It’s sunny here.

Not just sunny, either, but bright – so bright and colourful, it hurts your eyes. I had sunglasses, too, somewhere, but since it had been about forty degrees and sleeting when I left New York, I hadn’t thought to put them anywhere easily accessible. When my mother had first told me we’d be moving – she and Andy decided it was easier for her, with one kid and a job as a TV news reporter, to relocate than it would be for Andy and his three kids to do it, especially considering that Andy owns his own business – she’d explained to me that I’d love Northern California. ‘It’s where they filmed all those Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase movies!’ she told me.

I like Goldie Hawn, and I like Chevy Chase, but I never knew they made a movie together.

‘It’s where all those Steinbeck stories you had to read in school took place,’ she said. ‘You know, The Red Pony.’

Well, I wasn’t very impressed. I mean, all I remembered from The Red Pony was that there weren’t any girls in it, although there were a lot of hills. And as I stood in the parking lot, squinting at the hills surrounding the San Jose International Airport, I saw that there were a lot of hills, and the grass on them was dry and brown.

But dotting the hills were these trees, trees not like any I’d ever seen before. They were squashed on top as if a giant fist had come down from the sky and given them a thump. I found out later these were called Cyprus trees.

And all around the parking lot, where there was evidently a watering system, there were these fat bushes with these giant red flowers on them, mostly squatting down at the bottom of these impossibly tall, surprisingly thick palm trees. The flowers, I found out, when I looked them up later, were hibiscus. And the strange looking bugs that I saw hovering around them, making a brrr-ing noise, weren’t bugs at all. They were hummingbirds.

‘Oh,’ my mom said when I pointed this out. ‘They’re everywhere. We have feeders for them up at the house. You can hang one from your window if you want.’

Hummingbirds that come right up to your window? The only birds that ever came up to my window back in Brooklyn were pigeons. My mom never exactly encouraged me to feed them.

My moment of joy about the hummingbirds was shattered when Dopey announced suddenly, ‘I’ll drive,’ and started for the driver’s seat of this huge utility vehicle we were approaching.

‘I will drive,’ Andy said, firmly.

‘Aw, Dad,’ Dopey said. ‘How’m I ever going to pass the test if you never let me practise?’

‘You can practise in the Rambler,’ Andy said. He opened up the back of his Land Rover, and started putting my bags into it. ‘That goes for you, too, Suze.’

This startled me. ‘What goes for me, too?’