Dear California

I miss you, California. Your cool nights with the scent of jasmine in the air. Waking to wild parrots, the tapping of the woodpecker in my grevalia tree. I miss my patio, my barbecue, my juicer, and my own bed.
Oh, things are good enough here in the land of 10,000 lakes. Pairs of finches on the telephone wire outside my kitchen window. Pristine skies and flower boxes dripping with humid color.
What would it be like, I wonder, to have the people I love most live in the same place--across the street or down the road? What if there could be no future parting?

Whether.....

I learned last night from my friends Toni and Elizabeth that it's been very hot in L.A.  Toni emailed me that she was sitting on her patio (where I've sat quite a few times myself) "listening to classical music with an overlay of chirping crickets."  Bang. Homesickness.  Then I realized I was homesick for my old house, which my daughters and I refer to nowadays simply by its number--"270."  For a fraction of a second, I forgot about my new place and was sitting in the candlelight at 270--a place I haven't seen for almost a year and will most likely never see again. But then I started missing lunches with Toni, and the fabulous meals we've had in the dark on her deck and I wished I could be in Elizabeth's living room with my fellow memoir writers reading from our pages. I only have a week left here in Virginia where it's raining and by tomorrow most of the fall color will be a brown mush on the ground and I know now that whether it's balmy or baking when I get back to L.A.,  it's the climate of friendship that's pulling me home.