The Places That Shape You...

It's been over a decade since I woke up to this...the last light at Andrew Molera State Park in Big Sur, CA. Those were magical months of beach and empty roads and dirty feet. My life had never been that simple and has never been since. I don't know why we've waited so long to go back there...in fact, June's never been. Big Sur is one of those life changer places, and the more time that you can spend there, the more changes you can feel happening inside of you. I want to take Zoey there...to laugh and run and play in the sequoias, and scavenge shells and driftwood from the beach. To meet the dozens of people who have managed to halt time by running away to such an isolated place. That would be a summer to write stories about, to snap photos of, and to melt into, forgetting where is was you came from. A year would be nice, but a summer would do. I'd take two weeks and a promise to return too. I'd take any bit of it.

We;re already trying to figure out what this summer will bring, and of course, the next. We have a particular focus on the next. It will be the last before Zoey starts school. It had better be a biggie. We'd like to launch her into public education with a unique perspective. Big Sur could provide that. We've thought of returning to Brooklyn, of going to Japan, and of just wandering, but wherever we go it'll be the kind of thing that shakes a kid's perspectives as they scoot on into fifteen years of monotonous education. At some point we've decided that we'll sneak Zo out for an entire year...that twelve year old time frame sits right with us, just on the precipice of high school. Maybe it'll be Molera then? There are worse ways to spend your eighth grade year than wandering through the sequoias and pretending as though you've surfed your whole life.