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Blue Spaces

jen murphy parker
9 min readMar 5, 2025

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From the Holocene epoch

My oldest was here in California from Boston last week.

This is coming home, still. Of course it always will be. But she’s now out of college and working. This trip was her February vacation from the elementary school where she teaches.

She still sleeps in her childhood bedroom when she comes home. Of course she does. But now, she stages out of a carry-on in the middle of the floor. There’s no point to moving in to drawers for one week. It’s too temporary. Because this is now a Visit.

And as it can when you have visitors, it felt holiday-ish to have her here. Like we should have dessert after dinner. Or watch a movie every night. Or go on an outing.

That’s what we did last weekend. After a long morning spent in pajamas and indecision, we thought to drive the 25 minutes up over the hills that I consider to be behind our house but could in truth sit in any direction from our house because locations are none of my business. If we take a right off of our street, I regard that as behind. But it’s neither here nor there: the point is we drove to Half Moon Bay, named so because of its crescent-shaped beach, though I’d always thought the name was more astronomically-derived — like you could only ever see half the moon from there? I don’t know — I had never really thought it through I guess.

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jen murphy parker
jen murphy parker

Written by jen murphy parker

Jen Murphy Parker is a San Francisco-based writer exploring what exists in the middle - of parenting, of health, of life.

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