Raising Two Daughters Inside a Postcard

People who visit Huntington Beach in July come away with a very specific idea of what it is like to grow up here, and it is roughly seventy percent wrong.

The postcard is real. The beach is right there. The weather does the thing the weather does, which is to be so reliably pleasant that it stops registering as a feature and becomes a kind of baseline you only notice when you leave. Our two daughters grew up with the Pacific as ordinary scenery. That is a strange inheritance to hand a child.

The privilege of a beautiful place is that your children will find it boring. That is not ingratitude. That is what home means.

What the postcard leaves out

It leaves out the marine layer, which is not fog and not cloud but a gray lid that sits over June and does not lift until two in the afternoon, and which every local child associates with the exact feeling of being told to go outside anyway.

It leaves out the fact that a coastal town runs on a seasonal clock. Summer is a different city than February. Your neighborhood is briefly everyone's neighborhood, and then it is yours again, and both versions are true.

It leaves out how much of family life happens in cars here. Southern California is a place where love is expressed in driving.

The mountains part

The thing that people from elsewhere never believe is the range of it. You can be at the water in the morning and looking at snow in the afternoon. Growing up with that many landscapes inside one day gives kids a peculiar sense that the world is close and reachable, which is a good thing to believe when you are twelve.

What we would say to a family looking

Not much, actually. We would ask what your Saturdays are like now, and what you want them to be like, and then we would mostly listen. The place will do its own work. It always has.