Well, I’m back from California. But I suppose that I should have told you that I was going upon leaving. The first of two trips back this summer, aaahh, it is wedding season! Bring on the bouquets; bring on the bridesmaids; and bring on the catered food. Northern California was actually cold when we arrived, balmy and breezy, with a thick layer of marine fog in the morning. Cold though it may have been, the inclement weather did not keep the farmers from harvesting every sort of stellar local produce possible and bringing it to market
California was inspiring. I guess you cannot take the state out of a girl who was born and raised there. There were pies to be made at my parent’s house, with a mixture of stone fruit, and boysenberries so plump they looked like the belly of Santa Claus. [...]

Maybe it is just certain octogenarians I have run into, but most of them do two things: talk about their health, and talk about the weather. And now that I have moved to New York, a place that actually has weather and seasons, I find myself doing the same thing (at least the weather part). I mentioned before that it is HOT, but besides the heat there is the humidity, the sort of humidity that makes you want to run back indoors, to your small, air-conditioned apartment, peel off your sticky clothes, and take a cool shower. I’m from California, I mean: What is humidity anyways?
And so I have joined the ranks of those people, the one’s that talk ad nauseum about the weather, and to me, it is endlessly fascinating. We are mostly unpacked, a household’s worth of goods transplanted from California to New York. Newsprint packing has been [...]