Over the weekend, I hopped on Virgin America and bid good-bye to San Francisco and her gloomy, cold rain.
An hour later, Los Angeles welcomed me with a blustering rain storm. With a kinder gesture, my mom welcome me in her SUV. We then drove in the infamous LA traffic for over two hours, instead of the typical 45 minutes. There were cars going every which way, yet no one seemed to be going anywhere.
When we finally arrived home, what awaited me was our dear, near-freezing home. How could I possibly have forgotten her temperament? You see, she is scorching in the summer and frigid in the winter. How fondly I have loved and missed her.
Over the next few days, my mom caught me up on her exciting life of back and joint pains and the joys and woes of being a grandmother. And I, well, I shared with her my knowledge of Skype and MacBooks. In between our talks over hot water infused with lemon wedges, she cooked up a storm of her own, enough for the two of us, my sister, her husband, their two kids, and the three quails held prisoners as pets.
I returned to San Francisco this afternoon, to my apartment which is so small that it is rarely cold. I also returned to three days of junk mail, an inbox full of emails to be addressed, and an empty refrigerator. Luckily, my mom had sent along with me three days worth of left-overs that safely passed through airport scanners unscathed.
The heater and the cups of hot water may have partially warmed my body in LA, but it was my mom's cooking, 400 miles away from their origin, that warmed my heart in San Francisco.
Life is good.
