Homesick.
Sitting here, waiting for Andy to get home, listening to my kids scream and play down the hall and am missing home so badly my chest hurts. I just ran into a blog that had some nice pictures of So Cal up and suddenly the ache I’ve been repressing for weeks now has bubbled all the way up and I’d cry if it would help but it won’t so I’ll just sit here and remember.
I remember the smell of the mornings as I walked to the bus stop on my way to school. Perpetually fresh cut grass, Eucalyptus and dew. The smell of a warm day, of succulents and asphalt, roses and exhaust.
Chlorine. Good god, most of my life was spent in a cloud of chlorine, making my eyes water and steaming the windows in the car with the fumes emminating off of my body. Battling the green tinge that always threatened to over take my honey-blond hair.
Looking out my bedroom window and seeing fifty thousand pools in the backyards of fifty thousand houses.
I remember the smell of Masue, my mom. She smells like cedar and hand lotion. I miss the feel of her cool, dry hand on my forehead, a brush of affection and a sweep to check my temperature. The way she always, ALWAYS wears lipstick, and reapplies without fail before leaving the house and again before she exits her car. I miss our differences, the fact that we are opposites in almost every way, just not in the ones that mean the most. That we love each other and root for each other and will always fight and disagree and that’s OK because that’s what moms and daughters do.
I miss my sister and her constant pursuance for attention and her ridiculous outfits and her amazing sense of humor and her self. I miss the way she purses her lips and sticks her tongue out just a little when she’s concentrating on a project. I miss her fiery sense of righteousness and her unrelenting sense of humor. I miss her smell, too… perfume and hair product and cigarettes and booze and pure, unadulterated earthy decency. Her brutal honesty and her creativity and… dear lord I miss my little sister.
And my little brother. Fighting for his place in this world, he is the best person any of us have ever known. He is the soul of our family, we cry when he cries and we feel some absurd need to protect him at all costs. Because he is the most decent person you will ever know. He is the product of his environment and was born in the wrong century. He’s a Renaissance man without a renaissance. My baby brother is eternally cheerful and obnoxiously sanctimonious and while I don’t miss HIS smell, I miss the bone crushing hug he would have given me and the love and kindness he shows my children. My eldest emulates him when playing with his own little brother and sister and it’s almost enough to make my heart explode.
I should have been able to be there with them, with these smells and these memories and these people, my family. And the ones that aren’t there, Jason, Dad, Chris… it’s not that I don’t miss you guys. You know I do. But my home will always be California, as much as I love Washington and hope to never, ever live anywhere else. It’s hard to be from a place you can’t stand to live in and ache for at the same time.
It’s a funny thing about the Internet. I feel closer to everyone than I ever have, both my family and friends. Yet it seems to have made my desire to hold them and smell them and argue with them and love them in person even more acute and painful.
I think, for the first time in my life I am truly homesick.
I miss you guys. I promise, we’ll see you soon.
xo
b.