Scenes

Jake took Milo up to his parents' house for a few days.  The weather was already starting to turn cool, which isn't unusual that far north. Milo still had fun, though.

Jake got a couple of afternoons of sailing in, despite the cool weather. Here's his boat after they took down the sails. Jake has had this boat for a long, long time.

Even though we're in the midwest, Jake's parents live so far north that it sort of reminds me of where I grew up in Washington state. There are pine trees all over the place up where his parents are, unlike where we live. It's rarely humid up there. His folks are in the woods and everything is green and quiet.

I like it for holidays, but I don't like that climate enough to live there. Instead, everything I like reminds me of college. Here is an old picture I had on my computer of my college campus. It must have been early fall when I took this. I know exactly where on campus this scene is located, and can immediately conjure up what it was like to walk down that path on my way to the math building. I adore that campus. I love the enormous trees and the gorgeous architecture, the old buildings with the tile floors and the bizarre gargoyles sitting on top of doorways. I simply love everything about it. I wish that I had taken more pictures when I lived there. Pictures of the campus, of my apartment, my neighborhood with the brick streets and the old stone buildings and the corner store. Pictures of my walk to school, under towering trees. I must still miss it, since I can remember it like it was yesterday.

Here is one of only two pictures I have on my computer of my old neighborhood when I lived in San Diego for grad school. It's so different:

That scene is a park near my old student housing apartment. I liked my apartment complex and used to take daily walks or runs to this park. Everything is pretty because it is green and manicured and watered, the way stuff was around there. My student housing was nestled into condos in what was a pretty nice neighborhood.  I could walk to three different grocery stores, lots of restaurants, and a movie theater.  The weather in this picture is how the weather always is there. The sky is always blue. There are never any clouds. It is always 75 degrees. It is kind of nice, and it is especially nice in January, but it doesn't thrill my heart.

This next picture of the other side of the park reveals why I never liked California vegetation:

See, it's just a desert. You can see the brown in that hill in the distance. That brown ground is the natural part. All of the green is the unnatural, watered stuff. San Diego is a desert that people turned into a paradise by important trees and watering things. But it's still deserty and scrubby and that natural scrubby vegetation always has been and always will be ugly to me. As wonderful as my time in San Diego was, and it was great in lots of ways, it was never...right.

This is right:

That is home. Give me the midwest, or the east, or parts of the south. Give me the big trees that change colors in the fall and the sound of cicadas in August (I can hear them right now). Give me languid, humid summers and big fat snowflakes at Christmas. This is home.