Somewhere between vacationing and living, here we are on the Cote D'Azur, on the south coast of France.
It is very pretty.
No, no, I mean, it is wildly, madly pretty.
I grew up in Southern California, and I was a habitue of the canyons and oceans edging my faintly apalling suburb. It was very pretty, maybe even a little famously so. And when I saw pictures of where we are now, in this past year before we came, I thought a little bit: How strange that I am going back in my retirement to a land much like that of my youth.
There are similarities. But mostly it is incredibly different here. And oddly all the ways that it is different are as if one presented some version of youthful me the opportunity to make improvements on Southern California.
And because I am the way I am, I would have made a lot of improvements.
I would add more stone, climbing dramatically and mysteriously out of the wildland and oceans, in variegated cliffs and caves. I would make it a wetter, lusher, richer environment with real streams and a thousand shades of green. I would give it history and weave beautiful old stone buildings, passages, castles, and curiosities into the environment. And I would improve the culture with better food, and a more hands on personal approach to how people could live in it, walk in it, be in it.
All those improvements of my child's California are here, right here, out my door!
I have a new list of improvements now for here, equally dramatic, but we'll leave that for another day, because we are talking about how pretty it is!
It's really pretty.
So pretty that sometimes, in a very limited way, I have to stop and take some pictures. I keep this to a minimum, but the truth is that every glance, every walk, every stroll to my bayview apartment windows offers astonishments.
I should have a million pictures to show you of it all. But, still partly surprising to me, pictures don't work like that. They have a thousand of their own rules and limitations that the raw beauty of reality is not beholden to. So when I sit on the couch here and scroll through the 20 or 40 pictures I took back during the day, I am invariably let down.
But not for long.
Because though I am let down, I have planned for it.
Sure, I hoped for better, but I do expect it. And I know the work to build the pictures back up to a version of the place that was.
Though recognizable, it's never the same as the real place, but no picture is. Nevertheless, this is some of how it looks to me here:
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