Cottage-by-the-Sea

Los Angeles, California


While it is stating the obvious, I feel compelled to write that life is made up of too many endings. I know, I know. Endings are the other bookend to beginnings. And without that other bookend . . . the books topple over. I get it. I just don't like it.


And so, with that in mind, Billy and I left Carmel a week ago, and returned, at a slow pace, to Los Angeles. The slow pace as a result of the speeding ticket Billy got while driving back to LA just after New Year's. He was going 84 in a 65 mph zone (I've been telling him, and telling him, and then Officer Vasquez told him). This event has significantly cooled his jets.


So, home. Los Angeles. The first day wasn't so bad. Lydia accompanied me on a visit with my mom, on the way to Century City to pick up some earrings that I had left for repair several months ago. These days, life is like that. It was a beautiful, warm end-of-January day. We walked around in the hub-bub of the busy mall -- much different than the slow, quiet one, Del Monte Center, in Monterey. We shared a sandwich at Breadbar, and being the friend she is, she let me eat all the french fries. I mean ALL.


Billy and I stayed in that night and made a pasta with olivada sauce. I haven't yet really returned to cooking (is anyone out there thinking, where are the recipes?), and have yet to set foot on a dance floor. Returning to Los Angeles is a process. It requires some adjustment, a touch of grieving, and finally, resignation. Meanwhile, I think about these people who have made the jump. They fell in a love with a place and just went there. And usually it worked out. Billy and I made the decision to do that in 1998. We were going to sell the business and the house and just go. We announced this to friends and family. But then, my dad passed away suddenly. My mom was on her own, and she needed us. So we put our plans on the back burner. Fourteen years on the back burner.


For the last seven years, our annual travel plan has been anchored by a week at Kona Village Resort, and a month in Carmel. We've also been to Napa. And to Glenbrook, on Lake Tahoe, almost every summer. And we snuck in trips to Tahiti and Panama. But the economy's free fall has kept us closer to home and the business. And, that tsunami put the kibosh, so to speak, on the Kona Village trips. So now, we keep increasing the time we spend in Carmel; this recent stay from a month to six weeks. And we are contemplating spending the month of September there as well. Maybe we're just not the kind of people, or at the time in our lives, when we can just jump. Maybe we have to ease or ooze into it. Trickle. I don't care how we get there, just that someday we do. Because while being back in Los Angeles is where we find many of our friends; while it offers up a lot of activities and events that are not available to us in Carmel; the truth is that my heart will always be in a cottage by the sea. Any cottage, as long as it's in Carmel. And that's just the kind of hairpin I am. Thanks for reading my blog (aka the rants of a crazy, homesick woman).