Coming from a place where things don’t thaw until May, I fall in love with California every year again on January days like these—heartbreakingly gorgeous, their fragile warmth and promise surely doomed.
My glad escape outdoors from in- has been often symbolic, a sore-needed release into the world from some prison of mind or senses, from restrictive rooms or rules that kept me from myself.
My memories of Januaries past include finding a little house abandoned in the Santa Cruz mountains, its door ajar; passing a field of horses on the way to Petaluma, and stopping to buy sweet cherry cider from a stand; brilliant hillsides of yellow mustardweed along the back road to Los Gatos and a café in Old Town; the January term courses I took at Mills—Royal Scandals one year, and Bay Area Museums another (sitting on the almost Greek promontory above the Golden Gate Bridge one morning waiting for the Legion of Honor to open)—getting to sit out on a sun porch in the afternoons and later grilling hot Italian sausages in the dorm fireplace or buying fresh cracked crab; in recent years driving down to the mission in San Juan Bautista and eating enchiladas in the flower-covered patio at Jardines de San Juan while bright-colored roosters roam among the tables.
Another year I wrote this January journal, telling of other unseasonable seasonal pleasures.
image: Christie B. Cochrell, San Juan Bautista
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