Sterling Notes Moves (back) to California

Although Sterling Notes originated in Brooklyn, I will now continue blogging from.....drum roll please....the San Francisco Bay Area. Some of you heard the rumor that we moved back here, so allow me to confirm it.

This native New Yorker is feeling very sad and forlorn to be so far away from home (again! after 13 years in the Bay Area originally and only 6 back in NYC). However, upon seeing the weather reports day after day with snowfall heaping upon snowfall in my hometown, it gives me no small measure of comfort to be living in a temperate climate where in the winter, and indeed year-round, the days are sunny and mild. I've been here for 4 months and I'm still walking around my new neighborhood gawking at all the blooming magnolia trees, fulsome cherry blossoms, sprouting birds of paradise, and the million other types of trees, flowers and shrubs that I can't name. It feels like cheating, somehow, to be living in this incredibly beautiful environment while my friends and family dig out from the snowbanks - if they're getting outside at all.

What boggles my mind is that Lilah will always know this as normal. All the intangibles that remind me of home - the sound of subways and taxi horns and of mourning doves, the smell of the Hudson, the sensation of warm spring air of New York - will never jolt her upon arrival there into feeling immediately, exasperatingly, adoringly HOME. The lucky girl will have a whole host of other sights, smells and experiences that brand her indelibly as a Californian. Seems very odd.