I remember when Sister was living in New York while she went to law school and I went to visit her for a few days. It must have been the fall or the spring because it was cold enough to wear a coat, but not cold enough where I felt miserable and terrified of the city.

We walked through Central Park. We walked along a rooftop garden near the Hudson River. And then we walked toward the museum.

“It’d be so fun to live here and walk everywhere,” I commented. I was a suburb girl up ’til that point. Grew up in a suburb, lived in a suburb when I moved to NorCal. You could argue that I lived in a city when I went to UCLA, but Westwood was such a bubble of its own that I’d say it doesn’t count.

So, the fact that everything was so accessible and there was so much culture and so much going on? Well, it seemed pretty great.

Sister looked at my face as I kept smiling, looking around at everything.

“Yeah, it’s great,” she started to respond, “but it’s also not like this when you actually LIVE somewhere. When you run out of toilet paper in the middle of winter and you have to throw on layers so you can trudge through the snow to get to CVS.”

I understand what she means. It’s always easier to view a place when you’ve got vacation mode on. And you’re not thinking about all the little annoyances and adulting things you gotta do.

Yesterday, I thought back to this moment that took place 12 years ago.

Because I, too, had to throw on layers to trudge through the rain last night. I sludged through puddles to walk to the market across the street to return some very rotten milk that I had purchased a few hours before.

It felt like such an annoying, yucky task. Not a glamorous city moment. Just one of those real-life moments where it’s cold and rainy and late and you’re trying to hurry and get some nighttime milk for your toddler, but have to argue with the man behind the counter saying, “Yes, the milk is rotten even though the expiration date is in May, would you like to try a sip?”

Even though it was wet and mucky outside, and even though the man behind the counter was most definitely judging me for opening up the milk to sniff it before I left the market, I was smiling on my walk back. Recalling that moment with Sister from what feels like a different lifetime ago.

I guess this is all just life. You get the good with the bad, the sunshine-y with the muddy, the glamorous with the dose of reality.

There isn’t really one without the other.

And isn’t that what makes this human life of ours a little more exciting? Things aren’t always rainbows. Because sometimes you gotta trudge through the (literal and figurative) rain first.