I've lived in California for nearly two decades now.  I am impressed every time I return back to Minneapolis, my home town, by how much it still feels like home. 

The years I lived here, my childhood and early adult years, were mostly quite unhappy.  The years I have spent in California have been, on the whole, a good deal better.  I no longer have many connections here -- one close friend and my ex-husband's family -- that's really it.  And yet, if I could take my life and move it to Minnesota, I would do that in a minute.  Almost as soon as I arrive at the airport, I feel the way you do when you come home after a day at work, or maybe after a vacation -- it's just nice to be back where things are familiar.

Maybe it's because I didn't choose to move to California -- that was my husband's choice.  And if I was going to pick somewhere else to live, California would not have been high on the list.  I don't like the culture, I don't like the aesthetic, I don't like the climate.

That's right -- I don't like the climate.  I know that Southern California has what most people would describe as a nearly perfect climate.  There are only a few days a year over 90 degrees, and no days below freezing.  There is no rain at all for several months of the year, and even the rainy months have more days of sun than of rain.  It's rare that you need to even consider the weather before making any plans to do anything.

And that is exactly the problem.  There is so little variation in the weather, that the perfect becomes tiresome.  There is never a breathtakingly beautiful day.  There is no blaze of fall color, no blanket of snow, and -- worst of all -- no reason to long for spring. 

One year I was driving through a rural part of Wisconsin in March. The snow had melted, but it was too soon for any spring growth.  The fields were grey.  The pavement was grey.  There were grey, leafless skeletons of trees, reaching up to a grey, overcast sky.  If you saw the picture on television you would think it needed adjustment.

But within a week, all that grey would be gone.  The grey frozen dirt would be warm and rich and freshly tilled.  The trees would be covered in budding leaves, the unfarmed land filled with grass and weeds and flowers.  There would be birds and rabbits and ... ok it sounds like a Disney movie, but really, that's what it's like.  Even though I wasn't going to be there to see that transformation, the knowledge that it was coming was exhilerating. 

I'm not a particularly outdoorsy person, and I never thought it would matter to me what sort of climate I lived in, at least as long as it wasn't too hot.  I certainly never thought I would miss winter.  And I don't really miss winter, but I miss the feeling of winter being over.  I miss that one day in March or April when you go outside at lunchtime and can hardly bear to go back to work because it is so perfectly warm and fresh and gorgeous outside.  A day when just feeling the sun and the air on your skin makes you glad to be a creature alive on the earth.  When every day is perfect, none of them affect you.  Poems are written about spring.  None of those poets, I'm sure, live in California.