Day One

About a month ago I was visiting my mom in Mountlake Terrace, WA, and she took me to Costco for something or other. It was my first time in years, so in the mad rush of oversized shopping carts flying around sample carts of bento beef bullion cutlets and margarine cracker sandwiches with polenta paste, I could only go slowly and stare. People darting into unofficial lanes of traffic, faces either contorted into masks of permanent road rage or dazzling smiles of apology as they bump together, alternately excusing themselves and mowing down stray children in a stressed-out shopper's frenzy. I made the joke several times, thinking it to be just the most clever thing, that Costco should install traffic signals for the intersections and maybe institute some kind of licensing test. Nobody but the baby laughed, and even hers was more sympathy than genuine amusement. She did reach out a tiny sausage hand and grip the cart for me so that all I had to do was walk while she pushed. But enough of that. We made it out of that concrete cave alive, and with only two family sized boxes of granola bars.

So after spending the better part of this first L.A. day in the backseat of the Honda, desperately trying to placate one steaming hot and sweaty screaming daughter and crying some myself, while Kenneth dodged and weaved and sped and braked and cursed, and other L.A. humans drove their cars too close to us and yelled at us and honked at us, we made it home; we sat on the bench outside a good long while, listening to sirens in the not-too-distant distance, calling out to our barely remembered cats (she laughed when I said "Gurty!" oh yeah...that word and that creature, together like always), and I'm getting to the point....Costco. First impressions of L.A. between "home" and the "farmer's market" at Orange Grove is that the city is one big, hot, smoggy Costco. But that's just because Costco reminds me of road rage.

It's not all bad.

This morning Kenneth made me a decaf latte with Washington coffee and we walked Peggy the dog a few blocks that way, a few blocks over, a few blocks back, and saw the most gorgeous, magnificent, humoungous, adjectivy tree of unknown identification in the Daniel Freeman Hospital park. People had climbed up its roots to carve their tags into the smooth silvery bark, but somehow that just added to its apparent holiness. I walked all around it with my mouth hanging open and almost tripped on a root (well, I did trip on a root- I almost fell down) with the baby on my back. The security guard on duty told us it was a special tree, alright. It has roots that go clear across the grass to the dumpster in the back.

And there's termitesinthehousewe'llhavetotentitandfumigate. Boards chewed through. A little sticker in the attic saying "this house was fumigated on July 15, 2005".
Emily and I arrived exactly 3 years later, to the day!

Oh, and one other thing. Airplanes are really loud when they are right overhead. So now I don't have to miss the Portland ThunderandLightning storm that waved us goodbye a couple weeks back in St. John's.