An Ode to Home

San Bernardino. My home. Not a glamorous place, but beautiful in a way. And who can help but love their home? No matter what we say, we take the place we were born in our bones and leave a bit of our heart. San Bernardino. A blip on the map, due east of Los Angeles. One if its main virtues is being near everything interesting: an hour or two from the desert, the river, the beach, the mountains, the forest, Mexico; four hours to Las Vegas; eight to San Fran. In other words, a perfect place to escape from. Many parts of the city are poor, ghetto and dangerous. The parts that aren't are dilapidated, dusty and dull. But San Bernardino has a funny way of making you miss it when you leave, even if you're living across the street from the beach or in an Alpine villa.

My favorite part is the hills. They surround you, they orient you; you know those mountains point north and that way to the beach. There's an art to all the crags and crevices in the face of the foothills, especially during the brief spring when it's green with wildflowers and you can almost imagine you're in Ireland or the wilderness. Hills that God himself pinched and shaped out of the plain, smoothing out a valley below for us to nestle in. And the sunsets! I'd always watch them in my backyard, the sun dropping behind the mountains and the city lights coming out. The sunlight plays hide and go seek with the shadows, the big houses gleam with gold and the smog turns the sky such colors.

The seasons, too, I love. Our calendar is a peculiar thing. My mother mourns the lack of New England autumns and white Christmases, but this is all I've ever known. Summer lasts from mid-April to October and sometimes rears its head in December. Above 90 is the norm then, often 100, and it's dry like an oven. Mid-day you sleep or take refuge in a theatre or mall and at dusk emerge to swim or run through sprinklers or go the drive-in or do other summer things. I prefer leaving in July or August because the heat does funny things to me, but I love summer nights just about anywhere. September still swelters, but by the end of the month the Santa Anas come, the strong off-shore winds that suck the moisture our of everything and start fires. This is our fall, like summer only noisier. You can still swim until November and I've surfed on Thanksgiving. But then, usually around December, our winter comes. It's the strange bastard season that we don't know quite what to do with. The leaves start changing and quickly fall off. It gets cooler, down in the 60s. Sometimes it gets icy and one time it snowed, but usually it's cool and clear or it rains. Rain here is different than elsewhere. It's scarce and welcome, an excuse to wear a coat and boots or to stay home and pretend you're snowed in. Of course it snows in the mountains, so after a storm, as the wind blows again, you can enjoy the white majesty from afar. This is also when the hills turn, from brown to green. At some point in March there comes a storm you know will be the last and suddenly summer's racing back. Spring is nice, all three weeks of it, and everyone dons their California uniform of shorts, sandals and tanktops.

I never particularly liked sun or summery weather, and this is why, because I was surrounded by it half the year. And I will always be a valley-dweller, missing the comforting contours when I'm living in the flatland. Who I am was shaped by this here, and if I had grown up elsewhere I might very well not be me.