Various Edens

My cousin lives in southern California in the middle of the fires. She has a fantastically gorgeous garden. She lives in what appears to be the perfect climate in an area of stunning beauty. I, on the other hand, live in what most people would regard as an inferior climate. Once during an ice storm the power was out for 80 hours. We live at the top of the hill, and before we bought a four wheel drive Subaru we were often slip-sliding our way home from downtown. The temperature gets so low that when the kids were little, I would walk them to school for fear they would fall and die of exposure. When we first arrived here, people would ask, incredulous, why we had left North Carolina to come to this place. I would explain that in North Carolina we had encountered poisonous snakes, a rabid dog (fourteen shots in my abdomen when I was 7 months pregnant), black widow spiders and suffocating heat. Here we have black flies. We have a TV program on beautiful gardens, “Recreating Eden”, and two of these were set in Bali. But Bali has terrorists. My husband’s colleagues all retired about the same time he did, and most of them moved from here. They had to stay in Canada because of our medical system, but I am sure that if it weren’t for that, they would have moved to a better clime, and indeed most of them do spend winters in the south.