It's An East Coast West Coast Thing

I went back home to New York after two and a half years of hiding out in northern California.  It was great to see the family, friends and to eat good food again.  Yes, I'm taking a dig at California cooking and I feel no remorse for saying so.  After six years of living here I'm starting to see myself acclimating to the northern pacific lifestyle.
Packing for the trip I had to ditch the six inch pocket knife I carry in my pocket book.  I had to search hard for clothes without a Carhartt logo on them, shirts that weren't flannel and shoes that weren't caked in mud.  I ended up packing real light. 
Being back in the old neighborhood I thought about how much simpler it was to live back in New York.  When you take a shower clean water comes out.  They don't get those days at the end of summer when you start sucking up the last bit of scum in the pond that you have been draining from all year long. When you are cold you simply turn up the thermostat instead of building a fire that sometimes doesn't work because you're too lazy to hack up small pieces of kindling which you end up cursing out and find the emergency Duralog that you keep hidden for moments like these.  
Out here there are these things called "take and bake pizzas"  which are pretty popular. For $20 you can order a raw pizza, wait 20 minutes for them to make it, drive it home and bake it for another 20 minutes and by ten o'clock at night it might be ready to eat.  I don't know about California but in NY, if you're buying a pizza it's because you don't feel like cooking.  I don't get it. 

Screw cooking! 

One thing you can't do in New York is start shooting your .22 or .38 caliber guns in your backyard.  I never thought that I'd ever hold a gun let alone shoot pink plastic flamingos on my front lawn with one.  Even my horse Autumn gets a kick out of me shooting some rounds off of her.  She's a real redneck at heart. 
It was great getting back to the city.  There's the people, fashion, street corner foods, street performers, lights, museums, parks, yellow cabs, sky scrappers, shopping...  Then there's the Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, Time Square, Broadway, Grand Central Station, Macy's, Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Towers built around Ground Zero...The whole city pulsates around you.  You enter into this giant ocean that pulls you around in it's currents.  The 22.7 square miles of Manhattan can have up to 3.9 million people there during the day.  Humboldt County, where I live, is 3,568 square miles with a population of 134,623.
It was exciting being a tourist in my old home town.  As great a time as I had, I had to leave.  When I got back to our little cabin of the woods a massive blob of depression was sitting on my door step to greet me.  The sadness of leaving my family, friends and pizza behind crippled me but it helped when I took Autumn for a ride on the beach and went from this...

Curbside Sky.

To this..

Saddle back Sky with Autumn's mane breezing in the wind.

I'd like to congratulate my great friends Andrea (another east coast gal) and Aaron on their new baby girl Vera Nicole.  Don't forget to teach her that it's sneakers not tennis shoes, that woods means the same thing as forest and that "take and bake pizzas" just aren't natural.

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Copyright (c) 2012 Jacksonhillhorseygirl.com June 13, 2012