I  leave early tomorrow morning to drive back to Utah, so I should be in bed, resting up in preparation for 12 hours of driving. Seth and Chere both let their North Carolina licenses expire, and refuse to get Idaho licenses, so I’m the only one with an actual driver’s license. I’m also the only one in the family with any kind of luck, and I just know that the minute I let either of them drive, there will be a sobriety checkpoint. You think I’m joking? This actually happened once this week. Fortunately I was driving, and not Seth. Because he was TOTALLY wasted.

Not really.

I have a cold (which doesn’t excuse the sad humor, but might explain it) – and y’all know what I’m like when I’m sick. I basically go into a coma. I have no energy, and I can’t breathe and I’m just soooo pathetic. So I really, really should be sleeping.

But I’m not, I’m typing. The whole reason I’m blogging is because this has been such a good trip, and sometimes expressing gratitude overrides the need for sleep. I had my doubts – could you tell? I get a little worried about large gatherings of people, there are so many personalities and demands. I have GOT to remember to just let things go (not grudges, fears). And I have to remember to relax and give people time, including myself. Silences don’t have to be filled – you can just wait, and let people say what they need to in their own time. I forget how loving people can be if you just let them love you, and then show love in return. I realize these are such nebulous statements – and all without context, but trust me  - I wish I could write those things on sticky notes in my brain so that I could remember them all the time.

I love my family always, but I forget just how much I love them. They’re totally insane. Just completely bonkers. Not one of them from the same mold, and each outing is unpredictable and challenging. Our conversations range from top decible arguments over the validity of the Old Testament (hello Christmas dinner), Obama’s odds for reelection, abortion legislation, whether Ammon really needed to chop off all those arms, whether or not I’m shallow, why girls like boys with guitars (they do, Enoch, but that’s a conversation starter and does NOT make me shallow, Seth), and whether or not the elephant seals would eat Enoch if we threw him over the barrier on to the beach where they were all fighting. Physically, mentally and spiritually these people stretch me – heck, even politically. And with the exception of the bruises I have from fending off the affectionate poundings of Angel and Enoch, I’m stronger for these interactions. They’re passionate and intellectual, ruthless truth-tellers, critical, loving, totally relentless and when I’m around them I feel like things could catch fire at any point in time. It’s exhausting and stimulating all at once. We’re so invested in each other’s lives it’s ridiculous. It took me two weeks to realize that if I left my phone out, my little brother WOULD check my facebook. I caught him in the middle of sending a message today to a friend of mine – title: You’re Yummy.

Lovely!

And Chere is right. I think my mother really does talk to God face to face. Because I don’t believe in psychics. And how else would my parents know everything? EVERYTHING.

I’m happy to be returning to routine. But I’m going to miss the family.

And I freaking love California.

Sometimes I’m not really sure what I’m thinking, so things come out a little garbled. If I had a more organized thought process, we’d all benefit. Instead, we muddle through.

Christmas changes as you get older. This isn’t something cliche about how things have transitioned from getting to giving, because that was never my bag anyway, baby. I think it’s more about the dynamics. So maybe what I mean is that Christmas as a family event changes, not Christmas itself.

It’s so surreal being around all this family, because none of us are kids anymore, and this is the first time it’s been so glaringly obvious. At least to me. We are in California – we being my immediate family – at my grandmother’s house, with my aunt and her kids and their spouses. I have three fantastic cousins, and two are married and pregnant, and the other cousin just got engaged to his girlfriend. My immediate family has four adult siblings and one teenager, and none of us are married yet. The star of the show is the one (born) baby in the family – Savannah, the eldest cousin’s daughter. She’s this little, curly-haired, pink source of smiles and constant laughter and squealing. She reminds me that I really do want to have kids and that I’d be good at it.

I love my family. It’s true. I do feel like this whole experience is something that none of us could really have planned for, especially the moments where I wished I could crawl out of my own skin. My mother said something today about passing the baton on, and allowing us to make traditions from now on – and briefly, I felt like she’d started speaking Swahili. But she’s right, you know, and I felt a sense of loss that brought more relief than anything else. It was almost like being given permission to move on, and I didn’t even know I’d needed it so much. The Christmases of this year and years past are just that – past. They’re impossible to recreate because too much life has happened to us. It’s a really good thing.

Big changes are on the horizon for us all. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, or where I’m going and how much longer things will stay the same, but hey, whatever. I’m up for it.

It’s a long drive from Provo to the Central Coast, and, hello, four adult siblings, one car.

But oh, the good times were sweet, and the music was so fine. Apparently we’re an R&B/hip-hop family – it was the only genre of music we could all agree on. I drove the whole way, since I’m a bit of a control freak. I also sang the whole way, because I could. I didn’t have much of a voice by the time we reached our destination.

I forget how much I love this area of California. As we were driving over the mountains through the mist into the valley, I could smell the ocean and the leftover sunshine eucalyptus smell, and it just made me swoon a little bit. Then the next morning I woke up to that special California sunlight – the kind that makes everything seem a little cleaner and warmer, and it was just so gorgeous. The light in Utah has a dry, blue quality to it – even in the summer time, it’s a crisp mountainy light. But the Central Coast light has this gorgeously saturated feel to it – as though there’s just a little more water in the air. Which, now that I think about it, there probably is. Bottom line, the light here has a different quality, and I love it. No need to wax rhapsodic.

Can I just talk a little bit about the eucalyptus trees though? I know no one else cares – even the people that live here dont care. It’s just weird to feel about trees like I do about eucalyptus trees, and I’m aware of the weirdness. But literally, to me, these trees have an almost magical effect. I’ve written about it before. Eucalpytus trees are not native to California – they were apparently brought here by Australians during the Gold Rush. The trees grow incredibly tall, have twisty awkward branches, shed their bark constantly, and have long papery leaves that whisper and rustle when the wind blows through them. They’re no good for lumber, and have sticky, oily sap. They smell green and almost antiseptic. And thing is, no one else cares. They’re not like giant sequoia’s that people drive through/under, and they’re basically useless – considered kind of a weed as far as trees go. But there is something about the way the light shines through them when the afternoon is waning, and how they make the mornings smell so fantastic that just… changes my soul little bit. I want one in my backyard when I have my own house.

And that is all for now. Except for this picture of a troop of eucalyptus trees down the hill from my grandmother’s house.

Recently I said:

“Sometimes you meet someone who seems really shallow, and you think, ‘There’s GOT to be more to this person.’ So you dig, you make efforts, and you wait, and it turns out that nope, there isn’t anything else to them. They really are that shallow.”

While the context of this comment is not the point, I do want to note that the people I was talking to at the time are in no way shallow, and I’m not sure if I made this clear at the time. As far as I far as I can tell, they are above average intelligence, talented, very funny, and deeply cool.  I forget that people can’t read my thoughts, and assume they know that I think they’re great. Thought osmosis, you know?

Anyway, later, I was thinking about depth and complexity, and it occurred to me that while being shallow is generally meant to denote someone who only cares about the superficial, and is certainly how I meant it at the time, there is another way to look at it. A lot can be said for someone who is transparent, sweet, simple and the same all the way through. In fact, the few people I know that are that way are incredibly precious to me for those very qualities.

So while I love the complexities of life and people who are deep and layered, I’ve decided that from now on I’m not totally discounting shallow.

I went on my weekly trip out to the lake to take pictures. This is what it looked like.

And these are the stairs that I almost died on. Thanks, ice.

But these are some of the pictures I got.

Gold on snow is beautiful.

And my favorite: