[Volume I: 1959-1964] Katelyn Lowrie leaves home to test her mettle in the professional folk singing/songwriting scene taking shape in New York and Boston. Or is she secretly abandoning her 4-year old son to his grandmother forever? Bruised and shaken back East, Katie settles back into life within the one household barely hanging on in the all-but-forgotten ghost town of Cliffport. Then Jan McLoughlin, long-absent landlady, shows up with the intention of selling the property. Elisabeth Lowrie despairs of being evicted from the sanctuary she had created for her grown daughter, her growing grandson, and herself.
[Volume II: 1965] A winter storm catches the landlady in Cliffport, and she is forced to bivouac in the very house where she was born and raised on the frontier farm from which she had once definitively fled. As Jan tells her life story to Katie, and Elise bequeaths her own memoir of the first half of her life to her feisty daughter, it falls to Katie to span the widening gap between the two older women. She dreams then schemes how to stay living on the place.
[Volume III: 1966-1975] Having secured title to a sub-parcel of the land, Katie funds long overdue upgrades including a new vehicle, a state-of-the-art greenhouse, and the retention of hired help at her fledgling Redwood Coast Nursery. But now mother and daughter must sustain their presence against an onslaught of harassment by another threat: the new neighboring landowner, Yo-Mizo-Sata International Ltd. putting the squeeze on the smaller landlocked parcel, for the developers want the Lowries out in order to transform the whole region into the premier retirement resort community of the Central Coast, Monteflores Inc.
[Volume IV: 1976-2020] In the first three volumes of THE THREE NAKED LADIES OF CLIFFPORT, we encountered three single mothers from three generations connected to a ghost town situated midway between Davenport and Swanton, where sea meets land on North Coast Santa Cruz. In this fourth and final volume in the series, Katelyn Liliane Lowrie becomes the guardian of Cliffport's pioneer cemetery; the protector of Chapel Grove's ancient redwoods; the default repository of the McLoughlin clan's memorabilia; and the sole carrier of her family's collective memory. Solo, estranged from her renegade son yet aided by allies (a Dutch expat plantsman, a runaway Portuguese teen, her young tenants), Katie draws on all her resources before she will quit the home place. Navigating the ongoing threats to her way of life posed by the unscrupulous developers of the surrounding terrain, she fights to hold on to the land while contending with the elitist Monteflores Lodge West at the head of her driveway and the gentrified Whale Watch Shoppes in New Cliffport Village; periodic water wars and environmental fraud; vandalism and an unjustified CAMP bust; grassroots organizers, amateur sleuthing, and a criminal's capers in Nevada.
As the saga concludes, we witness the last of the three naked ladies, ever exposed, vulnerable, and unadorned, yet proving out as resilient and irrepressible as her predecessors. Her dedication to what she knows best and loves most proves as enduring as the bulbous Amaryllis belladonna plants, naturalized out West, growing wild up and down California's Central Coast.
[Volume IV may be read and enjoyed with or without having read Volumes I-III.]
