My blog for 9/7/2012 Going Home

California, it’s been nice, but I miss my fireflies that twinkle through the evening mists like fairies in their silent miniature world.  I miss the slow quiet peace that somehow thunders through the heavy air that yearns for--anticipates even--the rainclouds blooming off somewhere overhead waiting for a chance to flood my driveway and fill the creek out back.

I miss slow lazy smiles of friends who tease so inconspicuously that I have to think twice to catch up to the underlying meaning of their wit.  I even miss their baffled faces when I blather on about nothing in particular.  Their tolerance of me.  I still have remnants of the wild west about me.  I still talk too fast.  I still glaze over when I have to sit still, my mind running on tomorrow.

Most of all, I miss the eighty shades of green coloring the gazillion leaves of prehistoric hardwood trees--graceful oaks spread 100 feet wide to shade the red and yellow mushrooms swollen with spores waiting to burst.  Hickory trees filled with rodents scampering like acrobats blessed with no gravity.  The dinner-plate size leaves that look like cut outs from a kindergarten class.

I miss the free use of those woods, of launch ramps and islands and lakes and the surprise of streams that run through neighborhoods.

I anticipate Fall this year, and am grateful I won’t miss seeing the trees like ladies at a ball trying to outdo each other with their flagrant colors.   I even miss the orbweaver’s webs spread a yard wide thankfully made conspicuous by water drops along their guywires.

I’m going home this week, California.  You’re like a previous marriage--an ex-spouse I know so intimately, but has faded into my past.  You’re kind of colorless, actually, in your granite and sage.  Appropriately soft colors for a faded past.