How I Found the Sun (An Essay Collection)

Cascading

Part One: Cascading

Dad always saw the potential in things that never should've had potential.

If you had placed that man in Chernobyl in the aftermath, he would've handbuilt a house out of the rubble, sweat, and tears because he knew the grass would grow again there someday. It started out in the deserts of California, where he saw sand, dirt, and tumbleweeds and pictured a new life for himself. He built a cabin with his own two hands on the top of a mountain and dreamed about what his life would be like someday if he could raise his future children on those views.

He met a heartbroken mother who had just tragically lost her son a few years after he established himself on top of that mountain. Her eyes were kind but worn, and she knew how to cook hundreds of German and Italian cultural dishes but also knew how to throw hands. She cooked her way into his heart because keeping a fed man was to keep a happy man, and that worked well enough for him because he eventually got two beautiful baby girls out of the mix and a family.

It turns out that the mountains weren't the best place to raise a family, so we moved.

With that said, we didn't always live in New York. First, we lived in California, on Cherry Ave, and spent weekends up in the mountains. The city was loud and unpredictable, while the mountains were an hour away. It was the best of both worlds: Mom had access to nail salons and grocery markets while Dad got to visit his cabin on the mountain whenever he pleased. When the city became too loud and too unpredictable, Dad saw potential where he wasn't supposed to: the West Coast. He and my Mom imagined what life would be like if we didn't live in the desert and wondered if life would be better somewhere where we didn't have to worry about gangs and wildfires.

So we started driving toward Oregon. Portland was the land of job opportunities and Mormons, and they had helped us move into our new tiny apartment. Dad's job paid for the move, and the Mormons had helped us move in. Mom was excited at this new city with new opportunities: she'd never even been outside of California really. She was excited to brag to all of her friends back home about her family, her husband, and this new city that screamed we made it!! She changed her license and got new plates for the car within the first month, Dad began to settle into his new job, and I kept them both busy enough to question their decision to have kids.

My sister was a newborn, she didn't remember California and the mountains like I did. But Oregon had mountains too, Mom kept reminding me. But they have green on them! I'd protest, arguing it wasn't the same. There's no sand! There's no dirt! The sun looks different. She reminded me that the mountains here were the same mountains down there, we were just a little farther north. She also reminded me that the mountains seemed taller here, and this was a new experience for me. But that challenged everything I had ever known up until that point, and obviously, I knew everything at five years old. This was before Portland was hipster and cool, and I was too young to enjoy the alternative indie aspects of anything anyway.

We were in Portland less than six months before my Dad's job informed him that he was actually needed a lot farther North. I remember the look on my Mom's face when he told her that Seattle was actually a lot better than where we were. At that point, I had grown to love the weird-looking mountains and the trees engulfing them. I protested as we packed all of the things we had carefully unpacked, and I sulked in the U-Haul the entire ride going North.

Are we going to see more weird mountains? I asked, looking out the window as if I was in some coming-of-age movie at the ripe old age of 5. If I were to put music to it, it definitely would have been something out of the Twilight soundtrack. I don't want new mountains and new trees, why did we have to leave?