Excerpt:
When Adele Grunberg moved to Montclair in the 1970s, it had no traffic lights, though she remembers the Roberts supermarket. Montclair “felt more small town-ish than now,” she recalled recently. It never occurred to her, fresh out of college in Boston, that she’d be spending the rest of her life in California.
Now Adele is coming up on 50 years as a local resident. She’s occupied the same house in Piedmont Pines for 36 years; 11 years in Montclair before that. “I moved to this area because I love the hills, the variety of housing, the fact that it’s close to downtown Oakland, yet feels as though it’s in the country. Mostly I love my home and garden,” she said, adding that she started gardening as therapy after the 9/11 attacks two decades ago. “I still consider it to be therapy.”
Today she works as a therapist of sorts — a mediator and conflict resolution coach. With a law degree and an MA in psychology, she has a private practice doing workplace conflict resolution, as well as communication training and coaching. “It’s the work that I love the most out of all the work I do,” she said.