Why I like Sonoma - Sonoma Dairy Day

My crime thrillers are set in Sonoma. Here's why I love Sonoma so:

A SONOMA DAIRY DAY
(cribbed from by R. Kipling)

Atop Sonoma mountain, looking westward to the bay
A milk-maid sat sighing because I came upon her one day
Wind rushes in madrone and oak, cowbells chime to say
Come home, dairy boy, come back Sonoma way.

In redwoods she pines for me, where her milk sheep lay.
Can ya hear kayaks paddle on Russian River runs at play?
Sunsets sink serene beyond Captain Drake’s old Bodega Bay.

Her petticoat was yellow and her little cap was green,
Her name, Anya-Dakini, same as a Santa Rosa queen.
She sat in a cloud of smoke from a hardy hemp cheroot
Wasting her kisses on my bumpkin boy’s big snoot
An idle cowboy of mud, sipping whiskey in his suds
Plucky lot she cared who watched her kissing on her stud.

Mists upon the vineyards, sunlight splashing low and slow
She thumbed her banjo song ‘Come back Sonoma don’t ya know’
Once her arms were on my shoulder, her lips upon my cheek
Eloped in love we saw sunlight tumble on Sonoma’s highest peak

We lingered a week as otters splat in a sludgy, squdgy creek,
In silence hung heavy, the geek in me was all afraid to speak
But that's all shoved behind me, long ago and far away,
‘Twas wrong to merge Redwood Credit and Bank of Mandalay;
Now I yearn to leave Oregon as a ten-year soldier cries.

If you've heard Sonoma calling, you need nothing else.
Chew spicy garlic food as sunlight kisses clanking dairy-bells;
On the road to Oregon, you pass Sonoma, here may I dwell.

Tho' I walk other maidens around busy Waterfront Square
They talk a lot about love but none say exactly where.
So I’m sick of wasting leather pacing gritty paving stones,
And the blasted Oregon drizzle wakes fever in my bones;
Dog-faced local folks, Lord, what do they understand?
Once I knew a neater, sweeter maid in a cleaner, greener land.

Ship me east of Alcatraz, where the best is like the worst,
Where no Ten Commandments stop a man with a wino's thirst;
For the dairy-bells are calling and it's there that I would be
To trace sunlight falling on redwoods, looking lazy at the sea.
Where dawn comes up a thunder across a Mayacamas bay
Bring back my sweet milkmaid, turn me Sonoma-bound all the way.