I love it here.

I feel a little guilty saying it: we left behind such beloved friends back in Virginia (and in New York before that), and leaving them tore me up. I miss them wrenchingly, miss bumping into Sarah and her herd of turtles on the bike path across the street from Lisa’s house, with Lisa waving a cheery hello from her incomparable flower garden. I miss pizza nights and berrypicking and Lisa’s cream scones and sitting in the sun beside the neighborhood pool, counting heads and complaining about how much I can’t stand sitting in the sun beside the pool, counting heads. (I have ever been a shade-loving sort of girl.)

I miss my blue mountains and the view from that bonny, bonny glen. But mostly I miss our friends. I know my girls—happy as they are here with new chums and a whirl of fun activities—still ache for the cherished pals they left behind.

The pain of separation is real and stark. And yet I knew, as we said our goodbyes last fall, with "Danny Boy" running endlessly on the soundtrack in my head, that it was easier for us, in many ways, to be the ones heading off on a splendid new adventure—not to mention reunion with Scott, who is half of me. If Lisa’s family had left the neighborhood, or Sarah’s, there would have been one mighty big hole ripped in the fabric of our daily lives.

I guess we were the ones ripping the hole this time—same as I’d done to Alice and Brigid five years earlier. And although you know your friends will get along fine without you, still you feel some guilt.

And that can make it hard to admit to yourself how much you love your new hometown.

I love it here, love San Diego like I’ve been living here all my life. Love the perfect weather, the white stucco buildings with the red clay tiles on their rooves, the unkempt hills rising abruptly from flat scrubby plain and subsiding just as suddenly, as if in imitation of the ocean swells just a few miles away. You couldn’t call this valley we live in a bonny glen, exactly, but it’s got an undeniable charm.

It’s more than just the novelty—an avenue of palm trees will still catch me by surprise, but it’s not just the unfamiliarity—it’s what Jane of Lantern Hill would call "lashings of magic," meaning an indefinable quality about a place that speaks to something deep within you. We keep tumbling, here, upon places that whisper welcoming words to us, greeting us like they’ve been waiting for our footsteps since time out of mind.

The brown hills that flank Mission Gorge Road; the breathtaking expanse of blue rolling west from Point Loma, west to the end of the world; the swooping ride down a backstreet in Santee, where the suburban desert sprawls eastward toward red mountains that aren’t hills so much as giant heaps of boulders. The old Estudillo estate on the plaza in Old Town, where stout white walls enclose a courtyard so laden with blossoms that hibiscus are as common as the dandelions that ruled our old backyard.

The white cross atop Mt. Helix in La Mesa, stark and serene against a cloudless sky. The Marian shrine at the Maronite Catholic Church, seventeen feet high and crowned in spring with a garland of flowers. The Mission San Diego de Alcala, the first church built—in 1769, two hundred years before I was born (and one hundred years before Laura Ingalls Wilder arrived in that little house in the big woods of Wisconsin)—by Fr. Junipero Serra, before he began his long trek north. Its pews are short, its center aisle wide, and arched doorways on three sides stand open to admit the jasmine-rich breezes. At Mass there, two weeks ago, Beanie sat wide-eyed, staring up at the rustic vines painted on the wooden beams of the ceiling. Her gaze was turned heavenward, but her thoughts were on the things of this earth: "Mommy," she whispered, "did people of olden times really go to church here, just like us?"

"Yes, sweetie, really."

"Do you think they had donuts after Mass?"

My own thoughts may not have drifted toward pastries (for once in my life), but I shared Bean’s sense of wonder that morning. It was July 1st, and we were there for the First Communion of a new friend, the son of wonderful Erica who made us feel at home here before we even arrived. July 1st is the feast day of Fr. Serra, and there we were sitting in the church he built, listening to the priest speak about the parish’s "first pastor."

Exactly one year earlier, we had sat in another church thousands of miles away, red Virginia brick instead of white-washed adobe, at the First Holy Communion of our own child, listening to a priest speak about Bl. Junipero and the Mission San Diego de Alcala. We hadn’t known, that Saturday morning, July 1st, that the day was the feast in honor of a saint who had carried the faith to the destination that was soon to be our new hometown.

"Imagine how my heart thumped," I wrote afterward,

"when our priest, Fr.
Francis, began his homily with a story about his trip to San Diego last
year when he visited the mission established by Father Junipero. He
spoke about Junipero’s travels and how he was so full of joy in the
gospel that he couldn’t help sharing it wherever he went. The homily
ended with these words, which are still ringing in my ears:

‘Like Bl. Junipero, we too are sent forth to—through our lives and occasionally through our words—share our joy with others.’

So here we are, beginning to feel at home in this magical city at the edge of the western world, missing our friends back east, deeply and daily, but yes, finding joy here, lashings of it. It bubbles up like a spring in the desert, spilling out, starting things growing—flowers lush as hibiscus for us to pluck and share with our friends old and new.