Sunday March 23, 2025: A Small Moment of Delight

Palm trees!

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1663:

Every morning, when I come downstairs to start breakfast, I open up the blinds to the windows right next to our bird feeder. In short order, a few birds will show up, although the big rush comes about an hour later when my husband fills up the feeder. But a couple of mornings ago, perhaps because with the time change it was just getting light out, I found that the three tall palm trees rising from behind our neighbor’s house, which I see every morning out that window, gave me a shiver of pure delight.

To me, these palm trees are a symbol of the place I now call home.

To provide some context, my husband and I grew up outside of the southwest. I was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my husband in Atlanta Georgia, and we met in Oberlin Ohio. I can assure you there were no palm trees in any of these places (at least not outdoors.) However, when we moved to the Southwest (we have lived briefly in LA, Albuquerque, and for over 40 years in San Diego), the palm trees were what constantly reminded us that “we’re not in Kansas anymore,” as Dorothy said to Toto. Instead, every time we would see the palms from the plane as we flew back from our yearly visits back east, one of us would remark that it was strange to call home a place that really seemed more like a temporary vacation resort.

I know that one of the reasons for this was simply that the initial years spent in LA, San Diego, and the Albuquerque (1974-1982) we did indeed see these cities as temporary…places we would live until I finished my doctoral program and got a permanent job someplace else. We also didn’t own a car during these years, which meant we didn’t really get to know any of these cities very well. But that all began to slowly change when that permanent job in Lubbock Texas became so unpleasant that we moved back to San Diego after two and a half years.

Slowly, we began to make more permanent friendships, spread out our geographic familiarity with the city (now that we had a car), and became used to the subtleties of a climate that lacked the distinct four seasons we had grown up with.

Eventually, as we acclimated to the southwest, the verdant green we could see out of the plan windows, and the wretched humidity and mosquitoes we experienced when we got out of the plane, that began to feel odd. And I finally understood that the desert climate of the southwest had indeed become the familiar one.

Yet, it isn’t lack of snow (or even much rain), or the exotic flora like bird of paradise or bottle-brush plants or even the occasional cacti in local yards that underscores that mental shift for me. It is those palm trees that I see every morning, standing out against the sky, that keep reminding me of where I am living, giving me that small moment of delight to know that this is the place I now call home.

I would love if you could share what flora you uniquely associate with your home and that delights you?

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