“Let’s block out time in early March on all of our calendars and hope it works,” my husband proposed. The conversation was part of a mid-winter Zoom call with our daughter Libby, an art historian based in Los Angeles this year as a Getty Scholar. We had first thought we would visit Libby and her family for Thanksgiving, but given conditions with COVID-19 last November, we thought better of it. Even when we first considered March, it was with fingers crossed.
Despite being vaccinated and boosted, we were uncertain. Even with the precautions in place on airlines, we hesitated. It had, after all, been two years since we had taken a major trip.
However, by early February, both my husband and I recognized that our watchful ways were taking their toll on us. We felt somehow isolated and incomplete. Yes, he had his work and I was engaged with volunteer activities. But we are not stay-at-home people. Living larger had been our modus operandi since we left the Midwest as college graduates to become New Yorkers. At this point in our lives, leaving home was again necessary. Seeing our daughter and her family was long overdue. We agreed to get going.
As February advanced, we pinned down dates, booked round-trip tickets to Los Angeles and figured out the best airport parking in Burlington; from there, we could fly to LAX with a single change of planes in Newark. On departure day, between the two of us, we fell back into the routines of managing luggage, security quirks and boarding procedures. Comfortably seated, we began to relax and anticipate what lay ahead.
Arriving in Los Angeles, we encountered the challenge of taking an Uber to our hotel, but we were in “travel mode” by then. Nothing was too much. We had been sprung from the confined spaces of our COVID-19 restricted lives.
The identity of the LA area as “SoCal” was new to us, but it didn’t take long to get a sense of its distinctiveness. Southern California is youthful, expansive and fast-moving. There is a density of population; a vast car-commuting culture; an emphasis on the arts — museums, the motion picture industry, the exotic Disney Concert Hall of the LA Philharmonic. And farther to the east, the beauty of the desert in Palm Springs and in Joshua Tree National Park.
SoCal has a physical beauty previously unfamiliar to me. It offers sensual pleasures that during early spring in Vermont are often elusive. Staying in Santa Monica, we descended the steep stairs and ramps of the palisades for walks on the beach trails, where sun and an easy breeze invited us to shed all but our long-sleeved T-shirts. One morning I trudged through the warm sand in my bare feet to put a toe into the Pacific. I picked up two small rocks as mementos, and they are now a tiny cairn on my kitchen window ledge. Getting to know the neighborhood around our hotel, we reveled in the architectural influence of Mexico: adobe-colored walls, tiled roofs, pools and fountains as centerpieces of gardens filled with cacti and colorful flowers. Seagulls flew overhead.
Most gratifying, though, was the time we had with our daughter Libby and her husband, Tobias, along with our 14-year-old grandson, Sascha. Hearing stories of their California lives — Libby at the Getty Research Institute, Tobias continuing his East Coast work remotely in LA, and Sascha being a ninth grader in a local high school and about to travel to a soccer tournament in Las Vegas — renewed our cohesion as a family. How we have missed them!
One evening at dinner at their apartment, Libby asked if I would accept an early birthday present from her, one she had spontaneously bought especially for me when she visited nearby Catalina Island. Eagerly acquiescing, I was handed a perfect-sized leather journal with the imprint on the front, “I do believe it’s time for another adventure.”
From daughter to mother, here was the reminder that I needed to stay on the tack I had set out on, the mandate to leave behind my fears and the constraints that can lead too easily to loneliness and fragility.
Opening the journal later that evening, I began writing specifically about the sights, sounds, events and connections of our visit to California. I surmised that night that our time away could be restorative. And it was.
Looking back now from my home in Vermont, I feel liberated. I am a modestly different person than I had been when I boarded the plane for SoCal.