Dear Wigleaf,

I moved last month. I'm still commuting to Santa Cruz three times a week for work and I drive the lip of the Monterey Bay back and forth. During a clear dawn, when I'm driving north out of Monterey, Santa Cruz looks like a sleeping humpback whale lolling in multi-colored cotton candy. Its lavender back rises gently from a pink cloud and then drops off sharply, dives deep into the folds of the Santa Cruz Mountains. By the time I pass under the twin stacks of the power plant at Moss Landing, the sun is at my back and Santa Cruz shapeshifts: it's a city crammed onto the narrow land terrace between the mountains and the ocean, highway traffic inching north cleaving it in two. I sleepwalk through my workday. I wait for evening traffic to die down, then, as I coast south, I reawaken. Last week I watched the moon rise big and yellow over the Elkhorn Slough. I drove over the bridge where the Slough meets the ocean, the Bay was a black maw swallowing. Last night the fog crept back in after weeks away. I couldn't see the whale on the Bay when I started my drive this morning. Waiting at a traffic light, the sun hung low in front of me like the yellow moon. I stared at the maw of it, screened by fog, not once but twice. I dared.