Home Sweet Home

It is perhaps human nature to appreciate something only when you are about to lose it, or worse yet, only after you have lost it. For years, I took our home in San Diego for granted, without giving it much thought. Now that we are about to leave San Diego, suddenly I find myself wanting to savor for one last time the many things that are associated with “home sweet home”.

There is no question that it will cost me a fortune to find in Bay Area something similar to my Spanish villa style house in terms of condition or neighborhood. Still, as I was showing our house to some prospective tenants yesterday, I found myself lamenting the fact that I hardly went to our swimming pool or Jacuzzi, rarely went down the exclusive trail down the canyon to see the waterfalls, or to simply walk around and enjoy the beautifully (and I shall add, expensively) landscaped neighborhood.

So Michael and I went down the canyon trail today after breakfast. It’s a fairly cool morning, with the sun coming in and out from behind the clouds. It was raining a lot earlier in the month, but it has not rained in the past week. As a result, the canyon is all lush with vegetation, but the trails are mostly dry already. As I paused to take a break (after all, I am weighing already a whopping 124 pounds due to the pregnancy!) while going down the canyon, I looked around, and could not find better words to describe the view other than that sentimental Hollywood movie “How Green is my Valley”.


Once we got down to the bottom of the canyon, we started seeing people biking, hiking, jogging or horse-back riding. For people who don’t live in our community (our hefty HOA fee covers this keyed access to the canyon), they have to park their cars at the end of this long trail and hike for an hour at least to get to the waterfall. When we got to the rocky part of the creek, we heard torrents. To my pleasant surprise, the water took on this utterly beautiful green color due to the vegetation growing in the creek. While San Diego is known to have a desert-like Mediterranean climate, we are very lucky to have in our back yard this canyon reserve park in almost complete wilderness.


After getting back from this hour-long hike, I sat down to drink my ginger-peach tea and eat the grapefruit grown in our garden – these little things never seemed to catch my attention before, but somehow I am mentally recording all these events now! While Bay Area does boast great outdoors even on the peninsula (with the beautiful Portola Valley hills, Woodside area, Half Moon May and Crystal Springs Reservoir), it’s not possible to have those in the backyard while having a 15-minute commute any more. I looked around our house, which is sure to be trashed by tenants (who will take better care of it than I), and wondered what it would look like if we ever come back to San Diego many years later…

By the time we leave San Diego, I will have lived in this house for almost 7 years, which is the longest where I will have lived in a place. Although I have lived in Beijing and Cambridge, MA longer (16 years and 9 years, respectively), I did not live in one place for that long. My mother still lives in the same place where I lived from middle school to high-school. But it’s been so many years since I left home that it definitely is no longer my home. In Boston, I was a student and lived like a student most of the time, staying first in the dorm and then a tiny one-bedroom rental place, while spending most of the time away from home. Definitely the little apartment never felt like home. So it’s really this house – the first house that I have bought in my own name – that I genuinely call my home, in an area where I felt like that I just moved in for 7 years until I am almost about to leave. It is difficult to describe that feeling of feeling like a stranger or outsider for so long, until suddenly you are about to leave, and you realize that you are after all quite familiar with the place that you really know about it as much as other San Diegans! – And I never considered calling myself a San Diegan!


When it comes to what one calls home, for those who move around a lot, it could be a real challenge. While I was born and raised in Beijing and my nostalgia should be mainly reserved for Beijing, I must say that today’s Beijing is so completely changed that it might as well be a new city. – It’s impossible for me to even find my own ways around anymore. Boston is where I spent a large part of my formative years, but because I was constantly moving from one place to another (Harvard to MIT to Genzyme to McKinsey), I never had a sense of “permanence”. Besides, as a college town, it is naturally a city of high turnovers in its population. My Boston years were like a very long transition period. So it really is San Diego where I can truly call “home sweet home”…

Photos copyright Michael Lin.