The year before my father died, I told him Nicole and I might move to the east when we retired.
He laughed. “You’ll never leave California,” he said.
That was 2007, and our situation changed a great deal the very next year. In the first part of the year, I was one of about a thousand Southern California journalists who lost their jobs when newspaper chains slashed the size of their staffs.
That happened in January, and less than two months later, my dad died at age 82.
For the next two years, I collected unemployment and we tried to decide what to do. With both of our children in the Foreign Service and knowing they would spend some years in the Washington, D.C., area and with the cost of living so high in California, we decided to retire to the Southeast.
I lived in Southern California for more than 20 years and there was one thing that bothered me more and more as the years went on. Especially after four winters living at higher altitude in Colorado and Nevada, I really missed the fact that there were no real winters in Los Angeles.
In fact, our first winter in Georgia — 2010-11 — actually included snow and ice, although not a huge amount of either.
The problem is, whether it’s climate change or just coincidence, winter weather ever since is becoming fewer and further between. It has been three or four years since the last time in snowed around here, and we’ve only had a couple of times this winter that the temperature has dropped below freezing.
It has snowed more in Los Angeles this winter than here.
I have been missing it more and more with each passing year, but I honestly don’t know if it’s the difference between being in my late fifties and my mid seventies or something else.
In 2005, we climbed to nearly 12,000 feet in the Sierras. A year earlier, we drove all over California with my wife’s sister and brother-in-law. Yosemite, San Francisco, Santa Barbara. We even went out to Las Vegas. There is just so much more interesting stuff to do out west.
The other wonderful thing about 20-plus years in California was being close to my closest friend Mickey, seeing him regularly and talking on the phone all the time. In 12 1/2 years in Georgia, I have seen him once — in Denver in 2016 for the funeral of our friend Tom. I miss him a lot.
And deep down, I miss California.
A lot.