When we’re at our cabin, in the middle of nowhere in Riverside, California, sometimes we really feel (we sold the cabin some years ago, but just purchased our dream ranchero nearby!) that we are at a ship at sea, alone together in a great, romantic way, something that I hope I was able to capture in this painting from a photo I took. I love Van Gogh, and his paintings of his yellow house, and feel that its serendipitous that we should also live in a yellow humble abode, this cabin that Andrew’s grandfather built the adobe extension of, that we adorned with Christmas lights to let people know we are there and to light our way during the night.

Meadowbrook, an unincorporated township between Lake Elsinore and Perris, is filled with poor man’s castles such as our own (Andrew’s family had been there since the ’50s), and although the neighboring city was the epicenter of the housing crisis for California, and a four-lane highway has been built over our small two-lane road, and when Andrew was growing up and visiting there you had to bring in your own groceries as there was nothing nearby and now there are all the big box stores, it was our fortress of solitude and we feel at peace. The palm trees are more beautiful than they are depicted in Apocalypse Now, and yet there is that edge, as we are a gay married couple in a conservative environment, with guys with ZZ Top beards growing marijuana above us, a junkyard filled with cars in front of us, and meth addicts clambering down the road to visit the ex-con grandson of the retiree who lives across the street, but it was home for us, and hopefully the content here is how we can hopefully forge our future in the world of nature and personal history despite this, and find the great joy in nature and with each other as we continued our journey, coming to our cabin as an escape from New York City, as a place of contemplation, relaxation, and healthy restoration as we forged into the future.