After nine years, it's still funny to tell people that I moved to Vermont from the San Francisco Bay Area. The reaction is usually "Why did you move here?"
The real answer is because I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I couldn't continue to live there.
Don't get me wrong, I miss a lot of things about San Francisco. The people, primarily. We left some wonderful people behind us. Talented, strange, unique, wonderful people, and missing them makes my heart ache. I also miss the food. San Francisco is the Gateway to the Pacific, and there were more delicious and delightful flavors of restaraunt than you could shake a stick at. I miss those tangy Vietnamese sandwiches stuffed with unidentifiable bits that were so amazingly tasty.
Vermont, on the other hand, is very monocultural. It doesn't have the
What don't I miss about California? The politics. Yes, I can say that I voted in an the 2003 recall election, which had 135 people running for governor, including Gary Coleman (who took 8th place), porn star Mary Carey (10th), and action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won. Around that time, we also had the joy of the California Electricity Crisis in which deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate electricity prices, caugint them to triple in little more than a month's time. And hey, rolling blackouts, too!.
Vermont's politics are very different. Only in Vermont could Fred Tuttle have become a leading candidate. That's a world of difference.
Certainly Vermont has fewer employment options, fewer people, and not mearly the ethnic restaraunt selection.
But the real reason, the fundamental reason we came back is for apple cider. Californian supermarkets seem to believe that apple cider is apple juice with some spices in it. This is not true. Cider has a lot of filtrate, and is opaque. For nine years, I've been drinking apple cider first thing in the morning, and a mug with my dinner at night. Because it's the taste of home.
2 comments:
You sold me on the apple cider, but; what about the cold winters? The city of San Francisco is built with hills that will keep you in good shape.
But I do understand people prefering their home state.
I was born in New England, so the cold weather is something I expect. There's an odd sort of tinelessness to California, since the weather doesn't vary much from one season to another (the exception being January and February, when it rains). So when I look back on my memories, it's very difficult to say when it happened.
I don't begrudge anyone not wanting to shovel three feet of snow. But it's something I've become familiar with.
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