I Found Community in Sonoma - John Moss
John’s Sonoma Journey
This is the second of three stories about John’s relationship with Sonoma.
🟩 A One-Month Visit to Sonoma – Chapter 1
🟥 I Found Community in Sonoma – Chapter 2 (You are reading this story.)
🟦 Helping Build Community in Sonoma – Chapter 3
Click on the title about to read John’s final story describes how retirement led him to finding purpose by giving back to the Sonoma community.
I Found Community in Sonoma begins below.
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What began as a one-month experiment didn’t end when the rental was over. John and his wife bought a home, divided their time between Oakland and Sonoma for several years, and gradually realized that Sonoma had become the place where they truly belonged. OLD-I Found Community in Sonoma - John Moss.pdf
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Our one-month rental answered an important question.
We discovered that Sonoma was much more than a pleasant place to visit. We liked the slower pace, the weather, and the feeling of living in a small town. By the end of those thirty days, we bought a house and began spending part of each year here.
For the next few years, we divided our time between Oakland and Sonoma.
We loved the home we had spent years remodeling in Oakland, but the city itself was becoming harder to enjoy. Crime, homelessness, and the lingering effects of the pandemic had changed daily life. At the same time, something unexpected was happening in Sonoma.
We were making friends.
In our first six months as part-time residents, we met more people than I had met during ten years of living full-time in Oakland. Many were at a similar stage of life, approaching retirement or already retired, and they were open to building new friendships and becoming involved in the community. OLD-I Found Community in Sonoma - John Moss.pdf
Eventually I asked my wife a simple question.
“Why don’t we move here full-time?”
It wasn’t an easy decision. She had deep friendships in the East Bay and naturally felt more attached there than I did. But after a great deal of thought, we decided the community we were building in Sonoma was pointing us toward the next chapter of our lives.
In April 2024, we made Sonoma our permanent home.
We bought a house that better fit our long-term needs, including a garage apartment for our adult daughter.
Looking back, I realize we didn’t move here because of wineries or beautiful scenery.
We moved because we had found a community where we felt we belonged.
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Sometimes the decision to move isn’t made all at once. Living in Sonoma part-time gave John and his wife the confidence to discover whether it truly fit their lives.
While Sonoma’s beauty first caught their attention, it was the friendships they formed that convinced them to make it their permanent home.
John found that building community became easier in Sonoma than it had been during many years in the East Bay.
This story marks the middle chapter of John’s Sonoma journey. He has found his place. The next chapter explores how retirement led him to give back to the community through volunteer service.
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This story is the second chapter of John’s three-part Sonoma Journey. It was created by adapting a portion of John’s original recorded conversation with Don Lundgren for the Sonoma Stories project.
John’s journey continues in Helping Build Community in Sonoma, where he describes how retirement opened the door to volunteering with FISH, Rotary, and Vivo Youth Orchestras, and how serving others gave him a new sense of purpose.
