Goodbye to the Golden

First off, don't get me wrong - my youth is very far in my past (decades ago, with an "s" at the end of the word "decade" for emphasis). So, in a literal sense, I've left my childhood behind a long time ago. However, recent circumstances have caused me to revisit not only the "scene of the crime," but walk through the past, in a matter of speaking, and it felt like I was living through - and then leaving - my childhood once more.

Second, I wasn't raised on a winery, as the above picture might suggest. But growing up in California meant being surrounded by grapes - at one point, it felt like everyone and their brother was opening a winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Shortly after my parents moved away from the hustle and bustle of the Silicon Valley to the mountains in the late 1980s, there was a vineyard boom.

And the trend continued for over a decade while I lived there, all through my self-absorbed teenage years, followed by my early twenties before I ended up moving out of state. Just blink, and a new vineyard was planted.

So, the landscape of my childhood and early adulthood was a combination of trees, breathtaking vistas that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, and cultivated vines. As a friend of mine likes to say now, he's jealous that I grew up in "heaven."

And there's a part of me that sees what he was talking about. No matter how many years I spent in my old stomping grounds, the place I grew up can still can take my breath away today.

The above photo was taken at the Burrell School Vineyards, which isn't too far from my childhood home. It was October 2024, and my parents and I were taking a short break from packing up their house. What better activity to celebrate our progress than at a local winery? Plus, I had never been to Burrell - driven past it for years, back when it was a falling-down historic building and then through the renovations that turned it into the place it is today. But never been inside.

I was spending a month at my parents' house before I had to fly back home to wintry Alberta, in Canada. While I was sweltering under the 100-degree October sun in California helping fix up my parents' yard, painting scuffed-up walls, and packing boxes with all of their belongings, my kids were telling me about the below-freezing temps back home near Edmonton.

It had been years since my last visit to California. While my kids were young, I seldom was able to pack up all three of them and make the cross-country trip when I lived in the Northeastern United States. And then once I moved to Canada two years ago, I'd been very busy with my career. Any trips I made tended to focused on work, not the personal - writers' conferences, speaking engagements, award ceremonies, and the like.

Of course, my travels are few and far between - I don't have anything close to a jet-setting lifestyle. I'm much more of a homebody than otherwise. And home for the past two years has been in Alberta.

So, when my parents decided in September to move north to be closer to me and the kids and other family members, we were under a time crunch. We had to pack everything and get it to Alberta before winter made everything impassible (or impossible - either description for moving in Canadian winter would be appropriate).

To top it off, I arrived in California mid-September and immediately fell sick. So, I stayed masked around my parents to avoid spreading whatever it was I had (and I'm still not sure, but it was a pretty severe respiratory illness for a while - maybe walking pneumonia or bronchitis). So, it took a while for me to feel better enough to rejoin the world and "get me to a winery," to misquote a popular literary phrase.

I couldn't leave California without visiting one of the many vineyards near my parents' house. And so we decided one sunny afternoon to stop by Burrell and do a wine tasting.

And it was beautiful there. The evergreens, tinted slightly blue under the clear blue skies. The rows and rows of vines, now picked clean of their fruit and waiting for the springtime to blossom again. There's a wraparound porch that travels the entire length of the winery's building, and my dad and I strolled around and snapped a few pictures, commemorating the event.

We rested in the shade and drank a combination of grapes sweet and dry, and talked about the move, my kids/their grandkids, and what still needed to be done to get them ready to put their house on the market.

There were no earth-shattering conversational topics, but it was a moment that I will remember when looking back on the end of 2024, as well as the ending of an era with my family in California - not the packing of countless boxes or trying to convince my parents (mostly my mom) to throw out/donate more things, just so we didn't have to move them - not the squeak of the bubble wrap or the screech of the tape gun as I built box after box, waiting to be filled - not the oppressive heat of October where the three-digit temperatures meant that midday was a time best spent inside in air conditioning. None of that will be what I choose to look back on.

And there's a lot of looking back to do, at least when it comes to my family's history in California. My mom was born in San Francisco, as was her mother before her. She's Japanese-American, and her family lived in the US even after being interned in WWII and released, even after facing endless racism and hurled insults during the '30s, '40s, and beyond. It was my great grandparents who moved here from Japan, and I don't think my mom ever imagined leaving the country of her parents and her parents' parents. She'd lived a few years in Canada, where she married my father and where my sister and I were born, but she quickly moved back to California and never made plans to leave the USA again.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans. My dad is a Canadian citizen and held a green card to live in the US my whole life. I remember asking him when I was a kid: "Why don't you take the test to become a US citizen?" and his answer was along the lines of: "Not for me." It didn't make sense to me at the time - he'd been living in the States practically as long as I'd been alive. Why not take that final step?

Now, I'm wondering if there was some thought in the back of his head that he would someday go back to the land of his birth. That he would "do his time" in the States with my mom, but would be homeward bound before the end of his days.

Maybe. Or maybe that's just putting a romanticized spin on his natural stubbornness. He was already a citizen of Canada, so why bother changing that?

But looking at this photo of a California vineyard reminds me of that relaxed afternoon in October, where we sat and sampled great vintages of wine and talked about small and unimportant things. Not politics and the US election on the horizon in November, nor the changing global landscape with wars and the threat of more to come. And we had no idea about the fires that would strike southern California in January of 2025, although fire danger was something that I had brought up more than once as a motivation for them to move north.

After all, California has always been prone to fires, north and south, as well as earthquakes. We'd lived through the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, with the epicenter a mile from my parents' house. I remember watching the news as a kid and hearing the screams on TV of people trapped in the collapsed Bay Bridge as cars caught on fire. I was ten at the time.

And now? Now, my parents are en route to selling their house, where they've lived for the last 35+ years. They've accepted an offer on the place, which means that we're almost at the end of this moving journey. I've spent the last few weeks helping them unpack the countless boxes in Canada that I packed up in another country. My parents are, more or less, settled into their new house in Alberta.

I have a few photos like the one above of the landscape where I grew up. Even if I never go back there, I will remember it until the day I die. The trees will always call to me, and that baking smell of the grasses and dirt under the 100-degree summer heat, like bread in the oven. The way the sun setting over the ocean throws streamers of red and gold as far as the eye can see. A little slice of heaven.

But I have to admit there is a similar beauty in our new home - a sky that stretches to infinity over the Prairies, with no mountains to hold back the horizon. A beauty no less breathtaking, even if it's as different as night and day.

And with my parents arriving here after we've lived on opposite sides of the continent for so long, I know that home doesn't have to be a place. Home is being with family and the people you love.

And it's really good to be home.