Why My Blog Is named What It Is, And Why I Will Always Love the Grass More than the Three Stone Steps Leading to My Job

I grew up three miles from the ocean on Calle Abril—April Street—half-surrounded by tract homes and half-surrounded by graded, unimproved lots cuts into the side of the hill. My friends and I saved large cardboard boxes, little houses new refrigerators had arrived in, and flattened them, and rode them standing up down the slopes between lots, 30-foot waves with no curl, sometimes planted with iceplant, sometimes simply packed with dirt. We learned a balance there, sliding to the next lot, that would save our lives those rare weeks every other year a chubasco would flare up in Mexico and send 20-foot sets our way. At T Street, Cropley’s snack stand ran out of everything those days all the surfers from 50 miles around showed up to ride waves churned up by the storm, and all the watchers from 100 miles around called in sick and got into their cars and drove there, only to sit all day on the grass above the bluff, happy and vaguely hungry, watching all but the gremmies take their rides on liquid breath first exhaled half a world to the south of us.