California, Again

Earlier this year, after a series of events in Southern and Northern California, I did something I rarely let myself do.

I stayed.

Usually, book travel has a particular rhythm: airports and hotel rooms, green rooms and rental cars, the blur of one city giving way to the next before I’ve quite understood where I’ve been. But this time, between the bookends of two book festivals, in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, I rented a small cottage in Montecito for a week, close enough to walk to Butterfly Beach.

The jacaranda was blooming, that lavish, improbable purple spilling over streets and sidewalks, the way it always did in mid-spring, and I was here for it, in a moment of inadvertent but perfect timing. Along the highway medians, California poppies waved and danced like ordinary wildflowers, though to me they have never been ordinary.

I thought I would be writing every day, but almost immediately I realized that what I desperately needed the time for was a reset. A recharging of my drained batteries. The familiar landscape seemed to want that for me too.

Each afternoon, as I left my cottage and walked along a quiet road down toward the water for sunset, I felt my internal wiring soften, coming back into alignment. I watched the light move over the water. I noticed the jacaranda blossoms fallen on the pavement like spent confetti, the lean towers of eucalyptus across the road. I noticed, too, the feeling that rose in me as I moved through that familiar brightness.

Recognition. A return to the first language the world ever spoke to me.

I have a theory that our childhood landscapes impress themselves on us the way a hand presses into wet clay. The first hills, the first trees, the first quality of light, the first flowers we learn to recognize without being taught—these become part of the architecture of the self.

If so, then this what California is for me now: not just a place, but a form of sensory recognition. The salt air, the tulle fog, the yellow hills, the live oaks, the mission bells marking the miles along the old Camino Real—each one saying, quietly but unmistakably: You know this. You are from this.

The hills for me are the deepest thing of all. Those dry, yellow, parched-looking hills, almost burnt in a certain light. Lion-colored.

Once, Georgia O’Keeffe tried to describe the pull New Mexico had on her, writing, “A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s heart as it touches mine and I suppose there is no reason why it should.” I feel that same way about California’s yellow hills. They seem to speak beneath language, directly to some first and wordless part of me. Their beauty is not lush or accommodating. It does not try to charm. It is dry grass and shadow, dust and chaparral, oak branches twisting against a hard blue sky. It is abundance without softness. Tenderness with teeth.

I have called many places home and learned to love what they offered: the green density of the Midwest, the snowy woods and blazing autumn hardwoods of Vermont, the tall, almost human-looking saguaros of Arizona. But surely there must be gradations of home. Of belonging. I have been able to find beauty of one kind or another virtually everywhere, and yet California lives in me differently.

I’m not talking about nostalgia, or not merely that. Nostalgia softens the edges of what was. My childhood was far too complicated to remember through rose-colored glasses. The landscape included. Summers were so hot it sometimes felt like being boiled alive. Scorpions and black widows frequently found their way inside our house. And still, there was a kind of continuity in the dry grasses, the wavering heat, the searingly blue sky.

It’s possible that we never fully leave the places that made us. And vice versa.

As children, we press our hands into wet cement, wanting to leave proof that we were there. But the world is pressing back the whole time. The hills, the trees, the weather, the flowers in the median, the bells along the road—all of it leaving its reverse impression in us.

That is why a jacaranda blooming in France or Italy is never only a jacaranda to me. It is California, suddenly. Again and always. Like a first love whispering its name decades after I’ve moved on.

Maybe, in one way, there’s no such thing as moving on. We can fill and unload a U-haul, build lives elsewhere. We can learn new weather, new trees, new ways of belonging. But some part of us remains shaped by the original horizon. Some part of us waits for the old light to touch it again.

And when it does, we know.