This morning when I was driving Vera to school I rolled down the windows to let in the morning air. It’s spring in Los Angeles right now, which may not seem real to people in places who go through real winter, but it’s spring nonetheless. The trees and shrubs are bursting with blossoms, the light doesn’t edge out of the sky until past Vera’s bedtime, and the air in the morning shines with the silvery promise of a warm day ahead.

I used to visit California as a child. We’d come out once or twice a year to visit my grandmother and my aunt who lived on wide palm-lined boulevards in the sprawling subdivisions that make up Orange County, about an hour south of Los Angeles. What I remember most from those visits are my grandmother’s hands, the lines around her mouth, and the way she laughed. I remember my aunt’s avocado green couch that I slept on, her patio thick with bougainvillea, and our trips to Laguna Beach where I would walk along the cliffs with my mother, both of us lifting our faces to the cool salt air.

When I was in middle school and living in Florida I used to write stories about girls who ran away to California. We lived near the water then, and in my stories the girls always set out across the sea, hitchhiking from boat to boat. In my head California was on the other side of the ocean, instead of miles and miles away across flat plains of prairie land that I would eventually have to drive in order to finally get there.

In my early teenage years I used to dream about moving to Los Angeles one day. I would go to UCLA I decided, and I would live by the beach and I would wear a lot of white and pink, and I’d have a million pairs of sunglasses and date a surfer. But as my teenage years waned, so did my desire for the West Coast. Instead I began to feel a pull to the northeast, to cold and darkness, to small crowded towns, and cities. I forgot all about California and by the time I was nineteen I had landed myself in Manhattan where the buildings around me were so tall that it was sometimes hard to find the sky.

At the same time my father found himself drawn back to the west coast, to those same palm-lined boulevards we had visited so often in my childhood. His sister and his mother were long gone, but he made a home for himself there anyway and when he grew too sick to travel anymore I flew to visit him every few months, reaquainting myself with those old, familiar places. We took long drives, down the coast, through Laguna Niguel and San Juan Capistrano, and deeper towards Mexico where the edges of the continent grew more jagged and alluring.

We rolled down the windows and let in that silvery air and my father told stories and I stared out at the water lapping against the ends of the earth.

After a while it became difficult to return to New York, to go back to the darkness and the smoke stacks, the crowded buildings and tunnels. I missed the air and the light, the promise of something new.

I began to remember what it was that had made me want to run away here all those years earlier.

Now I’ve spent a total of seven years living in California. I’m used to it in a lot of ways. The strange plants and spindly palm trees, the flowers dripping down from every wall, the ocean mist and hazy fog, it’s become part of my landscape, in a deep, internal way.

But every once in a while, like this morning on the way to take Vera to school, I remember to roll down the windows and let in the cool, shimmering morning air. And when I do and when it hits me just right, then sometimes I remember those first impressions of this place, those first early yearnings to disappear into it all, to claim it as my own, to know it as my home, my forever here.

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since I’ve blogged. I think that’s the longest I’ve gone in years. I’ve been trying to be more forgiving of myself though when it comes to not accomplishing things, and blogging has been one thing I’ve tried not to beat myself up over. That said, I do miss it. I’ve always loved coming here and getting the opportunity to spill out my thoughts like a little bag of marbles, marveling over each one and arranging them in some kind of order that makes sense.

My thoughts these days are scattered. Nothing seems to have any sense of continuity. Any snatches of free time that I get I’ve been spending either fulfilling my writing duties for BlackBook or going for long runs around my neighborhood. I’ve been loving running again. I really missed it during my pregnancy and even though we’ve had a heat wave, it’s felt great to be out, moving my body and sweating. Every time I feel fatigued or get a cramp I remind myself of how much I missed this, of how envious I felt seeing other runners when I was seven, eight, nine months pregnant, and then I feel spurred on all over again.

I ran for forty minutes yesterday morning, down Ocean Park and into Cloverfield Park, running past kids playing soccer and a mom teaching her son to ride a bike. Three times I ran past this mom and her son, and three times I watched her push him forward on his bike, running alongside him for a moment until she let go. Three times I watched him fall into the grass, a look of surprise and dismay crumpling his little face. Three times I watched his mom squat down and help pick him back up. And three times I teared up thinking about how sweet life is, how it’s these moments that pull us forward, that sustain us, and that these are the moments we will look back on years from now.

