California ...

You ever go somewhere & know that's the place you call home. I don't mean in the sense of a certain house being your home but this place is where you feel you belong. It's like it's part of you & you feel like without it there's somewhere missing. That place for me is California & right now i'm getting some serious home sickness!

In the midst of reading Ansel Adams Autobiography, i'm listing to him describe California in a way that i'd imagine only he could, in such sharp detail you feel as if you are part of one of his photographs. He talks about places i've seen, driven past & experienced myself but now i have to return to in the hopes of seeing the things he saw. I follow blogs such as those belonging to the Ansel Adams Gallery & Sierra Impressions Photography that remind me of the places i've been & grown to love.

The Sierra Nevadas are nothing like little old England where i grew up, vast & empty in places, they seem sharp, harsh & unforgiving compared to the green grass & rolling hills you see in England. But they seem to take over, there's no escaping them & their beauty, & the more i see the more i want to explore new areas. & not just the mountain surrounding my husbands hometown of Bodfish (it has a stop light & a Mcdonalds) but north & south to the coast & the cities. I have yet to discover a part of California i haven't felt as if i've belonged (although i'm not going to lie ... LA might challenge this). I never felt this way in the city i grew up, i was never able to be the person i really was but California lets me be me, it doesn't try & turn me into someone else.

& one day i hope to call California my official home, the place i will spend the rest of my days, hopefully earning my living selling my photographs in a little shop attached to a small gallery in a mountain town somewhere. Where people will buy my books, & notecards & prints & hang them on their walls for the world to see.