Moisture

I'd forgotten how moisture affects things.  The berrykin and I are in California presently, visiting my momberry.  It's been raining off and on for three days now, and it's so *wet.*  Momberry doesn't really notice the humidity.  Part of my brain says this is nothing, because it remembers, viscerally, how thick the air was in Florida.  But that was warm humidity.  Here, it's cold.  It's nice!  Except that everything I touch feels wet when it's cold.  My sinuses and airways feel fuller and gunkier.  Because I shower at night and go to bed with wet hair in braids, my hair never feels dry.  On the other hand, it's also regained a lot of its body.  I don't know if that will stick around when we leave, but it's been nice for the visit.

I met my cousin's boys for the first time last night.  They're almost four and going on two, so nicely on either side of the berrykin.  Berrykin was too scared of all the people to play much until the end, and then he started petting them like they were cats.  Pretty adorably funny. :)

I wish I'd remembered to look for the camera before we made the drive.  It may be in my bag right now, but I don't think so.  When I was a kid, I never noticed how gorgeous the valley is.  In my head, there are houses then trees then sky on the horizon.  In reality, there are houses and trees, then an amazing layered backdrop of mountains and valleys and meadows.  They look amazing in almost any light.  Some days, a giant fog bank rolls off the ocean and pours over the mountains.  Maybe I never noticed because we were almost always here in summer, when everything's a single yellow-brown color.  This time of year (which feels a lot like Colorado October), the trees are turning and the grass is green.  GORGEOUS.  I really wish I had my camera!

It's difficult to drive here, though.  I have no sense of direction, no matter how hard I try to create one.  I simply have to drive something often enough that I know where I'm going.  Even when I've lived somewhere for years, the exact location of things often escapes me if I have to give other people directions.  Here, I have years of childhood romping memories of town and beyond.  I remember stores that haven't been around since I was in the single digits.  So rather than building a driving map from scratch, I'm building it from a smattering of remembered places.  Here's the Little Mermaid fountain, there's the church; this bakery is here, the chocolate shop is there; that used to be the bookstore where Chazberry sought out new comics practically every day one summer trip.  The candy story is somewhere new.  The shell shop is gone.  And because we only ever walked into town from one street, everything is oriented to that street, and nothing is connected.  Tricky, tricky, tricky.  But it's kind of fun figuring it all out!

Berrykin has been walking to town with me almost every day, when we meet my momberry on her break.  He does really well.  I had to buy an umbrella stroller, though, because there are WAY too many hills to carry him up when he gets tired.  My back hurt so badly for the first few days!  I was hoping to make it to the beach, too, but there's no chance with all this rain.  Maybe next week, before we leave.  It's a little chilly, though, so we'll have to wait and see.  I might take him up to the falls, instead, to see what it looks like without the yearly summer drought in play.

I was hoping to get more done while we were here, but...well, I suppose if the only things I accomplish  are resting and shifting my sleep schedule to get up with the berrykin, that will be enough. :)