An excerpt from We Were the California Girls:

When the radiation therapist finished plotting tattoo marks around my chest she handed me a grey and maroon robe folded inside a plastic tote bag.  I lifted the cloth and as if it were a rag and asked, “What do I do with this thing?”

            Her face turned incredulous—as if shocked that I was more concerned about fashion than the fact that I going to begin daily treatment for breast cancer.  

            I remembered my first visit to the cancer treatment center with my just-diagnosed cancerous lump.  Past the receptionist’s desk were patients wrapped in these in grey and maroon robes.

Grey and maroon—yuck!  It was the color choice for my Catholic high school wool uniform, worn daily—even in the heat of the Southern California sun.  The cancer treatment center could have its ugly robe and plastic tote bag for another patient.  A quick trip to a department store ended this ugly robe circumstance.  No one said I had to wear the hospital issued robe.  And I wouldn’t have worn it anyway.

            Not until a new patient, wrapped in his grey and maroon robe queried, “You don’t have one of these robes on?  Why?” did I look down at the pastel striped ¾-length fashionable robe wrapped around my hospital gown and suddenly see my entire life woven into this non-issued attire during a most serious and most frightening point in my life.   Once again I had strayed out of the approved box because…because…well, it’s my way.  It’s how I have survived so many life challenges.

            Several people have suggested that my way is the end result of being a California girl.  That’s weird.  A California girl?  What is a California girl, I would ask.   Am I some fantasy female that the Beach Boys sang about?  Not hardly.  Middle class, middle sized, middle-looking, not famous, I’m just a girl born and raised in California.

            Maybe because Matt E. Copeland and his artist wife Rilda Puckett Copeland left the frozen winters of Silverton, Colorado for the fragrant orange groves of Los Angeles in 1879 and gave birth to Osa, who gave birth to my mother, Jean, who all lived and died in Los Angeles, makes me a California girl.

            Maybe my Ohio-born father, Charles, who laid his frozen tools down on Lake Michigan one post war January and headed west to Los Angeles, makes me a California girl.

            Maybe never experiencing a real four-season climate until I moved to New Mexico in 1988 makes me a California girl. 

Maybe the day I crammed a bottle of Laetitia Brut Rosé into one of the last opened crannies inside my SUV and pulled out from the coastal California winery onto north 101, planning my next stop at Giovanni’s Fish Market in Morro Bay and I thought it was good to be home,  makes me a California girl.

Home?  At that moment I was 1026 miles west of home – a beautiful home at that.  One perched on a sunset view ridge in northern New Mexico.  Yet in about one hour or so, I would pull into the Pacific Ocean view California property that welcomes my heart.

A full circle was in the works.  Tears came when I paralleled the Central California coastline of wild winter waves, misty sunlight, coved with Irish green hills that line the literal and proverbial highway of profound life moments. I inhaled the eucalyptus air. Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonized through the CD player, “Dark Star…”  More tears.  I, too, found the dark star that lit my future.