The West Coast, where my heart lives.
One of the things that’s really not my favorite about where I live in Utah is that the air quality is so bad they regularly urge you not to go outside in the winter. We’re surrounded by this vision of clean mountain air with the Wasatch and Uintas mountain ranges ringing Salt Lake City and its suburbs, yet, ironically, it’s those same mountains that cause the atrocious inversion effect which allows smog to sit in the valley in the winter.
I looked out the window at 8am this morning and thought, are we supposed to get a blizzard today? The sky was ominous. The sky was, in fact, sitting low in my backyard, threatening to ooze right into the house. But my weather app confirmed blue skies and no precipitation in sight. However, the skies were not blue. They were soot.
Aside from the mountains, another reason for the inversion effect, of course, is urban pollution, and although I have to confess to knowing next to nothing about anything, I suspect that the rampant SUV-aholism of Utahns probably contributes, and I am one of those people now. I drive a Forrester. I needed a car big enough for two car seats, a stroller, and a gang of groceries, so I joined the masses.
I fantasize about how my recent conversion to Subaru-ite will be totally appropriate when we move to the Pacific Northwest, which is my number one dream these days. I once lived in Seattle for a hot minute, and I felt more at home there than I’ve ever felt anywhere in my life.
The weather suits me just fine, thanks for asking. I love rain and never get sick of it. I get sick of smog, and I also get sick of sunshine—especially that particular winter sunshine that glares off of the white, white snow from a low, low angle so that the rays pierce the backs of your eyeballs and go directly into the softest, most tender part of your brain when you’re simply trying to run a few errands. If there is a disorder that’s the opposite of S.A.D., I have it.
In Seattle, as far as I remember, this is never an issue. Also, there are natural food coops and next-level coffee shops on every block, and nary a box store in sight. It’s my place.
Why did I ever leave Seattle in the first place? Good question. Bad answer: for a dude. It’s a long story (that’s code for I don’t want to talk about most of it), but I moved to the Bay Area because he had a great job there. He was an inside sales rep, which is a person in Silicon Valley who sells one company’s computer chips and semiconductors to another company. To be an inside sales rep, you have to be able to talk the tech talk like you really know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.
He was terrific at this job, because he was a born liar. My first clue was that he left his wife for me (I said I don’t really want to talk about it). My second clue was five years later, when I found out he’d been cheating on me the whole time. Le duh.
Somewhere in the middle of all this madness, I agreed to leave the one place I had ever felt truly at home and move all my stuff, and my cat, yet again, to join him in Los Gatos, California. And I have been trying to get back to Seattle ever since. Recently, I took a detour to Utah.
But all in good time.
