home on the range

i've been trawling the websites of wineries in sonoma county in the line of duty (new website for a new company division. involving wine. and they're being delightfully vague about what they want. hence, the research). and while there's the usual smattering of uber-slick, poorly executed, nice and pleasant etc. etc. etc., there's a higher than usual percentage of those that make me sigh.

yes, miss delicious has been having pangs and twinges of homesickness.

i think it's all part and parcel of the amazing wanderlust i've been feeling of late, that every destination sounds like a good one. montreal? sure! road tour of the deep south? never wanted anything more! bavaria? bring on the meisterbrau! so, naturally, seeing sweeping pastoral images of the area where i grew up, in its full, sunny, clear, tempt-the-tourists beauty...definitely gives me pause.

i think that once you get those hills in your blood, you're never quite free again. and i remember detesting it as i grew up, i remember hating it for its stifling nature, its sparseness, its agricultural legacy, its lack of infrastructure for the growing adolescent. it was an area designed for breeding powderkegs, armies of dazed teenagers too bored to to anything but drink coffee, smoke pot in the teevax parking lot and cruise mendo in their hand-me-down volvos. i still get antsy whenever i go back. for god's sake, the entire town is the size of park slope. it's so...small. it's so...placid. it's so...it's so not where i belong any more. i go back and i see the same fixtures in the same places, the same kids i went to high school with who never quite made it out, the same crazies on the benches outside aroma's. and it all strikes me as so utterly alien, when really it's exactly what i remember, what i grew up with. only i'm not one of the slinking teenagers anymore. i'm not one of the landmarks that passing vagabonds and escapees notice on their passes through. i'm one of the travelers. my piece doesn't fit in the puzzle anymore.

once upon a time, that's all i wanted, to not fit into santa rosa anymore.

so why is my heart aching so for it today?

for some reason, today today today...all i want is to be where the ragweed makes me want to claw out my eyes, where the coffee is subpar and the sidewalks roll up at ten p.m...i want to tramp the grounds where i've become one of the ghosts.

i want to go home.

but this too shall pass.