In traffic she peeks over a ridge, and we point at her out the open window as we drive along the corridor, a narrow, quiet strip sidling the subduction zone between Klamath Lake and a steep weedy grade. And when the grassy plains appear, silver sage and golden verbascum, she takes shape as a queen of the valley below, blue and magestic, cloaked with white cloud and basking in the noon sun. We are at the rest stop on highway 9, just inside the California border, when she reappears this way. And we stop with two other cars to shake our legs and breathe her grassy yawn.
Like a lion cub, Chas scampers and climbs roadside signs and stone walls and hops over benches and under barbed wire fences. Ford, no less enthusiastic, shouts and sings, leaping off retaining walls and I, the lioness, shakes the flies off and squints in the sun, unfazed. Coralling them with a camera in hand, I watch them with soft eyes while keeping the horizon in sharp focus, taking a picture of each leap and pacing myself for the remaining voyage home. Occasionally I stop and squeeze sage leaves between my fingers. It smells of summer to me now. It is a new smell, a western delight, emblazoned on my brain by five summers spent in California.
Some people here believe that, if you live in California two years, you can easily return home (in our case, Austin). But if you stay five years, you will never want to leave. I wonder, is this true of all places? Does our limbic system operate by formula, gathering and stockpiling sensorial mementos as phantom roots spread? I had forgotten about the three summers we had lived here, when Ford was born. I remember on the return to San Jose, smelling eucalyptus among five o’clock traffic on 280 and savoring the sinister blend of aromatics and hydrocarbons like the way a friend smells when you embrace them after a long journey. I had not particularly wanted to return to California. I was very happy in Austin.
I crouch down, closer to the ground, to get my head closer to the bees and the swinging grasses. The boys are yelling and chasing each other, and Damon is paused on a bench. The bees circle my head and I grip a sage branch and give it a good, oily squeeze. And I smile.
Dare I say I’m growing very happy here, as well?