Field Song

This weekend, we drove down to Pasadena (just outside of LA) to visit my parents, who were there for the weekend for my dad’s work. At one point, my mom and I were standing in the hallway, waiting for Kendrick to come upstairs with the stroller, and she turned to me and said, “So. Do you like it here?”

Part of me wants to say I don’t. Especially to my mom, because I miss her and my dad so much, every single day. And there’s also a big part of me that feels like…you know, being a New Yorker is such a huge part of my identity, of my upbringing. I haven’t technically lived in the city for a few years now, but I still felt like if I was raising my children just a few minutes outside its borders I’d…I don’t know, I’d somehow be able to wrap my mind more easily around what their childhood would look like. I’d know what museums to take them to, what restaurants they’d like, be able to tell them stories about the things I did when I was their age when I walked down this street or that one.

At this point we’ve obviously committed to a life out here, but still:

There’s a part of me that wants to hold on to our life the way it was, because so much of it was so good.

But on the drive down, Kendrick and I were looking at the hills and the sun and the fields and I said, “Can you believe we live in California?” Not just “here for the summer.” Not just “renting a place to test the waters but think maybe we’ll go back.” We live here live here.

You know how when you’re in your early twenties (or perhaps your thirties, or perhaps always) and you wonder whether you should be an actor, or a scientist, or, I don’t know, an astronaut, because there are so many things you haven’t tried…so how are you supposed to know for sure which one’s right for you? That’s how I’ve always felt about where I live: I was a New Yorker, and that was Who I Was, so somewhere in or around New York was sort of the default answer of where I should be playing out my life…but I always wondered: how was I supposed to know I wouldn’t feel most at home in some cottage in France, if I’d never tried it? Part of our move to Tarrytown was a leap in the direction of saying “We don’t know for sure, but we’ll never know until we try.” And it turned out that it was great in a lot of ways, and not exactly right for us in others.

And then, last summer, we came out here. And we both knew, for reasons specific and grand, logical and emotional, that this – out here in the sun and the fields, with the ocean to one side and the mountains to the other – feels like the place where we belong. I may have been born in Hell’s Kitchen, but California is in my bones.

So the answer is that no, we don’t just like it here. We feel like we’re home.