I can't explain it, but I've had such a strange longing in the last few days to get back to California. Not permanently because I really feel my home is here, but for a visit. It's that time of the year when I hanker for the pastoral bounty of the San Joaquin Valley, the fresh, bracing air of San Francisco and the brilliant, unapologetic sun of San Diego. I always thought the sun looked uniquely different in California than anywhere else. It's pure and crisp and it seems to wrap around your skin like the softest cashmere shawl. I read somewhere that there was a heatwave in Southern California last week and I tried to imagine the restorative feeling of the hot, dry sun on my back as I slogged through the sheets of rain and syrupy haze of a New York fall day.

My grandfather was born in California. So was my dad. So was I. There's something to the place that works into your skin and into your chemistry. You can roam all parts of the earth and live where you throw your hat for awhile, but something draws you back, now and again, to the small trappings of the familiar that give you a solid sense of serenity.

I couldn't wait to get out to the big city when I was growing up. No city was big enough for me and I couldn't get there fast enough. Yet, when I had time off, I'd get in the car and drive back to Fresno, just to get a little dose of home that set things perfectly in perspective. I always rationalized it with the same anecdote. When the author William Saroyan died, there was a telling quote in his obituary in The New York Times. It read, "Saroyan divided his time between his two favorite cities: Paris, France and Fresno, California." I understood that. The breadth of a clear blue sky strewn with some passive streaks of clouds on a hot summer day still restores me like nothing else.

San Francisco was home for a long time, too, and I miss that breathtaking, ethereal place. Even the miserable foggy summers are a pleasant memory, thought I cursed them often when I lived there. It had its' quirks for everyday living, but the vistas on a clear day always made me draw an extra breath. The embrace of the Pacific can't be equated by any other body of water and I've dipped my feet in quite a few seas. To charge the surf at Baker Beach and feel the icy water spill over your toes made me feel brilliantly alive.

I miss eucalyptus trees and oleander bushes. Strawberries from Watsonville. I miss driving through Gilroy on a hot day when the air is heavy with garlic. I long for a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, just near Big Sur, where the ocean paints a vivid tableau crashing against the rocks. I think of the bark of the seals off Lover's Point in Pacific Grove and a hot plate of abelskevers in Solvang. Fishing in Morro Bay. Mud baths in Calistoga. Real Mexican food.

Perhaps the call of the West Coast siren is particularly stirring just now because I'm going for a visit in a few weeks. A few days of work in San Diego and a few days of seeing family and friends in San Francisco. A few days to reinforce the restorative peace to get me through a long cold winter.