Life is not usually especially quiet around here, and it just hit me how magnificently ironic it is that we have a habit of buying houses and then going to great lengths to make them precisely our own ~ which involves power saws, scaffolding, hammers, nails, and people (so many people!) traipsing in and around everywhere ~ yet our homes are known as the havens. Friends and family stay with us for days and weeks ~ they move in for goodness sakes! I throw out an easy invitation for a last minute dinner party, thinking most everyone will already have made other plans, and within ten minutes our table is full. A small group of friends comes over for a Sunday afternoon powow, and hours later we’re all sitting down to dinner together.

Clearly we must be doing something right ~ somehow we manage to create cozy spaces even if the windows are covered in plastic.

I’m still not sure if I’m an introvert or an extrovert, and I don’t think I’ll ever be entirely convinced I was meant to live such a big, rowdy, social-fueled life. I know that last statement makes it sound like we’re dancing on tables with lampshades on our heads every night (it’s actually only on Tuesdays), but it’s not so much that we’re whooping it up all the time, it’s that my husband and I happen to be incredibly passionate people, each with our own interests (me ~ art, writing, travel; him ~ violin, classical music, cycling), and these passions are very much a part of our day to day lives. I’m always working on one story or another and he practices violin almost every evening. I put on art shows; he is involved with the LA Chamber Orchestra. And in all that his friends and my friends mix and mingle and run into one another, and interwoven through all of it is our family, each with all of their passions and interests. This means my husband and I have seen plays we would have otherwise never heard of. It means we went to a bicycle race this weekend. It means we get great facials.

On top of all this we live in Los Angeles, which is not a city for the faint of heart, the mildly interested, the halfway-motivated. It is a city of movement and appearances and the strange allure of movie magic, not to mention a major international airport. It is only recently that I began to connect the life I’m living with the fact that I live in Los Angeles. I know this seems like a fairly obvious thing to be oblivious to, but once a friend of mine shared this observation with me (when we were each in the middle of moaning and groaning about how intense our lives felt), it stuck with me. There is so much to do in Los Angeles, and so many ways to work and create and share and experience and gather. This is true of most cities, I know, but only now ~ nearly six years into my life here ~ am I beginning to appreciate the peculiar manic-yet-laid-back energy of LA.

I sometimes have vivid imaginings of how serenely beautiful life must be in, say, northern Wisconsin or rural Idaho. I wonder where I might be ten or twenty years from now. I used to think that the minute I had the chance, I would run as fast as I could away from this city. But it is in this city that I have done my best work, fulfilled some of my greatest dreams, and helped create the (growing) family we have. It is here I married my husband; it is here I wrote my books. It is here where some of my dearest friends have created extraordinary, artistically-fueled lives.

It is here where we have created this home, and it here where we have made some of our most extraordinary memories which, if they could each be bottled, would fill every bookshelf and every cabinet, would be tucked under beds and stacked along our staircase, would be dangling from the ceiling and sprouting flowers in our garden. Here. Right here.