By Samantha Shorey

For someone who basically has a camera glue to her face, there is a surprising lack of pictures framed in my apartment.  No laughing candids of dinner parties, no backlit flowers on a windowsill—just one single, wide-angle shot of a bend in the road in Big Sur.  It was taken off the side of Pacific Coast Highway and somewhere, just outside the frame, is my Honda Civic stuffed to the gills with comforters and flowy Free People tops that I had just packed-up from my beachside attic bedroom. The photo is a basic landscape, really—mostly made up of turquoise water and yellow scrub brush. I framed it to remind me that life is surprising and that sometimes, when we are very lucky, the future is better than we know to hope for. I look at it and I know that on the other end of that road is an old craftsman house and a new best friend, a local dive bar and a mountain home-town.  It was all waiting, right on the other side; I just had to get there.

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