All My Californias
I was 18 the first time I saw an avocado in a supermarket in San Diego, so far in miles and emotions from the small landlocked town in Kentucky where I grew up. It came to symbolize all of California to me. Exotic, green, unknowable. How did you eat one, and how could you comprehend the magnitude of California? I felt so small next to the heaving, limitless Pacific, so empty under the homesick sky, so unprepared for the role of wife.
California was thousands of miles away from Sunday dinners after church, my room in my mother’s house, childhood friends I’d known since birth.
On the bus trip across the country, I was irrevocably moving away from my own childhood into unknown territory, like the early pioneers who had gone west before me. I was a girl heading toward some new iteration of myself I had yet to inhabit. A teenage husband, a new last name, a tiny bungalow…we were actors playing house and trying to learn our lines on stage. In California, I learned a new language that included avocado and artichoke, a language sometimes punctuated with fists instead of words. In California, I learned not to talk back. In California, I learned loneliness. Even though I never lived there again, California had a hand in making me who I am. I carry her with me—the girl who sees that ocean for the first time, marvels at an avocado, begins to let go of happy endings. It was an Eden for me…the spiritual surge of the Pacific, the dry tawny hills rising up from the highway, the light that is like no other, all of it mixed in with the loss of innocence, the growing knowledge of pain, the exodus from childhood. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.