Endless Summer Creations

There was a time we lived off in the woods.  As I lie here in the comfort and security of my bed, listening to the rain fall outside my window with the blinds drawn, I can almost imagine that we are in the middle of that forest again. It was a good place to rest.  A good place to escape the life that had been imposed upon us, and to redefine life according to  our terms. No need to dress up or look a certain way.  I mean, who really cared?  There was no pressure.  The residents were mostly down-to-earth, unassuming people living in a rural Pacific Northwestern town.  Some of them were retirees.  Some lived on Social Security like us.  For others, the RV park was just an in-between place.  One guy had been in the process of building a house on his own land for about a year. I even worked for the RV park for a while doing bathroom maintenance.  But it wasn't really a job....

This is the post I wrote on Facebook in early September 2015 when I realized we needed to return to Florida.  I wrote these words with a very heavy heart because in coming north, I had just wanted to come home.  But I had to eventually face the reality that the places which had always been home to me no longer were.  I came to realize that home is wherever Jim, Carl and I may be.  Even if it's in a hotel room.  Or an RV.  We learned to cling hard to each other.  Like hikers lost in a snowstorm, we kept each other warm to survive. There's a part of me that wishes I could just wash my hands of my old home.  It is no longer the source of comfort, companionship and merriment that it once was. However, I would not take back our time up north.  There was so much beauty there.  I saw it when the heavy snowfalls descended outside our motel room window, and Carl looked out to sights he had never seen in his life.  I saw it when Ca...

Each day we drove on to these stepping stones on our trip home back across the nation saw places too big to fathom desert which stretched on forever, unchanged for centuries occasional border patrol checkpoints along the highway vast skies over dry mountains then eventually the sand gave way to green the waters drew close again we heard 2013 arrive from our San Antonio room by the next night we walked the streets of the French Quarter observing the spoils of the night before lingered over a meal of Big Easy favorites the promised land was within our reach now we would tarry there until the next chapter began but the highways have never stretched away so vast, free and wild since

Los Angeles a mystical land I'd heard of mostly in song film poetry then that one day we were there gazing through the rain at the vast expanse of city far below stretching away for miles what is LA but a surreal place fashioned of dreams? As the streetwalker in Pretty Woman proclaims "Everyone who comes to Hollywood has a dream What's your dream?" Indeed Dream to walk the red carpet or the red light district So much about LA I could not see as I looked down from atop the hill surrounded by a theater of mountains yet as I took in the sand, desert, neighborhoods and mountains so unfamiliar to me stories of LA floated through my head similar to the Florida I know yet beyond comparison in so many ways Laurel Canyon a community of 1960s hippie love the juxtaposition between crudity, violence and death the drive-by shootings of Compton and South Central to the renaissances of art blooming in Venice Beach and the bastions of style throughout the city the opulence of Rodeo...