OTC, San Diego

I'm writing this post on a flight from Detroit to San Diego. The ski team is meeting at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Cal., for about a week for the quarterly testing and conditioning camp we usually do at the OTC in Colorado Springs. It was raining steadily in Maine this morning, but now the air below us looks hot and dry, and the land is brown, wrinkly, and mountainous. We must be crossing Arizona or New Mexico about now. I was looking at an aerial view of Chula Vista on Google Earth, and it looks like the place is really in the middle of the desert. This is pretty unfamiliar territory to me.

I just spent two days at home in Maine, moving my stuff out of our house in Cape Elizabeth for the last time. In case I haven't mentioned it, my parents have sold the house where I've lived since I was four and bought a new one just a couple of miles away, in South Portland. (For now, at least until I move back from Colorado at the end of next ski season, most of my stuff is residing in a storage unit. I'm going to refrain from speculating on whether that's an apt metaphor for anything else in my life.) Although our old house is gorgeous, I've been in favor of the move for some time. Now that my brother Will is away at Brandeis, neither of us will be living at home most of the time, so it hardly makes sense for my parents to occupy a house as big as the one in Cape. Besides, it will be so refreshing for my parents to live in a neighborhood (Knightville) where they can easily walk to a local grocery store, several restaurants and shops, and a post office. Downtown Portland is just a quick bike ride across the bridge. And the new house is right on the water — albeit more of a tidal backwater than the ocean proper. Its address is 3 D St., the terseness of which inspired my mom to ask me to try sending a postcard from New Zealand to "K.E. & N.B., 3D, S.P., ME 04106, U.S.A." It worked.