboards. Its wood is a happy yellow while the floor is made up of weathered, grey boards. We make our way upstairs to find two spacious bedrooms and a relatively new bathroom with bright blue tile and only a minimal amount of grime in the shower cabin.

“I’ll take this room,” Janet announces, peeling off to investigate one of the two available spaces.

“Not a bad choice, ma’am,” I muse as I briefly inspect the room.

Its walls are painted a cream color, but it needs a serious cleaning before anything else. The linens survived a moth invasion and the subsequent chemical treatment, but we brought fresh textiles from the city, anyway.

A single window looks out over the valley, letting in a steady stream of sunlight filled with flecks of dust.

“Nice digs, Jan.Let’s see what I get,” I say as I walk across the hall to the other room.

My window looks out over the forest in the distance.

I can see the road and the car from up here, the future vineyards almost whispering to me from across my field of vision.

It’s not bad. Not bad at all. As soon as we get the bed up the stairs and the single chest of drawers I brought, it will feel just like home.

Janet joins me by the window. “Mac, this is a slice of heaven.”

“Wait until we’re done sprucing it up.”

“Let’s get crackin’, then.”

We put on some loud music and get started. There’s no way I can spend more than half an hour in this place without cleaning. We tackle the kitchen first, considering that at some point, we’re going to want to cook a meal.

It takes us nearly two hours, working together, to clear enough counter space to prepare our food. I clean the refrigerator while Janet tackles the stove. It looks like all of the appliances are still working, which is great. I’m too much of a city girl to have any idea how to fix a stove.

“We’d better start meeting folks in town,” I say at one point. “And get in touch with Bryan’s guy, too. We need a handyman, a plumber to check the pipes, and we’re going to have to hire a fieldhand or two for the brushwork.”

“I’m right there with you, sister. But first,” Janet pulls her dish gloves off and sighs, “I think we need to take a break. There was a bottle of wine here somewhere, wasn’t there?”

“In that bag, I think,” I say, pointing across the room to one of the grocery bags Janet brought with her.

“Oh, yeah,” she remembers, pulling two bottles out and holding both up. “I got a rosé and a white, because I wasn’t sure what you like.”

“We’ll do both,” I say thoughtfully. “Let’s start with the rosé.”

“Rosé it is,” Janet agrees, looking around for some wine glasses.

We aren’t able to find any, but there are two coffee mugs in my kitchen box. I pull them out and set them on the counter so that Janet can pour. Once both cups are full, we hold them high to cheer for this next chapter in our lives.

“To friendship,” I say.

“To new opportunities,” Janet replies.