Looking for Home
Having lived most of my first 50 years in the Midwest and the East, our move to southern California seemed like a prolonged vacation. For the first time ever, I lived within a few blocks of a beach, within view of the Pacific. I could look out my windows and see beyond the buildings and palm trees down the hill to the blue or gray or white water and just a sliver of sand. I could tell from the color and the size of the waves whether the wind was stiff or quiet.
The beach there was not much like the gulf-side I was used to from past vacations in the East — those childhood Florida stays when my grandparents took us to Pass-a-Grille to luxuriate in the sugar soft sands and wade in the gentle gulf waters.
This Pacific beach was bolder, grittier, with tall, cold waves and sand that was neither soft nor white. High eroding embankments and dark jagged rocks lined the coast. Driftwood and mounds of seaweed strewn on the sand blocked your walking path. But eventually you stopped minding. I stopped minding. I became used to this chilly California beach life and tried to mimic the hardiness of the beach walkers, their deep tans under wetsuits, jackets, and shoes.
But I couldn’t decide whether it felt like home there. By this point, we’d been years in Cleveland, the not-really-midwestern butt of jokes about burning rivers and suggestions that is was a…
