Yi Dianr

I promise I’m not ignoring you. I know I’ve been a bad blog friend of late. It’s just that we’re switching houses. Little by little. And if you don’t hear from me for a few days next week, it will undoubtedly be due to the fact that our internet service has not been connected at the new house, because we have one phone company around here. And they take as long as they darned well please.

I’ve hauled and unpacked three van loads thus far. I like the moving and unpacking in turns. It’s much nicer than facing a pile of boxes and jumbled furniture all at once. That part starts tomorrow.

It looks like, for once, we will not be moving in a snowstorm. We won’t have to shovel the driveway every half hour. We won’t have to slip and break our tailbones on ice while carrying kitchen knives. We might have a mundane, three-block move!

As I thought of this, it dawned on me that I never imagined I would ever have to worry about things like snowstorms and ice and mud, back when I was used to enjoying 70 degree Southern California winters. And then I thought, How the heck do people live like this?! How the heck am I living here?! And I realized that I’m really not living here: The inside of my house is Southern California. The outside is completely foreign. (You neighbors might be chipping your car out of an ice block right now, but I live in Burbank, thank you very much.) If we ever migrate to Jason’s ancestral home in Austin, Texas, it will be all the same to me. I will wave out my California window at all of our Texan acquaintances, and I will be shocked and offended when I step out the front door into the sticky, Austin heat.

No offense intended toward you Texan nationalists. But I realized tonight that underneath their apathetic exterior, Southern Californians can be loyalists every bit as fierce. I’m spoiled by mountains and oceans and the stalky, white poppies that bloom in the dead of winter. No matter where or how often we move, it’s always going to be home to me.