Hey guys, sorry about the extended hiatus. I know you were all a little lost without me, but just take a deep breath: I’m not going anywhere for a while. (Quite literally. I used up most of my vacation days.)
For my extra-long absence, you can thank a nasty throat virus that felt like I was swallowing glass followed immediately by a trip to the East Coast whereby my Mass accent slowly but deliberately crept back into the lexicon, and all of a sudden I’m saying, “Yah know yah gonna weah shawts even though it’s only fawty degrees out.” (Translation: You know you’re going to wear shorts even though it’s only 40 degrees out.)
Visiting all my friends and family in Mass gets harder and harder every trip back, mostly because I feel less and less inclined to return to California where the seafood is not as fresh and the Italian cooking (besides my own, of course) is severely lacking. Things I dwell on in order to feel better about living in Salinas:
- There are a ridiculous amount of mosquitos in Massachusetts, and they all love to feast on olive skin. (Though apparently, they go kookoo for Mexican dark meat. Alex got absolutely destroyed, while I was only mildly mauled.)
- It eventually snows in Massachusetts for the better part of the year. Do not be fooled by the summer mirage! This is only temporary!
- While June is a lovely warm and mostly dry month, July and August are hot and sticky. Hot and sticky. The humidity makes my hair puff up like an 80s music video vixen.
- Short visits with my mother = everyone gets along well, minimal nagging, shared eye rolls at our respective husbands, yummy home-cooked meals. Long periods of time spent with my mother = we essentially hate each other. Short, good. Long, bad.
- Our friends and family in California are also pretty amazing. Two of our best friends and their kids came with us to Massachusetts and stayed at my parents’ house, and they fit in like a glove. We’re lucky to have them, and they’d be sorely missed if we left.
On the flip side, there are so many, many positives to living back East, not the least of which is the incredibly fair cost of living compared to housing, gas, and food prices over here. On the same salaries we have here in California, Alex, Lucas, and I would be living pretty comfortably over there. Something to think about. Something to really think about, especially as we inch closer and closer to having to send Lucas to private school because we can’t afford to live in an area with a halfway decent public school system here in California.
Trips back home always remind me of who I am, and I take that with me as I ease back into my everyday routine. Part of it makes me feel a little divorced from reality, as if my heart’s not really in it over here anymore. But I have to remind myself: my life is here now. OUR life is here right now. As long as we can continue to give Lucas what he deserves while we are here, then I have to give this life a fighting shot. And I will do whatever I can to make it work. In the meantime, I can be grateful for the childhood I had, for the family I still have, and for these twice yearly trips where I can soak in all the East Coast goodness and let it bleed out West.
The Olive Gal
green of skin, black of heart
