06:10 AM CDT on Thursday, September 18, 2008

It's been just over two months since we closed the Lone Star chapter of our lives and headed west for another shot at California dreaming. We crossed the open spaces of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and half of California to get to here, three days and 1,000 wandering thoughts from our home in McKinney.

We're living in Half Moon Bay now, a coastal town south of San Francisco. We lived here 10 years ago, before we moved to El Paso and then Dallas. This was the place we compared all other places to -- God's Country, the hometown of our hearts. It's what other places came close to being on their very best days for just a moment or two.

And it probably would have stayed that way if we hadn't moved back.

We knew that it was going to be expensive living here -- I mean, you don't have to be a financial planner to know that if houses cost about four times what they do in the Dallas area, a middle-class family like ours will be in for big changes. What we didn't realize was that the California in our memories would be so different from the California we're taking in each day now.

Growing up, I watched my hometown of Salinas grown bigger every year -- new houses, stores, movie theaters and other places to go. It seemed life was moving in the right direction. There was a sense of energy about the growing and newness -- this was a place people wanted to be.

Now the growth has slowed in so many towns and cities here, and the malls and suburbs that sprang up when I was a kid have become the places you'd drive by in Texas to get to the newer, nicer ones. The schools near us seem held together by luck and a thin coat of paint -- not bad places, I'm sure, but a little sad to look at.

There's a lot of that post-new look here, and it takes some getting used to.

It was a lot easier getting used to the new and newer look in McKinney, Frisco and Allen. I think the growth there reminded me a lot of what California felt like when I was a kid.

When we lived in Texas, I had a clock radio that had soothing sounds, and I sometimes played the ocean one at night before going to sleep. It was pretty good, but not quite the same. We now live a few blocks from the Pacific, and I can hear the real thing. The waves crash and fade in the distance as our house grows quiet at night, and it's like the biggest mantra in the world, saying life goes on and on.

My clock radio also had a thunderstorm sound, but playing it seemed a bit like overkill when we lived in a place with so many storms that it has a 24/7 Doppler radar channel. I recently pushed the thunderstorm button as I was lying in bed reading. I missed the sound of a good Texas downpour.

I do long for my Texas lifestyle, but I'm sure my mind is already smoothing out the rough spots as it stores six years into long-term memory. It has become the new place that I'm comparing other places to, which I risk exile in admitting here.

Darrin Swartz-Larson, formerly of McKinney, is a Community Voices volunteer columnist. His e-mail address is darrinslarson@sbcglobal.net.