Homes

            Jenna, my happy earth mama alter ego, loves suburbia.  She looks around at the sunny playgrounds, the parks, the schools, the conveniently-located grocery store, frozen yogurt shoppe, yoga studio, and therapists’ office, and thinks, “How lovely.”  For her, the promise of edge-free, happy family living wafts up from the tree-lined streets, the proud front porches, the helmeted scooter boys and girls zooming in cul de sacs brimming with golden retrievers and basketball hoops.  Jenna is in.

            Chloe is skeptical.  She finds the playgrounds mundane, the parks rather on the nose, the grocery store merely a delivery system for GMOs and Big Organic, and the town square fro yo, yoga, and therapist shoppes sirens of suburban perdition, promising pleasure and well-being where only lies a certain kind of living death.

             The tree-lined streets are planet-icide fictions borne of watering the desert, the picturesque porches are camouflage for pill poppers, pedophiles, philanderers, and existential doubters of all stripes grasping for normal.  The frolicking cul de sac kids are one drunk teenager in an SUV away from the grave, the black-legginged stroller-striding moms one secret dream away from outtathere. 

            And then Ax and I, driving back to my current chosen fantasy world of sybarite village by the beach, stop at the Natural Grocers in West Los Angeles.  There are rap stars driving Bentleys and high-end hippies with blonde dreadlocks and sophisticates in stilettos and worried faces, men sitting in cars eating tight salmon sushi rolls while typing on laptops and yelling at dashboards, road ragers in Range Rovers and toddlers in silver suede boots strolling the aisle drinking kombucha on the wrongly hot day.  It’s too crowded, it’s too loud, and people avoid eye contact with each other, even the toddler.  Chloe loves it.  “These are my people,” she thinks to herself as someone honks at her for backing too slowly out of her parking spot, or perhaps for backing out too fast, or perhaps just because. 

            And then we head up the coast, Ax in the backseat munching Amy’s organic cheese crackers and sparkling Smartwater, me pounding brown rice avocado roll and chugging organic, non-GMO, cold-pressured Suja juice LemonLove water and we are happy.  The traffic thins out past Thousand Oaks and as we crest the grade into Camarillo down that steep steep steep hill, we see the sky and ocean open up to us with golden pinks and purples and yellows and blues. 

            We cruise up past Oxnard, then Ventura, and the gleaming sky and sea and mountains get pinker and brighter and more and more astounding each moment, singing “welcome home travelers, welcome home.”  It is the longest, most glorious sunset in the entire history of the universe.  “It’s so beautiful!” exclaims Ax.  I agree.