It’s time to settle in to this new world called Southern California. I have a job, a car and the beach is about 1 1/2 miles down Warner Avenue. I love the water. I don’t care if it’s a pond, creek, lake, river or ocean. I am a fish so I am drawn to it. It soothes my soul and realigns my thinking. It’s a pisces thing. It was not unusual to find me there on my days off. In fact, Sunday became a beach day for us. An entire day at the beach doing nothing is pretty much a perfect day for me. I grew up in Ohio and winters can be brutally cold so living in SoCal was a gift of sorts. You have to be the worst weather person to not be able to predict the weather out there. Sunny and 80 everyday except for the month of February. That was the rainy season.
Playing in the ocean was not new to me. Growing up, our summer vacations were always to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. That’s a long lost love of mine. Here I am though, living in Huntington Beach. It is time to embrace this world. I quickly discovered that I loved to body surf! I would spend hours swimming out to the point where I could catch that perfect wave that would catapult me through the water. Then that moment would arrive when the wave would start to bow down to the the shoreline, and smash me into the beach. I did this while wearing a string bikini. To this day I marvel at how I never lost a top or a bottom from this activity. I will say that the biggest challenge was standing up with a bottom full of sand and shells (think of a diaper filled with crap). I really didn’t make any friends for a long time because I had a husband after all and we spent every single minute together. That’s what you are supposed to do. Right? To know me is to know I am a social butterfly at times, and I love my friends and suddenly I had none. I decided that the beach would become my first friend. The one place I could go and just talk to the universe. I could play there and be happy. Honestly, it played a huge role in my time out there.
Before I go any further I should fill you in on the details of our delayed honeymoon. We had one. About 5 weeks later we went on a 4 day 3 night cruise to Tijuana. We went to Tijuana, Mexico. I got sick on board the ship and one of the nights that I wasn’t seasick he suggested we go to the nightclub and see who we can each pick up. I’m not sure he was joking or not, but that summarized our honeymoon and pretty much laid the ground work for a solid relationship.
Now back to everyday living. Our apartment was on the third of fourth floor, I can’t remember and it was okay. The nicest part of that place was the view at night. Our balcony faced Anaheim and every single night I could sit on my couch and watch the amazing fireworks from Disneyland. Anaheim is not that close, that’s just how spectacular the fireworks were. We learned quickly that this apartment was not somewhere we were going to stay for long. I don’t know if we made it past 6 months there. The neighbors were bizzare but more importantly, we were infested with roaches! One night we came home and I opened the cabinets to start cooking dinner and there they were. Running across our plates! I lost my shit! I am a good housekeeper but roaches are a deal breaker in my living environment. We called the office the next morning and they told us that because we live in such a large building it is hard to control. Excuse me, I live here. That is not acceptable. They agreed to fumigate our apartment but if the living conditions of the other neighbors don’t change then this won’t help. We left the apartment for a day and night and came home to clean the residue off everything. It lasted about a week and they were back. I am living in a roach infested building. We quickly broke our lease and moved into a much nicer apartment across the road and that’s when I finally starting to meet neighbors who quickly became my friends and my lifeline. They were the ones who would witness what was about to go down.
A Voice For Women 