Swimming

One of my oldest friends go married last weekend in Vermont, so we flew back home for a whirlwind tour of the North Country and Boston. Home, home...yes, that still feels like home.

A few of the friends we saw mentioned this blog. Specifically, that I'm making my life sound like a blur of wine tastings and restaurants and la-la-sweetness. I have two things to say about that. One: Yes, it's true that the blog's a bit uh, sunny. I still can't figure out whether I'm trying to worm my way into the Food Blog Club--all food and nothing but the food, with the occasional food-related travelogue or childhood memory thrown in--or whether I'm creating an online journal of my California life. And if it's the former, I don't want to get too personal. If it's the latter, then I should password-protect this thing. I need some more time to figure out what I want it to be.

Oh, and second: It's actually really nice when people trust you enough to tell you the truth. Yes, kindly, of course.

So in the interest of honesty, I'll say that life has not, in fact, been a bowl of (local, seasonal, organic) cherries. I'll spare you the details, which may or may not involve crying into my steamed dumplings at Taipei on Clement St., but I haven't been this homesick since Camp Timber Trails. We didn't leave Boston because we were unhappy...we left because we were so happy that it made us ballsy. There are far worse places to be homesick than San Francisco. But there was also a lot to leave behind, a home and a community, and I have been feeling decidedly unballsy of late.

I went for a midnight swim in Caspian Lake on Friday night. My friend B, the bride, wanted to do a little mikveh-style ritual with her close friends, so we sat around her on the dock and gave her our blessings for a happy marriage. Then we all got in the water. A cold breeze was blowing and the lake was about as warm as a lake in Northern Vermont can ever be at midnight. I was halfway in, shivering and wet, trying to go under slowly, when I realized that the dock was too far away to go back without getting even more chilled. "It's warmer once you're in the water," B called out hopefully. So I dove in and after a minute of agony, it did get better.

And that, metaphorically, is just about where I am right now: In water up to my waist, too far in to go back, holding on to the idea of the warm shore. And the only way it's going to get better is if I dive in and start swimming.