Journey to the Heartland

It's been almost a month since we've returned from our three-week long road trip to the heartland of America, mainly Oklahoma City and then southern Illinois. This time was even stranger, because it was our first trip with Nova. She did amazingly well, especially during the long days of traveling by car. In fact, the whole experience seemed to spur her into a mega-growth spurt. During the trip she sprouted her two bottom front teeth and started crawling! We were even able to maintain her sleeping schedule for the most part. That said, the trip "home" is always difficult and emotional for me. It is difficult to live so far away from people who really matter.

Since relocating to California, I have never really been able to fully reconcile the two parallel worlds which now exist for me: California vs. The Midwest. They are like parallel universes, existing simultaneously but unable to merge. When you visit one, it is hard to believe the other exists, and vice versa.

Even after seven years, California still feels like an alien landscape to me at times, with it's abundance of surgically altered faces and bodies, narrow palm trees touching the sky, frantic-paced drivers with little space-age clip-on phone receivers, crowded health food stores full of people talking to themselves while trying to find organic goat's milk yogurt, Doggie boutiques, movie premieres, grocery store celebrities, Hummer limos, ranting vagrants, and electric car charging stations. The Midwest seems so beautiful and exotic to me now. Ironic, that it once seemed dull and oppressive. These are the things I love the most about the Midwest:

1. A pace so slow that you sometimes don't even know what to do with your day

2. An endlessly expansive brilliant blue sky with big fluffy cumulus clouds
drifting through it

3. Lush greenery that is dripping with the vibrating sounds of locusts humming
4. Thunderstorms rattling the house in the middle of the night

5. Yard sales that are five tables deep

6. People who say "Hello" to a stranger

7. Not waiting in lines anywhere

8. Houses and buildings made of brick

9. Empty roads and highways

10.Millions of twinkling stars against a black infinite canvas of a sky

For me, the Midwest is like a lover that I left a long time ago, only to later realize through self-reflection that I was the one at fault. But if I were to rush back with open arms and apologize, I would eventually see that all the reasons why I initially left are still there.