Home, The Place I Love



The autumn sky over the Truckee Meadows. 
 Rancho San Rafael Park, Reno, Nevada.



My last blog was July 13, 2011.  I was getting ready for my annual trip to LA for my cousin Lori’s daughter’s 3^rd birthday party…and desperately trying to write a blog entry.  But the words just would not come.  So I wrote a short entry, giving a quick run-down of the trip and promising that the blog would resume when I came back from LA.   And when I returned home, I tried to write.  And then I tried again.  But the words did not come. 

In all honesty, something funny happened when I got back from Spain….I felt so desperately and passionately happy to be home.  And that’s why the words did not come. After all the build up to the trip in the spring, after all my talk about moving there in 3-5 years and the great time I had, I now admit….I was more happy to be home than I was being there.  And that threw me for a loop that I have been trying to sort out for the last three months.

It’s one thing to be happy to be back in your own bed and around familiar things.  It’s quite another thing to admit you never want to leave them.

I think both Americans and Spaniards have a romantic notion of what it would be like to move to Spain.  Most Americans think living in Spain consists of sitting around all day sipping sangria at the beach.  And I get the impression that Spaniards think moving there automatically means your life will be better, as if you have no attachment to any other place or no life anywhere else. 

While there is a bit of truth to both of these fantasies, both for the most part, are wrong.  I’ve never thought a move to Spain would be easy.  I’ve been there enough to know what I like about it and what I don’t.  But I think for me it is more of a question of this:  Will I be able to leave my comfortable life, my comfortable job for something unknown?  Will I be able to leave the landscapes of California and Nevada that function as my center?  Will I be able to remain independent – a goal I have always insisted I attain for myself – when I have no job and no voice of my own because of the language barrier?

I was bombarded with all these questions during one of the most beautiful summers I have experienced in northern Nevada and again while visiting all my friends and family in Los Angeles.  They even haunted me on a hike my brother, Pedro and I take together during my family’s annual summer trip to Mammoth Lakes, my all-time favorite place in the Sierra.

Family, history and a sense of place all make up what we know and feel as HOME.  And since returning, I’ve had doubts that Spain could feel like home to me.  At this point, I can’t even imagine it.

Luckily I still have a few years to figure it out because in the end, we will move there.  But for now, I feel the need to document my life here while showing my Spanish relatives what our life in northern Nevada is like.  So in addition to writing about Spain as I know it, I am going to write about the places we love and the things we love to do. And it’s also important to share my fears and my doubts as I begin a journey that growing up a Southern California girl, I never thought I would take.

And in the end, I hope that this will better prepare me for one day leaving home - this place, as it turns out, I really do love.

Let’s hope the words come.

Mammoth Mountain from the Shadow Lake Trail.
Eastern Sierra Nevada, California.