It’s things like this that help me to let go when I feel discouraged about not writing more often right now or when another bill we can hardly afford to pay lands on my desk, or when it’s 9:30 at night and I’ve been trying for almost two hours to get the baby to fall asleep. I’ll take a deep breath and let it out, feeling my body soften and relax, and I try to remind myself that life is not made up of bills or stressors or stupid numbers on the scale in the bathroom. Rather it surely consists of moments between people, of the way the light shifts in the sky at dusk or the feeling of an infant’s quick little breath on my neck.

In some ways it’s felt good to give up on getting anything done. I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time at the beach. I figure if I’m not going to be getting anything done, I may as well not get things done while on the sand, staring out at the water. Jules seems to like the ocean air and Vera is content to play in the sand for hours. Often I marvel at the idea that my girls are going to grow up amidst palm trees and sea breezes.

I’m finding it easier and easier to get swept up in gratitude for this time in my life. For California, for being a writer and a mom and a therapist, for this beautiful, little family I am a part of. I took this photo on my father’s death anniversary last week, struck by what a different place I find myself in all these years later. A reminder that even when it feels like we’re not moving forward, we are.

But really, what I thought most about that day was California. As I wound along the 405 freeway for miles and miles, as I drove past long-familiar exits like Golden West and Beach Blvd., my eyes skimmed to all the places where my father once lived. I thought so much about him and his years in California, first as a young man in Pasadena and then as an old man in Garden Grove. He first moved to California in his mid-twenties, along with his wife, three children, as well as his mother and sister, all of them exiling themselves from Michigan, the only place any of them had ever called home.

My grandmother got a job as a perfume lady at a department store and my aunt Jean worked at an auto-dealership, which in the 1950s was kind of glamorous. She set her blond hair into waves each morning and spent her days smiling at customers amidst the gleaming new engines of big, beautiful cars. My father and his little family settled in Pasadena, his wife staying home with the kids while my father drove off each morning down the oak tree-lined streets to his engineering job.

My grandmother and my aunt never left California, settling into Long Beach as if they’d always known that this was the turn life would take for them. My father and his family were here for at least fifteen years before moving on to Florida and eventually to Atlanta, my father following his dreams of owning a steel manufacturing company. It was in Florida where he divorced his first wife; he was living in Atlanta when he met my mother. For years after he married my mother and had me, we flew out to California at least once a year to visit his mother and sister. I don’t remember what my father thought about California. I only remember my own fascination with it, with the constant sunshine and ocean air, the strange plants pushing themselves out of every corner and crevice, and the bright, tropical flowers cascading over front doorsteps and back fences.

One year on a visit that we took when I was eleven or twelve, we all drove down to Laguna Beach, and I completely fell in love with its oceanfront cliffs and glimmering, artistic community. For months after we returned home I wrote stories about a girl who ran away to Laguna Beach. Even after the stories stopped my fondness for California never quite abated, and later in high school my best friend Liz and I schemed to go to UCLA for college. But then I got swept up by life, and also by New England, and for quite some time I forgot about California.

My father never forgot about California though, and after my mother died he moved back here. He lived with his sister Jean in her condo in Garden Grove until she died only a few months later of pancreatic cancer. She left not just her avocado-green couches and swimming pool-sized ashtrays, but the entire condo, to my father. And he was happy here, among the soft warm air and palm trees, and each time I visited him from New York I could see it in the way he always had something new to show me about this place he once again called home. He took me long drives up through the hills of Riverside or out into the desert. He pointed out plants and mountains and water ways that would seemingly never exist elsewhere. And I stared out the window at the little bungalow homes and the tropical flowers passing by and I was glad my father was happy, even I longed to return to the grit and grime of New York City.

I moved here when I was twenty-four, and right into Hollywood, where I failed to fall in love with my new city right away. It was really only after moving to the beach over a year later that California’s strange shimmering air and tropical plants filled up my heart before I really knew what was happening. I realized then why I could never shake the feeling all those years that my father knew something I didn’t. It was if he’d always known that this was where I belonged, but typical to my father, he let me figure it out on my own.

It’s a strange thing to love a place. We’re so good at loving people and things, but so many of us spend years and years in places that fail to inspire us. The first place I ever loved was New York City, and I still love it. Each time I visit, it’s akin to running into an ex-lover, one who I’m never quite sure I should have left. I could equate my time in Chicago to a lover as well, my life there like a forced relationship I always knew was never quite going to work out. On the flip side, returning here to Los Angeles last year felt like coming home, in the deepest sense that I’ve ever known.

Funny that we often think the place where we grew up is where we belong, and how many of us never bother to find out if that’s true or not. Driving back to Santa Monica the other night, I realized that I’ll never stop feeling grateful to my father for giving me this place, for showing me where my home was.