Photo by Jared Ryder, 2025


I haven’t lived in California for over 15 years. People ask if I miss it and the answer is no. I appreciate the state, but it’s not for me. Everything from the streets to the wilderness to the layout of the cities is too big. In California, nature has a way of making itself unavoidable, mightily and at random—that unnerves me. It’s also possible I don’t miss it because I have so much of it in me. All my early memories, those I can picture and those I inherited from stories told by family members, are backdropped by that expansive state.

For example, a few days after my first birthday, a series of storms created an atmospheric river that hit Northern California about as hard as it’s ever been hit. Ten inches of rain fell in the Sacramento Valley and over 30 near the base of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Folsom Lake reservoir, formed by the dam, was pushed to its limits for the first and only time in its history. The levees held, until one didn’t. The flooding spread for miles, measuring 10 feet deep in places, destroying thousands of homes and killing 13 people. Highways and freeways––the 5 and 99, 50 and 80––were overtaken by water or buried by mudslides. There was no way in or out of Sacramento, though the floodwaters never made it to our doorstep. Nor do they take up much space in my parents’ memories. My dad doesn’t remember the storms at all. My mom remembers them best as a photo he took of her holding me next to a swollen American River. But whenever Mom recounts moving north, which we did just days after the floods, she describes water lapping the sides of the newly reopened roads, and fallen trees spread across the sandy coastline like beached whales.

The events we assume will organize our sense of the past often don’t. Instead, it’s the smaller but more personally impactful transitions that drop pins in our timelines. Things like moving to a new town or losing a close friend or a pet, that require us to drive new roads each day or find new grocery stores and spend our evenings differently, tend to segment our life into befores and afters when we look back on it. The storms didn’t alter my parents’ daily lives, but moving to Northern California did, so it’s the move north to the redwoods that anchors Mom’s memories of the floodwaters rather than vice versa. To me, that’s the real story: how natural disasters and wars, local ordinances and global politics, do and do not shape our sense of ourselves, and our stories.

Here’s another example: We were visiting my grandma in Los Angeles when Mom had a premonition. She wrapped up Grandma’s hand-painted china in bubble wrap and drove us back to Sacramento, where we lived after our short stint in the redwoods, as fast as our car would legally take us. We woke the next day to news that Los Angeles had been hit by a 6.7 magnitude earthquake. When the phone lines were restored, we learned that Grandma was fine and so was her china.

I don’t remember a single thing about that trip. I know the story because Mom likes to tell it. I know the date because the story is associated with a significant geological event that’s been well documented. What I do remember in vivid detail is an overnight field trip to Yosemite that’s not documented at all and likely remembered by, at best, two other people. There had been a late spring snowstorm that caught a parent chaperone off guard and without chains for her van. I can’t tell you where we were coming from, only that we inched along a snow-slick road for what felt like an hour before finally making it to Curry Village, where we rejoined the rest of the class. In the lodge, the final episode of Seinfeld played on a large screen to a clutch of campers and kids. I got a chocolate-vanilla soft serve from the buffet and used the payphone, usually off-limits, to call Mom. The following morning, the snow was gone and so was the door of a Mercedes in the parking lot. A bear had ripped it off to get at a cooler left in the backseat.

There’s a language we acquire from the places we live. It’s embedded in our taste buds, gestures, and thoughts. Even when we don’t acknowledge it, this language operates on our identities in potent ways. It was only in the last decade or so that I realized I’d grown up in a place defined by its agricultural industry. I was flying home to visit Mom at the time. As the plane approached the airport, I looked out the window and noticed for what felt like the first time an endless grid of squares and circles crosshatched by irrigation channels. I’d never thought of Sacramento as a suburb surrounded by farmland, but it is, and there are many things it taught me. Like how to pick a ripe avocado or spot mold on a red cherry. I can ride a horse and identify the smell of a burning rice crop. I’ve made my life in New York City and Maine, where I work in magazines and write about culture––design, art and architecture, books, wellness, and sports––but when I sit down to write about nothing in particular, it’s almost always a story about California that comes out first.



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Find my recent bylines in ELLE Decor, Town & Country, and PLAYERS, and previously in BBC: Worklife, Maine Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, HODINKEE, GQ, Bon Appétit, Real Life, Take Shape, The Pitchfork Review, Guernica, and many others. I hold an MA in magazine journalism, an MFA in creative nonfiction, and a BA in comparative literature. My work as an editor and content strategist is on LinkedIn, and my copywriting portfolio is available upon request. Visit the Lighthouse Writers Workshop for my current craft courses.