I got home late on Friday night after what should have been a quick couple hours of travel turned into delay after delay and I ended up spending most of the day waiting for my flight to board in the Palm Springs airport.

The past few times I've flown home from a trip, I've gotten a bit disoriented, feeling like I should really be traveling back to Charlotte, not San Francisco. I don't always know why it happens, but I usually end up sitting on the plane, picturing our South End apartment that we loved so much--the one we lived in when we first moved to Charlotte, the first place we ever brought Ender home to, and the neighborhood where we never needed a car because we could walk everywhere, including to the light rail station. It really was home.

When I landed at SFO, it was rainy and chilly and for a quick minute my Queen City homesickness subsided. I waited for my ride on the sidewalk, breathing in the cool air and feeling more and more anxious to be done with the day. I had such a great time in Palm Springs, but I was really excited to get back to Rob and Ender. They're my home, no matter where we are.

But it still hits me out of the blue--a deep daydream of Charlotte, usually in the spring. I think about morning walks to Atherton Market for coffee with Rob and Ender on Fridays, when the grass is still a little wet and the sun hasn't made its way through the clouds yet, but the buds on the trees are blooming and the air around us is perfumed and damp in the best, most subtle way.

One of my best friends had a baby last week and I was surprised by how sad I felt to not be there to visit her in the hospital, or bring her a breakfast casserole, or walk her dog, or just generally be there to share in the excitement of a brand new baby. I've made friends here, sure; but none of them have shown me their pregnancy nipples yet. (If that's not #squadgoals then I don't know what is.)

I love a lot of things about California. Yesterday we went to Rob's aunt and uncle's house for brunch and sat in their beautiful kitchen drinking mimosas as the gluten-free waffles they had made for us from scratch cooked in the waffle maker. It was a warm morning, and the little buds on the cherry blossom trees are blooming and the air around us on the way out of our house and into theirs was perfumed and damp in the best, most subtle way. 

After breakfast, as we walked to our car, Rob's aunt handed me a white paper bag of avocados from her neighbor's yard. We drove home with the windows down.

My mom is visiting later this week and I'm so excited to have her here. I keep thinking I'm going to show her around, forgetting that she lived in the Bay Area for much longer than four months (she moved here from Argentina when she was eight years old and didn't leave until I was five). Is California my place to share? Minneapolis felt that way. But the Bay Area, while varied and vast and beautiful, feels like a place where I am still very much a visitor. But I think that's okay.

With every flight and every rainfall, I am learning more and more to be content exactly where I am today--wherever that may be.

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”

— Frederick Buechner

Photo by David Coe.

I was running errands a couple weeks ago and stopped by the nail salon down the street from my house for a quick manicure. It was rainy and I was tired, but I needed a sparkly nail color for my trip to Las Vegas. Getting my nails done before a trip or event has been a tradition for longer than I can remember. I know it's a thing for a lot of people, but as I left the salon I realized that I had almost mindlessly rolled into the parking lot, signed in, and later checked "manicure" off my to-do list.

It reminded me of the weird little nail salon next to a Kroger that my mom and I used to go to--before vacations, before I graduated from high school, before any event that had us excited enough to want to prep in some way. As I sat in the salon by myself that day, waiting for gold gel polish dry under the UV light, I realized how far removed our life in California is from the days we used to live all over Virginia, extra-close to our families.

I grew up in Roanoke and met Rob in Farmville even though he had also been in Roanoke for high school, and then we moved to Charlottesville together before he lived in DC and I would drive there on the weekends, getting to know I-81 N like the back of my hand. We traveled 81 and 64 more times than I can count, and through all four seasons, but the one that sticks the most is spring, in the rain--when the air is damp but not muggy yet, and everything is fresh and greener than you remembered it ever could be.

There's a stretch of 280 N that reminds me of those days back east. When we were first moving to California everyone told us how amazing the weather was, and from our own visits we knew, too. It's sunny and mild every day and there are palm trees and cacti in my neighborhood. But this winter has been rainy and grey and occasionally, on a damp highway lined with evergreen-studded mountains, it almost feels like we're back.

So maybe you're driving yourself from the South Bay to a dermatologist appointment in San Francisco on a dreary January afternoon, listening to podcasts and sipping hot water with lemon after a blog meeting and a barre workout. But it could also be the road between Charlottesville and Roanoke on a rainy April morning; the sun coming up over the mountains as you make your way to the coffee shop where you work every day before returning to your small apartment on The Corner to write more of your master's thesis.

I didn't know that winter in California could look and feel like spring in Virginia.

But sometimes, it does.

So far, 2017 has been rainy and chilly in Silicon Valley. We finally turned on the heat in our townhouse on New Year's Eve--every new season I like to see how long I can go before I turn on the heat or AC, and because the weather here is so mild, we never actually turned on the little window unit that's in the corner of our dining room (central air is not really a thing here). In Minnesota, winter starts in September. In North Carolina, summer lasts until October. And here, in the Bay Area, the seasons seem separated only by ten or fifteen degrees, depending on the time of day.

Our heat is an old gas furnace that's on either side of a wall--one half is next to the bookcase and faces our living room, and the other half radiates heat into the dining room and kitchen. I kind of hated it at first, because it seemed clunky and I guess I'm kind of afraid of gas appliances, but now I love it--the way it smells, the sound it makes when it kicks on, how sitting on the couch next to it feels like being beside a fire. The heat wafts its way slowly upstairs, so in the morning I wake up and feel it right away as I turn the corner down the stairs to start the coffee.

The air here doesn't smell much like winter, maybe because we won't get snow, or maybe because the seasons don't really change the way they do back east. The mornings are cold, and so are the evenings, and the afternoons are bright and a bit warmer. Sure, the leaves fall off the trees at the end of autumn and things bloom in the spring, but there's a kind of neutrality to the seasons here that, much like my heater, I thought I'd hate but has turned out to be rather soothing.

Charlotte is currently hunkering down as they wait for the first snow of the year (something that doesn't always come around down south), and I know that as soon as my Instagram feed fills with flurries I'll feel pangs of jealousy, but for now I'm happy to spend my rainy winter days cuddled up with a cup of coffee and a long-sleeved tee shirt.

Lately (this week) Ender and I have gone out on rainy afternoon walks, which I love because no one else is out. Usually I would take him to the dog park to play with his pup friends, but everyone on this side of the country seems to stay home when it rains, so we have started to as well. I put on my hooded jacket and rain boots and we head to a different park close to our house to walk the loop until we're damp and rosy-cheeked. And then we head back to the house to wipe our feet at the door and carry on with our day, wondering if maybe the sun might come out tomorrow--because this is, after all, California.