Where is home?

[Just discovered that I never posted these first two entries. They were written shortly after we moved back to Southern California, almost two years ago.]

They say you can't go home again, but I seem to have done just that. Technically I've landed two counties south of where I began life, but Escondido is more the place of my childhood than Altadena, the neighborhood I grew up in. It is in fact the place of my mother's childhood, and when I was young we often drove the two and a half hours south for holiday gatherings and weeks in the summer to the property here that had been farmed by my grandfather. When we visited, the place was divided between two of my mother's sisters, and populated by my older cousins, whom I idolized. My parents acquired a smaller piece in the middle, where we camped, and I still have access to that piece because my brother is there. It's probably true that I wouldn't find home in Altadena, unless I could take back the actual house that my father built when I was a baby, and where I stayed until it was time for college, and where my wedding took place.

Sacramento didn't seem so far, and it was home in its way, with family life and working life, for twenty-five years. Too dreary in the winter, with fog clamping a chill lid on us for weeks at a time, so that we had to drive forty miles up the Sierras to get a glimpse of the sun.

What made us think we would be satisfied moving north instead of south when retirement arrived? We told ourselves that Southern California, 400 miles down that lonesome stretch of I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley, had changed too much was too crowded now, too many people and too much traffic and too much sprawl. Instead we moved 800 miles north.

In Washington we lived on an acre in the country for a time. I remember for the first six months or so, driving through exquisite countryside between distinct towns -- towns that had actual edges to them -- I would say to myself, "Oh, I wish I could live in a place like this." And then I would remember, "I do!"

Eventually we were snugged up in a place with a view of a bay, almost to the Canadian border.

Beautiful, green, never hot and rarely warm enough. And wet. Living in rainy country is the price you pay for all that sumptuous verdant landscape.

I never guessed that there would be an actual kinesthetic sense to confirm that this place now is home. At first I only noticed I'm satisfied somehow, in a way that I haven't been for a long time. Then I identified the contrasting sense, the one I realize I've had while living so far north, of being perched, ready to fly at any time. We did fly in the winter, to escape the cold. Now that's not necessary. Now we fly away to see other places, but the weather at home is at least as inviting.