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My wife Bonnie and I recently went to the de Young Museum to see the Vermeer (1632 - 1675) exhibit on loan from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The Exhibit is called “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” after what is perhaps Vermeer’s best known work. The girl turns to look at us over her left shoulder and as she turns our gaze is drawn to the single pearl on the lobe of her lovely ear. A text describes the painting as the Dutch “Mona Lisa.” The exhibit reveals a world of mostly prosperous looking men and women. Self assured, Protestant, one might even say secular. They are a class of people absent from earlier times, the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages. They are neither prelates (there is one painting of a preacher in the exhibit), nor princes, and they are certainly not peasants. They are burghers and their families, men of commerce, trade and industry; and they read and write. There is a charming, domestic scene of a woman, seated comfortably at a desk in her own home. She is writing, maybe a personal letter, maybe household accounts, but the point is she is writing, something that a few hundred years earlier few other than clergy were able to do.

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Two decades ago, lots of Sonoma County winemakers and innkeepers were jealous over the attention heaped on their counterparts in Napa Valley, but they swore they’d never actually want to be another Napa or another wine country version of Disneyland. Back then, Sonoma’s wine and hospitality people would chortle, “Sonoma’s for wine, Napa is for auto parts.”

As part of its statewide election coverage, CalMatters has given Sonoma West Publishers permission to use its explainers of state propositions. Scroll through the module below to learn about Proposition 18.