Last summer we dropped out of the Mojave through the mountains north of the city into a verdant valley. I could’ve sworn I’d seen this in some car commercial, complete with perfect golden hour sunlight and breezy switchbacks. We were embarking on a one-year stopover here for my fiancée’s professional training, not a reinvention or some journey to find ourselves. What follows is a ledger of the in-between, the routines that made a temporary place feel like ours, and a defense of the small rituals that held the year together when everything else moved. This is not a travelogue. It is an argument for the middle of things, that most of life happens in between, and that what makes the in-between work are rituals you can pack and rebuild anywhere.
Early on I pushed us to assimilate. She had a craving for chilled soup to fight the summer heat, so that weekend we came back from the farmer’s market with a couple bags full of ingredients that, to a neophyte like me, seemed could plausibly result in gazpacho. I had never been a huge fan of gazpacho, but one afternoon and three spoonfuls later I became a convert, which said more about the produce (and my future wife’s cooking skills) than it did about me. Seasonality has a practical way of directing your plans. And then calendared obligations took over. Most weeks I was on the moving walkway between terminals and coasts, Delta through Atlanta, the same gates at odd hours. I will not name the quiet lounges where I found respite; the hidden escalator in that terminal is a moderately well-kept secret. A Red Sox cap lived in my carry-on and kept me rooted. In hotel rooms Shark Tank bred familiarity; at home we saved The Sopranos for the couch and flew through all six seasons. I am good at productivity, but this past year asked for presence. Maybe Tony was right about family and rituals.
One of our favorite third-places was a small café in a leafy neighborhood with simple sandwiches and a sidewalk table good for people-watching. A sitcom actor you might recognize walked by with a coffee on one of our first visits; he never reappeared, though I kept half-expecting him like a running joke. The grocery store grew familiar in the steady way that matters. Same staff, same shifts, same quirks. The sort of faces you start to recognize before names, a quick hello that says we see each other here. That is enough.
Rituals are what I’ll end up missing. Not so much the map or the topography. William James, the psychologist behind The Principles of Psychology, called habit “the enormous fly-wheel of society”; my interpretation is that repeated acts steady a life when everything else moves. Cultural historian Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia, draws a line between restorative nostalgia, which tries to rebuild what was, and reflective nostalgia, which lingers on the texture of a time. I’m attempting to describe the second kind, a reflective look at a liminal chapter. And when a chapter closes, the choreography stops.
You are not grieving a neighborhood or a sunset or a vista so much as the reliable order of its moves. The way Sunday tennis set the week in order and the way a saved episode held a place for two people to be in the same room at the same time. I do not want to reconstruct a shaded corner tennis court or the exact café table; I want to remember with fondness that our days had a pattern that fit the time. There is plenty to look forward to in the next chapter. The sentimentality sits alongside it. You can be eager for what comes and still miss the old choreography. Choreography like the five wedding-dance lessons that did something I did not expect. They gave me a different kind of confidence, more posture and timing than mindset; standing up straight, listening with your shoulders, moving together without rushing. It’s unlikely I’ll miss California all that much, in the geographic sense. Instead I’ll miss what won’t be possible to recreate.
Fridays had a routine that took some dedication to refine but eventually found something we could not improve on: driving to the next town for a Neapolitan pie, picking up a good Barolo at the shop nearby, and heading home on my favorite winding drive through the hills. The oven heat on my forearms as I carried the box to the car, the Barolo bumping the console on turns, the small exhale when we set it all down on the table. What I will miss is the order of it all, and the small relief that arrived because the steps were well worn.
Not everything fit neatly, and in July our attention turned towards prepping for a move. When we scheduled the appliance donation, our temperaments showed. I wanted to keep them plugged in until the last possible hour; she wanted a two-week buffer in case the hauler slipped so we could reschedule without a scramble. We rarely disagree, this one simply made our risk tolerances visible. I tend to see how close the needle can run to E. She prefers to keep a full tank. We found a middle that worked, packing has gone off mostly without a hitch, and we still despise the whole process, which counts as shared values even if not always done with shared methods.
When the week of ‘lasts’ arrived it did not announce itself like something you might expect. We just kept our schedule. The last Sunday morning tennis lesson gave us a coveted shaded court and our best rally yet. The final first-dance check-in confirmed we had finally managed to (mostly) remember the whole routine. The last pizza was consistent, reliable. Then there were farewell cards from our instructors: kind, unexpected, and heartfelt. The sort of notes that land because someone paid attention while you learned.
The practical case for moving back east is easy for us to make. Travel shrinks. Work, friends, and family move back within reach. The relief is not theoretical. Eagerness for what is next is not at odds with gratitude for the pattern that got us here. Still, what we built is not a fragile museum of coastal clichés. The place itself will leave its mark. Cool walks under the marine layer. Produce that makes even a simple salad feel like you cheated the recipe. And the way late light casts the hills aglow late in the evening. I remember my fiancée’s colleagues folding us into a birthday party, showing how temporary community still matters. The clerks at the grocery store became familiar company without a single exchange of names. None of it photographs well, but it still built up all around us.
A wedding and a honeymoon sit just ahead, so looking out more than a few weeks feels both hard and unnecessary. Day by day feels right. Somewhere in our packed-up cardboard boxes there is a preserved butterfly in a small frame that will carry for me a symbol of our time here. Not because it is rare, but because it reminds me that change is normal and attention is the part you get to keep.
On the last Friday-night pickup she held onto the pizza box in the passenger seat, and I set the wine in the back. A relatively cool night in August, the scent of jasmine blossoms reached through the open car window while we waited at the light. The place was background, the pickup was the ritual. The light changed. I checked the mirrors and turned toward home. Wherever that is.