This morning I went for a run, sun on my bare shoulders, the smell of damp eucalyptus trees around me, the sound of crows picking off the last of the walnuts in the branches above.

All around me is the neighborhood I grew up in. My feet crush shriveled olives, persimmons and walnut tree leaves as I move. It is winter and 75 degrees outside before noon.

I used to always want to arrive home in California with my life full of sureness. To appear together, visibly going somewhere. There have been years when it’s felt like I’ve been obedient to how my life is supposed to look. Most of the time though, instead of a triumphant return, it’s a collapse. Those are the years when I’ve loved this place the most.

When I go on these runs it is like swimming blind through memory lanes. I drift in and out of time lines. I’m too old to be nostalgic for my childhood here. Instead, there’s this tenderness for the long stretches of time I spent here in my 20s and 30s, usually arriving broken and beaten up by life, sullen, ready to sleep for 16 hours straight, then sit in the hot tub and grumpily drink coffee brewed hours before, when my parents first got up that morning.

Different scenes will come back to me at different times, and hardly ever chronologically. When I sit at the Corner Coffeehouse and eat gelato, I remember pacing the sidewalk outside, walking back and forth during a phone interview for a job in northern Montana that I didn’t take. Then hanging up and having that feeling that I could go anywhere I wanted when I was 36.

I drop off our rent check in the mail box outside the Los Olivos Post Office and walk past the gate to local hotel that we used to climb over to swim in the pool, a few months after I turned 33 and thought that life was all downhill at that point for me.

There were the hours I spent sitting back in a backyard chair made out of a wine barrel, tasting syrah from the hills around me, mourning the loss of the redneck ranching town that this place used to be – but simultaneously realizing that I was totally comfortable enjoying it’s trendiness as the new Napa. That I had changed just as much as this town of 900 people had. It was impossible not to alter, to adapt somehow, in order to survive and grow.

I drive with my mom to the next town over, and I think of myself, biking in flip flops and shorts and gas station sunglasses, to get peaches and nectarines from the farmers’ market on Tuesday afternoons, having just come from winter in the southern hemisphere at 28, uncaring that I was getting passed by serious cyclists, in proper, padded, cycling shorts.

This week I am back for the first time in this new decade of my life. My husband and I are here for five days, to drop off our truck in my parents’ backyard while we go overseas. Winter in Montana feels like this Narnia-esque dream we’ve woken up from. In the afternoons I walk outside barefoot and lace up my running shoes in the driveway. Before I leave I see John helping my dad rake leaves in the front yard. Later they will watch football in the garage. John and I are going over to our friends’ house tonight to barbecue in their back yard and drink cocktails at their kitchen island, surrounded by their girls, who I’ve known since their infancy.

Maybe in another 20 years, I’ll remember the ordinariness of the visiting times just like this one. When everyone we love is just down the street, or a phone call away.

Sometimes it takes a run through the neighborhood to bring it all home. I’m older now, so I feel released from having it all together when I return. Instead, this is what I wrap my mind around: The sun is out. I’m able to run. My lungs inhale and exhale air. There is my husband and dad raking leaves, with a game on in the garage and my mother cleaning out the filing cabinets in the office while listening to an audio book. Later, there is dinner with old friends just down the road.

That is as together as I need to be.